wow dude, THUMBS UP!

this is a really great article! thanks!

awesome posts guys thanks alot i reach many intresting info from
but i still dunno how can i increase my productivity on someones end ?

how to make ppl click more on my trade sites ?
im sending 7k to my op trade and get only 4-5k back
my skim ratio is 73% but my traffic still low productive
i dont know how to fix that
anyone here can help me out?

i think this would be intresting to know
and many ppl will agree with me i think
because everyone talking about productivity on our own sites
no one talks aobut our outgoing productivity ;p

here are some thing i know that helps to make productivity better abit :
1. Dont skim more then 30%
2. Dont trade with non productive trades
3.... some one esle know 3th rule ;p?

It isn't talked about too much because there isn't a whole lot you can do to affect it directly: that's obviously up to the webmaster of the site you are sending to.

You may get advice such as it's best to trade with "similar sites", but apart from that not telling you a whole lot, after a while you will realize that some trades work and some don't: often with no obvious rhyme or reason. I see that all the time between my sites and those of a friend: his traffic works great on some of my sites and is awful on others. He sees the same thing from his end. To confuse things further, sometimes we see the same type of results, while with other sites the trade is good at one end and bad at the other.

About the only generalization I have found true often enough to risk mentioning, is that when you work on low skims to your trades (and avoid sending surfers to sites which have an exceptionally high skim), your productivity at the other end will usually be above average. No-skim traffic is almost always very productive indeed on other sites.

It's a good idea to visit sites with which you plan to trade. Look through the eyes of a surfer and ask yourself whether you would be happy to be sent there. If not, why should your visitors be?

1. Don't worry too much about the number of visitors returned: focus on whether or not those visitors are generating more clicks than you had to send out to get them.
   
2. It's a tough fact of life as a newbie in the TGP world, that if you start out with little or no traffic, you are mainly stuck with trading with people in a similar position. Which unfortunately means that even if you are doing everything right, a lot of the trades open to you just won't have enough traffic to send back. Unless you can buy traffic, you just have to work through this phase.

I apologize if I am reading too much into your post, but I get the impression you are still looking for quick and easy answers. One of the main points I have been trying to make, is that there aren't any.

The areas to examine in order to increase your productivity have appeared in this thread. But you are going to have to work out for yourself how to apply them to your site(s), because no two sites work the same way. You could put your URL up on boards like this and ask for comments, in case you have something glaringly wrong.

To try to put all this further into perspective, it took me more than 3 months (and it was a lot easier when I started) to get a reasonable handle on the ins and outs of traffic trading and to collect a fairly solid list of trades. And I had already been in this business for 4 years...

And frankly, I hated it. At one point I was sending 3/4 million hits out to galleries and over 300K to trades. But it took all my time and got to be as predictable and boring as turning up to an office or a factory every morning. Early last year, with the amount of cheating already getting ridiculous, buying worthless traffic started to be popular in a big way with TGP's. That seemed to me like madness and it was the last straw.

These days I use mainly low skims, some no skims, and I do very little trading except between my own sites. I don't have any big sites any more, but the total traffic is pretty good and I earn more money with fewer headaches. When I finally stop handling submissions, I shall have achieved nirvana

We should put $100 join fee on this page... lol.

Are you open to trading with any new small sites?

( but your idea of small is probably my idea of huge )

Possibly next month. Right now I'm working on some other things and my TGP's are looking after themselves: not a good time for new trades, especially small ones.

k

Don't worry too much about the number of visitors returned: focus on whether or not those visitors are generating more clicks than you had to send out to get them

Everytime I have a trade complaining about something....that is the FIRST thing I ask them to check. I have trades where I have sent about 2k more than I get in...but the clicks generated far exceeds that. Add in the good prod from the trade....it is a simple choice.


One thing is cool...although this board is for Comus support...gotta love the interesting, insightful and educational topics. I am beginning to believe that Comus users are some of the most intelligent

>>I am beginning to believe that Comus users are some of the most intelligent

LOL, probably because they have to be, at least if I'm to believe my feedback.

This thread intrigues me. and several times I've wanted to add my 2 cents to the ideas here.

I dont know if there is a single right way to trade, there sure are some wrong ways, some may agree with this method, others may argue it stinks..

But here's how I handle trades.

Now I dont want to try to send more traffic than I have available to trades, or it will strangle my trade script, and I dont want to under send, or I'm wasting possible traffic.
I want to send more to my good trades, and less to my bad trades, and I want to be able to force feed traffic to new trades so that I can get established.
I also want to be in the top 10 of my partners top lists, so I can get the best traffic and as my trade script cannot know where I sit on a trade list, I will have to make custom adjustments to the forces in order to achieve and maintain this.

