Hey there
could someone help me out and tell me whats wrong with it ?
my site growing 5-10k a day then just stop
for now i dont know what to do im trying differnent tempaltes
writing PM to Tony, nothing helps
Tony never answer me i dont know whats wrong with him
templates dont help a shit maybe im doing something wrong ?

Please help me some one ;p

Once you have a reasonable design and moderately attractive thumbs, the layout and appearance of your site are probably the least important factors affecting whether it grows or not.

Have you reached that point? If your productivity from non-traded traffic is 300% or better, then you are in the ball-park. At that point you should probably make a priority of building up some good trades and work on the cosmetic aspects of your site when you can.

Even if you are still working towards a basically productive design, Comus cannot perform miracles for you. Others will surely disagree, but on a thumbnail preview TGP I believe the selection and appearance of your thumbnails is the most important factor; the overall design of the site comes a distant second; and the actual ordering of the thumbs (the only part which is really affected by Comus and your choice of template) trails in third place.

You also should not be misled by the fact that the HTML involved in putting up something which looks like a TGP is simple. Operating a TGP, unless you have some very narrow and specific ambitions for it, is one of the most difficult areas of online porn. It is difficult to build traffic and even more difficult to make money. You are going to have to work hard. You will need patience because it takes time. You have a lot of skills to learn, mostly without help from anyone else.

PS: Even if you have everything lined and working up properly you will find "ceilings" from time to time. The reason is that traded traffic is usually very poor quality, so most have to support it with traffic from other sources. For many webmasters that means search engines and bookmarkers.

This is relevant because it is relatively easy to grow trades, so trades often grow faster than the rate at which you can increase the traffic from those "other sources". This reduces the overall productivity of your site and therefore the ratio of skimmed clicks you have free to return to your trades. When that happens, your trades will fall back until everything is back in balance.

Tony has his expertise in programming.

Johhn, as usual, posted some great info...and I have to agree with him...and really....I have nothing useful to add as he hit it all on the head.

Yeah i see but some times sites grows so fast like 10-20k a day this brings alot of traffic to them. Lets say he have 200k on trades so he have more chances to get a bookmarker, right? and more chances that he will listed on google, because of more outgoing links... etc bro
its just all about things i still dont know but im searching for hehe
they just boosting sites ;p

This is the best place to ask these questions, as Actorguy says, my time is best spent programming, and every single minute I get spare, I do just that. And every minute I spend on other stuff, the script suffers, and therefore everyone suffers.

As for your site.

It sounds like normal ebb and flow to me.

There is a limit as to how much you can get from your trades.

Assuming that Comus allows you to run at the maximum efficiency that your server and content and traffic sources will allow.

Imagine if you had just 10 trades, the best you can do is be their biggest trade. You send them all 2000 hits each, and they send back all they can. They can only return as their traffic levels allow.

Lets say they all send back 3000.

Where do you go now?

In this imaginary scenario, the only way you can grow is to get more trades.

It is not uncommon for a site to expand to the limit of its trade capacity, and then slow down.

There are 2 main ways to get growth from your trades.

1. Maximize what you have.
2. Get more trades.

There are more variables in play thats for sure, and as far as I know there is no authoritive guide on how to handle trading, those who have a handle on it, are very secretive.

The best broad advice I can give, is get more trades, and let your scripts do the thinking for you, dont try to out think them, unless you are prepared to think VERY VERY hard.

Okay, this post is going to put most people to sleep. But underneath the cut-and-thrust excitement of traffic trading, those scintillating conversations on ICQ, etc., is some hardcore math. If you don't get the numbers right, something has to give.

For an example, assume a site about 6 months old. The owner hasn't gone flat out for growth, so he sends 70% of his traffic to galleries. Thanks to this and the passage of time, he has 4,000 non-traded visitors (20% of his incoming traffic) each day. He has a decent design and nice thumbs, so these 4,000 click a total of 14,000 times (350% productivity). He also gets 16,000 visitors in from trades and their productivity is 175%, so they generate 28,000 clicks.

These are only hypothetical figures: a specific site will improve on some, lose out on others. But from what I see posted around the boards, they are reasonable for the purposes of illustration. Let's see where they lead.

20,000 visitors and 42,000 clicks = 220% overall productivity (pretty much in line with a lot of posts I read and actually better than many). With the stated 30% skim to trades, that means 12,600 clicks available for trades. Houston, we have a problem...

This guy gets 16,000 visitors in from trades, which means that his trade partners' scripts have recorded about 20,000 outgoing clicks. The reason being that somewhere between 15% and 25% of the clicks reported by the sender never appear in the recipient's script.

