Blog traffic exchanges are one of the best ways for new blogs to get noticed and for medium sized blogs to get more readers. They work by users surfing blogs for a specified time period in exchange for credits. Those credits, in turn, bring visitors to one's own blog. The key to maximizing traffic is using all of these simultaneously to drive the most unique visitors to one's blog. For Firefox users or IE7 users, tabbed browsing allows you to surf all the exchanges at the same time.

Every blog exchange has a community that populates the service, and such, each exchange has its own flavor. At present, there are five such exchanges and these are presented according to current Alexa traffic rank as of this writing.

BlogExplosion

Surfing rate: 2 sites for 1 credit, 30 seconds each.

BlogExplosion is the first of the blog traffic exchanges and it is by far the largest. It features games such as a lottery, Battle of the Blogs, and Blog Tycoon. However, as of late it has had performance problems and many users are less than happy with the service. More importantly, there seems to be not enough views being generated with the service. It has too many people and not enough surfers to really drive readership up. However, it is the stable of blog traffic exchanges and has a great community that uses it. It has the widest variety of blogs in the exchange.

BlogMad

Surfing rate: 1 site for 1 credit, 25 seconds each.

BlogMad is a relative newcomer that has had a real successful marketing effort that has driven up its traffic quickly. Many of the users are very passionate about the service and surf it religiously. This results in a great deal of hits that can be generated per day. It also has a 1:1 surf ratio which is the highest around and allows a blogger to build a great deal of traffic quickly. It has a sleek interface, by far the best among the exchanges, and offers a few games that can be played for credits. For the most part, it's been stable but as this is being written the service is current down. The community tends to be of the liberal political persuasion.

BlogSoldiers

Surfing rate: 1 site for .75 credits, 20 seconds each.

Full Disclosure: I own BlogSoldiers, so I'm taking this review from a popular blogger, Slightly Drunk.

Blog Soldiers is a Manual Traffic Exchange designed to generate visitors to your website. It appears to be a very bare-bones service which does exactly what it advertises. I found the Blog Soldiers layout to be very simple to navigate & non-descript as they appear to have a very limited number of services aside from the blog rotations.

I was unable to find the official number of active users however I estimate it to be lower than the other two, based on my own traffic. Although the number of users appears low, the quality of traffic I have received either through comments or emails seems to be very good. This service could easily be number one if they continue to focus on their core business, add a few supplemental services and advertise in order to attract new members. I am quite satisfied with their service. Based upon my own experience the customer service appears excellent. Quick turn-around with no issues.