First I need to find the total traffic I have available to send out, I just take my skim ratio, lets say it is 65% to galleries, which means 35% to trades, and multiply that by my total clicks.

Lets say, 40k clicks * 35% gives me 14000 clicks to send out to trades.

Now I determine what I can use to force feed new trades, and my good trades.

Divide 14k by 2= 7k ...
So I assign 7k for forcing and
7k for whatever the trade script wants to do.

As far as the return ratio.. I only use a 100% return, instead of 120%+ like most people. Now I know the web loses 20%, but here's the difference, that 7k force is a free hits force. That means the trade script sends back whatever they send me, and then adds to that at the hourly force level which I determine.

I use the following hourly force levels.
0 Disabled for really bad trades.
0 for bad trades that I want to let die.
5 for small productive trades.
10 for average trades
20 for productive trades
40 for highly productive big trades.
80 for real special cases.

My default force of 20 per hour seems to push a trade up to around 1k per day each, regardless of their size and prod.
For some reason when I tried just using pure prod trading, the trade scripts would not send enough to the guys I wanted to, or send too much to the guys I didnt want to, it just doesnt work for me.
But most of all, pure prod didnt allow me to boost the trades I wanted to, and it didnt allow me to setup new trades or hold trades up that I might want to deliberately run at a loss, (which I do often when people buy traffic from me, or if I think a trade is giving me new bookmarkers, like a text link site might)
This method kind of caps the trade, and at the same time drives it up by forces, and so you can use it to position yourself on trade lists, and force your position into the top 10. It also allows you to kill a trade by letting it phase out with a 0 force.
It seems to work for sites that are doing between 10k and 200k. And above those levels you will probably want to work with higher force levels.

Now, if you are just changing over to this system, then you will want to first sort out who is worth trading with and who is not. You can do that by just forcing everyone with an even amount of traffic. Lets say you split your 7k worth of clicks up evenly amongst all your trades as an hourly force feed at 10 hits per hour. After 24 hours you will know who can handle it, and who cannot.
I like to work on a 200 force per trade, per day minimum, so that comes out to about 10 hits per hour to each trade, so if you dont have enough traffic to send 10 hits per hour to everyone, decide first who you think can handle that sort of traffic level. The idea is to get rid of the chaff.

Now if you have traffic left over to force, after sending everyone 10 hits per hour, you can immediately go out and seek new trades.

After 24 hours you can come back and look again at the trades.

Every day, you want to sort your trades by Quality or Effect, (Most trade scripts allow this). I use TM3 and sort by effect.

Now take stock of the trades,
Visit each trade, and see where you sit on their trade list.
If it looks like raising your force to the next level will get you into the top 10, go for it.
If they dont have a trade list, maybe you shouldnt trade with them, because you cant tell who their trades are, what size they really are, and where you sit.
If the traffic looks productive, but you are oversending to them, dial it back to the next level down.
If prod sucks, and you think there is no gain in trading with the site at a loss, set it to 0 force, and let it die.
If the prod is really good, (over the crossover point - see below) then dial the force up.
If it is obviously really bad, kill the trade right away.
If you want to expand your trade sources, and bring in fresh blood, you can adjust the forces to dial down the biggest feeds and drop the bad trades. This will free up some traffic that you can use to force into new trades.

Once you've tuned things up, and have yourself some traffic to force feed with, go get as many trades as you can and force them 10 hits per hour.

The average size of an active TGP site is about 20k clicks per day, getting over 100k is the exception rather than the norm.
So at 40k clicks you're already twice above average, and niche sites can be more difficult to build to the mega size, because it can be hard to find people in your niche to trade with.
But it is usually not too hard to reach the average size.
At much more than 40k, I believe it is a better strategy to make more sites, rather than try to make the one site bigger. And it is a lot easier to take 5 sites to 20k each rather than a single site to 100k. Although I havent seen many people who could psycologically manage multiple sites, the tendency is to get hung up on a single site.

Now I will rant about my theories on trading.

The key is bookmarkers.

But why?

Well first lets look at what trading is and is not.

I dont believe trading is a perpetual traffic generator, it only Amplifies what you Contribute to the network, and only to the extent that you are tapped into a trade network.

You can artificially inflate your site, and 'float it on the others' by using your prod, but this seems really really hard to do, only a handful manage to do it consistently. Most guys begin this way by using traffic feeds.

My theory is that the artificial inflation works on a trade productivity crossover point, which determines growth over shrinkage, independent of your traffic feed.

If your trade productivity is over this point, you can run around and sign up with as many trades as you like, and you will grow, all the way to the top of their trade list.