By the same principle, only a little more than 10,000 of the 12,600 clicks our man is sending out, are going to be counted by his trade partners.

So... our Hun wannabe - as far as his trade partners are concerned - is only sending back about half the traffic he is receiving. I guess his traffic must be really productive on his partner's sites, or his trades would have died long ago. Which of course, is exactly what happens to most of the sites attempting to work on figures like these.

Hopefully, everyone reading this has much healthier results. Either that or you are all buying traffic to feed your trades, have some 404s or whatever to spare. But if your numbers do look like these and your site is stuck, what is needed to fix things?

If you optimize your HTML; get a clean, pleasing design; and put some serious work into your thumbs; with a little experience you should be able to get your non-traded productivity up to 400%. More is possible, but very difficult for a beginner. You won't see many boasting much higher figures, and I would be inclined to take most who do with a pinch of salt. I have been doing this for 4 years and 450% is about my limit.

The overall %age from our man's trades wasn't at all bad, given his inexperience. Good luck to you if you do better, but I wouldn't want to assume that even with your design tweaks your trades are going to do much better than 180% for a while.

It would be better if you were willing to drop your trade skim to 25%, but with everything else lined up, you still might manage to increase your non-traded traffic by 1,000 a month. If you can hit that, you will have 6,000 daily after 6 months.

Now our 20,000 site looks like this:

6,000 non-traded visitors @ 400% productivity = 24,000 clicks
14,000 traded visitors @ 180% productivity = 25,200 clicks
Total = 49,200 clicks = 246% overall productivity.

That's not a big productivity increase and you will have had to work for it.

We now have 14,760 clicks to send to trades. Accounting for those which get lost en route, our trade partners sent us 17,500 and will see 11,800 coming back. That's a 15% improvement on the original example, but still under 70% of the traffic they "think" they sent us. You may get by, but it will still be difficult. So what else?

There are a handful of sites - Zilla, Tiava, Shemp among them - which can return large amounts of very productive traffic if you can meet their trading conditions. Against that, many more sites - even if you have observed the rule of trying to appear among their top 10-20 trades - will never send out anything except rubbish. There are all kinds of trading practises out there, which if they weren't routine for many of the "heroes" of our industry, would be much more widely and openly condemned. And that is before we start talking about cheating trades, cheated trades passing along bad traffic, and surfers armed with site rippers. In short, it is blo*dy hard to get your overall trade %age over 200%. To do it, you will need to work at getting everything right, be ruthless about killing trades which don't work, etc.

You are not alone. The reason some big sites keep their trade signups open and never return more than a trickle (if that), is because they need the traffic from all the hopefuls, to help balance the books. I have no idea of the exact numbers, but it wouldn't surprize me if Zilla was getting traffic from more than 500 sites. In his case he isn't doing anything dishonest, because he makes it clear who will get traffic back. But that's an option you don't have.

The other thing many big sites do, is buy traffic. This is particularly true of the "big boys" who didn't exist a year ago and the older sites which changed hands and suddenly rocketed up Sextracker. And if you don't have patience - remember it took The Hun 4 years, in much less competitive times, to make 100K - you may have to do the same. You can kill your chance of getting bookmarks with high skims, but acquiring bookmarks is a slow process even with low skims. You can optimize (as far as it is possible for a TGP) your site for the SE's, but any returns will be slow in coming and depend more on how many gallery submitters (FHG TGP operators take note) are linked to you and whether you can persuade some high PR sites to exchange hard links.

You can get more SE traffic by giving your site "depth": adding extra pages (not just more gallery pages). You will do more to increase your bookmarkers by actually adding some "sticky" features and by giving your site some personality, than by relying on your skim ratio to do all the work. If you are starting up and have a site which at best is like 10,000 others, ask yourself why will anyone bookmark it?

So you can buy traffic and boy, is that ever a minefield, especially for the unititiated. Don't forget what you have read here, even if you find a seller in whom you have confidence, because bought traffic is generally lower quality than traded. If you buy too much too quickly, you had better be ready to go on buying, because your site will collapse as soon as you stop.

If you have deep pockets, you can pay someone to build your traffic for you. He will do that through a mix of buying traffic and trading with people he knows. This is an expensive route too, so don't deal with anyone you are not confident about and be sure you will know how to keep everything running once the site is handed back. IMO this is not a good option unless you are reasonably experienced.

***

Since I'm thoroughly into rambling mode, let's go off at a tangent...

Why exactly do you want telephone-number traffic anyway? The answer is obvious if you are looking to sell advertising space or banner spots. Then stats are everything. But if you are looking to sell off your own banners, or via your own or hosted galleries, maybe you should be thinking quality and not quantity?

