Link Exchanges and Sub-Domains or Folders

[horney]

Virtual server (LVM) just about built, about to buy a domain name or two and go live with a couple of sites, both already built and ready to go. Both push memberships of a sponsor in the general "babe" niche which crosses into a number of smaller niches. I have a couple of questions first.

One site is a story site with an introductory page, starting with one story and adding a new one every few days - I'll have to experiment a bit with exactly how often to see what works best. I'll also have to experiment with illustrating the stories, 'cos I'm not at all sure I've got that bit satisfactory.

The other is a free site, the standard index page with warning to under 18s, exchanged links (none there yet, see below), then an intro to the two gallery pages. All bog standard stuff.

I quite enjoyed building the free site so I may well build more of them unless I can think of a good blog topic. I understand from these boards the best way to get traffic to free sites is link exchanges. My problem is, there are loads and loads of sites offering them. Does anyone have any tips for narrowing it down to the dozen I need, selecting effective ones? Is it all trial and error? Are there any "must haves" or at least "must tries"?

The other question is whether each and every site should have its own, separately registered, domain name or whether sub-domains or directories off the main site are acceptable, and in what circumstances? Could these be used for free sites, for instance?

I should have them up and viewable "in the ether" within a small number of days, so look out for domain names suddenly appearing as a signature block. Critques will, once again, be welcomed.

[odysseus]

To build the free sites, you will want to use a folder structure. You are going to need a folder for each site you submit. The link lists you will be submitting to will each have rules as to how many recip links can be on the index/warning page, and they will all want the warning page to be index.html. They won't accept index1.html, index2, etc...

Many link lists want between 6 and 12 recips on the sites they approve. I usually went with 9. This means that if I was submitting to 27 link lists, I had to duplicate my site 3 times and the folder stucture would look like this:
http://www.mybabesite.com/babesite01/index.html submitted to my first 9 link lists.
http://www.mybabesite.com/babesite02/index.html submitted to lists 10-18.
http://www.mybabesite.com/babesite03.index.htm submitted to lists 19-27.

It may sound at first like you are doing a lot of work, but there is a huge amount of code you can re-use when building your templates for these free sites. Make about 30 of them so that the pieces that remain the same are easy to cut and paste when you need to, and you can build one each day in an hour or so when you have your work flow down. Then spend about a half hour to an hour submitting daily and you're good to go.

To find good link lists to submit to, well, that's a trial and error process. Unfortunately, nobody is going to give you their list. The best place to start is to go to http://www.link-o-rama.com and check out some pages, visit the links on other people's warning pages, and get lost surfing for a while as you make notes of places you want to submit to. Do searches on various boards for announcements of link list owners needing submissions. It takes a lot of tweaking to build up your submit list, but it's worth it. Once you've found 6-12 of them, start submitting, and continue to grow your list whenever you can. There are a few big sites that you absolutely must submit to, and I'm sure you'll find out which ones they are after a while, because they are the ones everybody else has in their recip link table.

Good luck with it.

[horney]

What a tremendously helpful post. Thank you, odysseus. Packed with information and very easy to follow.

A follow up question on the cutting and pasting of code and content: will the link lists accept .php pages, or only .html? i.e. page names ending in .php?

Some code, plus content like the warning notice, is re-usable across every single site, so you could have those as .txt, .inc, .php or even .html snippets, you can name them what you like, all in one folder, and call them with include commands when needed. Not only is that quicker, but it's less error prone than cutting and pasting. It has the added benefit that if a piece of information within those snippets changes, you only have to change it in one place, so you don't forget which sites have been done if you get an interruption part way through.

The downside is that, when using a scripting language to construct pages, you either have to change your apache configuration (only very slightly) so the language engine on the server parses everything including a lot of stuff it doesn't need to, or make the pages constructed that way end in .php, .jsp, or whatever language you are using for the purpose.

[odysseus]

Yeah, it would be nice to include all you need on your paged dynamically, but the owners of link lists are sticklers for static html pages with only the extension .html or .htm. I don't know if there is a way for them to know if you've set up .htaccess anything like that to parse PHP in .html or .htm, but I've just always played it safe when it comes to the people sending me traffic and gotten really good at copy/paste/upload.

[horney]

Looks as though I'm about to get a lot of practice.

To be honest, I'd forgotten about .htaccess, I'm so used to doing everything from within apache2.conf and httpd.conf before that. There's also mod_rewrite. So that's three methods which will do the job. The only way the link site webmasters would know is if you made a mistake setting it up.

I'll do the first few by hand (cut and paste) and see how it goes. Then I'll only cheat if it gets too tedious.