I’ve been using text ad exchanges in my marketing for awhile now, and they’ve really helped increase my traffic and leads.

However I’m starting to see something that is starting to hurt most of the text ad exchanges. Here is a list of warning signs you should look for before you join any text ad exchange.

• New text ad exchanges are popping up everyday (which is fine) but most of them only have a couple hundred members, and really don’t grow much from that point on.

  So if you come by a text ad exchange with 100 – 400 members you might want to shy away from it. Just keep it on the back burner and watch and see if it grows.

• Most text ad exchanges give away free pro memberships until they reach X amount of members. Sites that do this hurt the value of the site, and traffic you’ll get from it.

  I’d stay away from these sites because people will only join to get the free pro membership. They aren’t joining because they think it’s a great resource to use.

• You’ll find a lot of text ad exchanges use promo codes to give away free advertising. This is ok, but most of them over do it. To me they give away too much which greatly devalues their sites and the traffic.

  It’s ok to do this from time to time as a prize, but giving away free solo ads to anyone that joins just makes the solo ad almost pointless to post since everyone who joins can send one.

Text ad exchanges again can be a great way to get traffic to your site at a very affordable price. However some of them (not all) devalue their site and traffic due to the above. There are a lot of good text ad exchanges out there that don’t do any of the above, and if you join those you’ll notice the difference.