In that case, you really don't want to know about the majority of traded traffic and you might even want to think twice about encouraging too many freeloaders via bookmarks and SE's. Perhaps you would be better off just working your TGP(s) in with the rest of your sites, maybe to feed them or else to catch people you don't sell to the first time around? Perhaps you should have a network of your own TGP's and only have one at most trading with the outside world? That's a great way to get rid of all the cheats and worthless traffic. Or if you are primarily a submitter, maybe your galleries are worth collecting into a "TGP" but otherwise it is not worth investing too much time into making it a real TGP. For both these last two, Comus is a great tool for setting up TGP's that pretty much takes care of themselves.

***

Bottom line: don't just put up something that looks like a TGP and hope for the best. It won't happen. Have a damn good idea of where you want to go and some good reasons to feel confident you will get there. Use your stats to figure out whether it is happening or not and if not, figure out what you can do to push it the right way. And all the time, ask yourself if there is another way you could be earning more money. Often the answer will be yes.

Great info / tips Johhn... thanks a lot for taking the time to write all that!

John,
Thanks very much for a very informative post. Gave me lots to think about.

I read on various adult webmaster boards (netpond, AWI, GFY etc), and i can honestly say that yours is among the top 5 posts I have ever read. Funny that it appears on such a narrow scope board.

I really like the community here on the comus board, better atmosphere than many other places.


Thanks again John, I know lots of people are reluctant to share such valuable info, and I can't really blame them. Nice to see a vet sharing some deeper thoughts on how to approach this biz.

Since you mention AWI: I have put 2 or 3 variations of the "stats" part of this post there over the years. "Variations" because the point isn't to try to reach the specific figures I mentioned: they are just ball-park figures intended to give you some attainable targets. The point is that the sums have to add up somehow.

And it really isn't valuable information, because you still have to make your own site work and that's the tough part.

The other thing I could have mentioned while in numbers mode, is the way that trading scripts work. Although they differ in specific details, they all decide who is to get the next outgoing hit by prioritizing the list of sites with which they trade. It is important to understand this because:

1. If you are high in the list of a site with which you trade, your traffic should be returned quickly. That matters a lot because until you get your traffic back, you cannot use it to generate more.
   
2. High in the list, you have a greater chance of receiving visitors who are not yet thoroughly p*ssed at being sent to TGP's instead of galleries. If you rejected a trade for poor productivity, but never got higher than 20-30 in his top list, it is perfectly possible that might have been a good trade, if you had got into his top 10.
   
3. Depending on how much traffic someone has and the extent - by forcing, etc., - to which he is interfering with his script, anywhere from say trade #10 on down, he may not have enough traffic to return.
   

All of which explains the fairly common advice to trade with sites of similar size. But by itself that isn't enough: you need to get as high in their toplists as possible. Certainly into their top 10.

That isn't easy, because your script also has its limitations:

1. If your total forces are set to more than 40%-50% of your outgoing traffic, you are making it near impossible for the script to do its job, because you are leaving it with too few hits to send out at its discretion. Some scripts pay more attention to forces than others, but force too much and you will starve some of your trades.
   
2. In an ideal world, you might like to return 120%-140% of the traffic you receive, so you set your ratio at 140. Now look at your stats and compare the actual number of visitors you are sending to trades to the number of incoming hits from trades. Let's say the actual overall ratio is only 110. Since the ratio you set is usually a major factor in the way your script prioritizes trades and determines how much is owed, the effect of this difference will be to starve your smaller trades. Try to set your ratios only slightly higher than you can actually send: maybe 10% higher.
   
3. When you start and have limited traffic, it is tempting to use all the force you can spare to get one good trade going. Be very careful because you have to return all the traffic he is going to send you. If that one trade is too much bigger than the rest, you won't have enough visitors coming from other trades to send back what he is expecting once the trade gets under way. A reasonable pattern to start with is something like 2 large trades, 3 medium (these 5 you actively manage), 5 small (largely left alone, but with a small force set to keep them moving) and then 10+ others which you more or less leave to fend for themselves. The terms large, medium, etc., are relative and the exact numbers depend on your site. The point is to get a spread of different size trades and to focus your "tinkering" on the large and medium trades.
   
4. If you followed the principle of working with similar sized sites, your #1 trade when you had 5K a day is unlikely even to be in your top 10 when you reach 20K a day. As you grow, watch out for trades that stop growing even when you send more traffic and be ready to move on to trades with more potential.
   