To find the trade prod crossover point we calculate (100/skim% to trades)
By trade prod, I mean (trade clicks/ traffic out) , so if we send 1000 out and get back 2500 clicks for it, we are running at a 250% trade prod.

So if you were running at 20% skim, the crossover point for growth is, 100/20%=500%.
Which means if you skim at 20% you will need at least 500% Trade prod in order for your site to sustain itself on trades alone, and if you were averaging 600% you could sign up like mad and grow.
20% skim to trades =500% crossover point
35% skim to trades =285% crossover point
40% skim to trades =250% crossover point
45% skim to trades =222% crossover point
50% skim to trades =200% crossover point

This is the minimum prod of a trade required at that skim ratio in order to be trading with someone at a profit, if your prod is over this point you're in a growth mode.

The only way to sustain a trade if you are under the cross over point, is to prop it up with a traffic feed.

And thats where bookmarkers come in.

Take away the traffic feed below that crossover point, and you shrink.

And because most of us are below this crossover point, we can only prop our trades up and strive to accumulate bookmarkers.

Remember in the examples above I was running at a 35% skim to trades, so I have a 285% crossover point. If I'm not over that point I'm just floating on my bookmarkers.

But I've actually seen many sites cross this point, as new kids on the block, they introduce their site to a bunch of trades and all the surfers are like, 'hello?? what is this?' and they click around, driving the site up to 400%+. Way above the threshold of a 35% skim, the site then accelerates leaps and bounds for a period, as it fills out to the extent of their trades.

I've seen quite a few niched sites do this, using a small traffic feed they signed up with 30 trades or so, and pushed themselves up to 30k or so in a matter of days. Then they stopped seeking new trades, topped out and floundered about as they occupied themselves by tweaking things on the site. The trade meets the limit of their prod and bookmarkers.

How high can you float?
I'm not sure of the calculus there, but I can make a rough guess.

Clicks=
((traffic feed+bookmarkers) x Bookmarker Prod)+
(((traffic feed+bookmarkers) x Bookmarker Prod)*skimrate_to_trades)*trade_prod+
(((((traffic feed+bookmarkers) x Bookmarker Prod)*skimrate_to_trades)*trade_prod)*skimrate_to_trades)*trade_prod

Ugh.. Thats just too hard to work out.

I think as a rough rule, if you are under the crossover point, you can expect total clicks at around (bookmarkers * Prod * 2)

So 'bookmark me' links are essential, we need to explore ideas to give surfers reasons to bookmark and start their adventures with us.

The top sites on the network are at least 300% prod, about the only way you can sustain something like that, is to purge trades aggressively.

What do you do when you get that big? The best thing they can do is expand their traffic sources, which should expand their exposure to new faces and therefore potential bookmarkers.
But that gets progressively harder to do when only 1 in 300 sites have the traffic levels you need, I think these things combined put an upper limit on the sizes of the sites.

You're probably best taking all your content, rolling it into a new site, forcing the new site with 10k traffic a day, and pushing out another 40k site, before rolling off another one.

But for those of us struggling to get there, the big question is...

'Why would someone want to bookmark my site?'

You guys are causing me to have dreams about trading... no joke

Good stuff! Keep it coming... but give me a week to digest all this

Hi

i just wanted to know, how much traffic is xxxonfire.com getting daily.

My site just keep on growing, Some days ago it had about 30k/day...now its 40+ and clicks out are over 300% or 123,010 clicks at this moment.

I have set the default return ratio to 150% for all trades,
I force 250/hour to my top 3 trades.

Actually I dont like to force but it seem to be the only way to get something back and their prod is HIGH and well worth it.

While I don't have NEARLY as much experience with TGP sites as alot of these guys do, I have considerable experience in sales, advertsing, and particulary sales and advertising adult products. I think what ALOT of people who run TGP sites forget is ths: TGP sites are, in effect, the sales and marketing arms of porn sites.

I bring this up because if you keep that in mind, it shouls what sponsors you choose, what thumbs you select, and most importantly, hwo you "trade traffic". Sometimes I wished we woudl call it what it is and call it "bait and switch". You bait the surfer with a hot thumb and then, instead of giving them more of that.. you send him to a "trading partner".

I understand the need for this and activily trade traffic on one of my sites. I run other sites simply as an extended showroom. One day I may change this philosphy. Keep thsi in mind, at the end of the day, we are selling porn. To someone, somehow, OR we are just hobbyist trading our "dirty pictures" amonst a few thousand friends a day.

Not sure if this is helpful to anyone but is just my $.02.

I think you should do that for your top FOUR trades