5. As a rule, never trade actively with someone whose traffic is unproductive. The more traffic is "washed" - sent from site to site - generally the lower its productivity. So if someone's traffic is 100% productive on your site, it might be 80% productive on sites to which you send it. Many people return on productivity or if they return on uniques, kill trades which send unproductive traffic. Don't be tempted, if you see that although unproductive, you are making a "profit" because such trades are sending so much more than you are sending them. Such traffic will almost certainly damage your other trades and the chances are he is buying Chinese or Russian traffic (or flat out cheating) to get back a nice mix from you of US and European surfers.
   
6. I wrote "actively" above because most traders kill small and/or unproductive trades and I have never been convinced that is a particularly good idea. In the overall scheme of things, what is happening outside of your top 10-30 trades (depending on the size of your site and your trading methods) doesn't matter a damn. These small trades will not get a sniff of your traffic unless your script has nowhere else to send it and if they did not exist, chances are the hits would go to exout or wherever. In any case, they would be largely wasted. By allowing small and unproductive trades to putter along (just pretend they aren't there), you get back a steady trickle of fresh visitors. As per the old banner exchange principle, fresh traffic is in many ways as important as actual numbers.
   

Beware the "ICQ syndrome". I understand the frustration of having a signup form open just to have people sign up who never send a single visitor or else send bots and other crap. But this is a copycat business and the vast majority of people who want you to contact them by mail or ICQ because they "want to know who they are trading with", never stopped to ask themselves how such contact achieves that end. More often than not, if someone answers you at all, the only question he will ask is how much traffic you are going to send.

But for whatever reason, people prefer to play this game rather than just monitor their signups or only activate trades manually. So you are stuck with playing it: just don't take it too seriously. Look for sites around your size posting top lists and traffic numbers; pick a spot (in his top 10) you can reasonably reach; add 25% to the numbers to allow for the clicks which vanish, and that is the number you are going to send. Don't be tempted to promise more (let alone actually attempt to send more) and if he is happy with that, fine. Set up the trade and your force, and see how it goes. If you get too much ego or BS on ICQ, leave him alone, and if you aren't getting back reasonable traffic within 24 hours, move on to someone else. Far too many people over-manage their trades, and unless you want to end up spending all your time that way, you will learn to steer clear of them.

Never forget what your own time is worth and the minimal value of traded traffic. If you have other talents in this business, then spending many hours a day building trades, means the loss of what you could earn working on galleries, FPA's or whatever. Maybe you would be better off doing those things and spending some of the money you make to buy a steady flow of traffic. Or you could put time into building multiple TGP's: once you have 15-20, you can put most onto trading on autopilot with each other, and just use 1 or 2 to bring some fresh traffic into your network. There are lots of options and following the same path which worked a few years ago, is probably the worst of them.

talk about knowledge! wow this post is a classic a gem

Thanks for great thoughts, Johhn

Though I am new here, I see this is a place to meet really clever people.

nice post john, thanks for sharing

Im gonna throw in a quick 2 cents.
Bookmarks are key, if you dont have them or if you wanna get it through your head that bookmarks are key you will fail in the long run.

How to get bookmarks? Ill let you know for only 183 easy payments of $49.99 + shipping + handling.

Cheque is in the mail... now spill it!

OUTSTANDING POST!!!!

My two cents.....

Big sites are nice to have. If you are skimming 80%+ to galleries and are carrying a 300k site, my hat is off to you. However, I have recently seen those trying to sell gallery spots (at steep prices)..boasting about traffic and a quick look shows a < 70% skim to galleries. Total traffic can be manipulated by purchasing a ton simply to drive your counter up and make you look huge...nothing to brag about when it comes to jerked thumb traffic.

Outs to galleries....now that is, imho, a more important number. The post above talks about quality over quantity..and I agree 100%. Nothing worse than jerked thumb traffic. Work on an acceptable out to galleries and a decent prod and numbers fall into place. I make more money now by having a good skim to galleries and lower traffic..than I did when I did the opposite.

Icq...the biggest time waster...especially from those wanting something for nothing. Time is money and unless you are discussing business...swinging a deal...something...keep it closed until your work is done. You will never KNOW somebody through icq.

Bookmarkers.....I did a little test using one page for bookmarkers and one for trades. I made more cash from my bookmarkers page, which is a small part of my site...than I did from my traders page....including a better productivity. Another indication...the above post is correct....traded traffic has minimal value.

What is it with people always emailing asking why they have sent more then they have received? They ask if something is wrong. Logic.....if you set a 120% ratio...that means you are sending back 120 for every 100 received. Before emailing and wasting everyones time...or thinking about deleting a trade consider.....size of trade...prod of trade...effectiveness of trade (hits out/click received). Prod is just 1 aspect. I am sure you are sending less back to some sites.