Traffic Trading: How to Start?

[Cozy Monica]

Does anyone here do a lot of traffic trading with a script?

I've decided it's high time that I learned how to do this.

The only problem I forsee is that it must be really hard to get started trading when you only have a little bit of traffic. It kind of boggles my mind how on earth you can build traffic in this fashion.

Does anyone here have any hints for learning how to trade traffic with scripts?

[Chang]

Well, of course you can buy traffic to get started, but... I've tried it with new sites and it's my opinion that it's almost a waste of money. I say almost because although it will give you something to give your traders, the quality sucks and won't produce any long term profitability. So, you have to keep buying it over and over to sustain the volume.

IMO, the better approach is to keep tweaking the site and wait until you're out of the sandbox, tweak again, repeat until you get some "free" traffic. That will give you quality SE hits from people who are clickers with a smaller percentage of them who are porn savvy. Of course, this can take a long time, but your only investment is just that... time.

Once you start getting a decent amount of SE hits, then start trading with sites that are close to the same size as yours. Ideally, you should aim for sites that are slightly bigger than yours and hope they don't dump you for not keeping up right away.

Once you get some of those, they send you a few more hits than you send them, then you have those extras to send to other traders, and on, and on...

By the same token, don't dump every trader who signs up with you and is not keeping up, but make sure they are a smaller percentage than the ones who are.

If you've ever read any of my other posts about this, you'll see it can be pretty tough. You can burn a lot of bandwidth with little gain and you'll have to deal with a lot of shady webmasters. It can be done profitably, but it can be tough, especially starting out.

[phuckbunny]

Monica, are you talking about TGP traffic?

[Hammer]

Not much point in a trade script unless it's a TGP. Hard link trades are much better for any other kind of site.

[porn punk]

I've been trying to figure it out for two years now, Monica and I have to agree with the general consensus that it's really not worth the effort. Unless you're trying to build a tgp, you're probably wasting your time. Now I've met people in my travels who swear by it and even use fake tgp's to do it (or claim so anyway).

But even though I have traffic trades, tgp's and scripts, I have to agree with Hammer on this one and advise against it unless there is some other purpose in the back of your mind.

You won't get much monetary gain out of it and I'm assuming that's what you're after

P.S. buying traffic is only going to get you the traffic no one wants just for the record

[porn punk]

In case my opinion hasn't swayed you though (and it shouldn't) here's some links at least for research

http://bbs.icefire.org/
http://protect-x.com/

[porn punk]

One more thing. I should apologize to Cozy and tit because these links are forums, but they are absolutely technique and traffic trade oriented.

I wasn't thinking and been drinking when I posted these links but didn't see a conflict. This is still the best place for any newb to learn the adult webmaster trade and I'll stand by that until death.

[Cozy Monica]

I am absolutely determined to learn this. And I know it can be used successfully for blogs... I've seen it done by people I know. However, learning how to do it too... that's an entirely different thing. heh.

Chang, the site is starting with a bit of traffic (only 150 - 200 uniques per day), and it's coming from some of my other porn related sites that have clicked to see the kind of places I'd be sending them to.

I think the real trick is going to involve two things:

1) avoiding cheaters, like you mentioned

2) finding that magic mix of skim where surfers are still happy with the site, but trades are happy as well


I'm imagining it's a pretty steep learning curve...

If you have ANY hints at all, I appreciate it.

I'm using Arrow Trader and they had a good section in their docs about finding evidence of cheaters in your logs. So that will help me get a start on figuring that out.

[Lana]

Here's my formula. Slow and steady wins the day.
My only advertising is straight hard links.
My site only has about 20 links.
I don't want to overwhelm with ads.
Every month the least producer get booted and a new guy comes in.
If your at the bottom you get an email telling you your out because I'm not getting the hits.
I've now got 20 hard links sending me tons more traffic.
They're more than welcome to be an affiliate but they're off the links page because I'm not going to ad you and also pay you money.
I keep a small amount of hard links and just keep honing in on the best producers.
I'm consistantly pulling in about 2 grand a month.
Yes, not a great amount of money but for this simple little formula it works.

[Hammer]

Well Monica, you do what you want, but IMO, using a trading script on a blog is a very bad idea. Neither you nor the sites you're trading with will get any PR benefit from the links because they won't be hard links. What I suggest is that you put a "your link here" link at the bottom of your friends list and link it to a page with a form so webmasters can sign up for a trade.

The only reason to use a trade script is so that the top traders are at the top of the list which rewards the top referrers. This makes sense for a TGP because they want to know that they are getting the same amount of traffic they send, back in return. I can't think of a good reason to do that with a blog, unless it's a splog, in which case the traffic is damn near useless anyway since it's just surfers going from one splog to the next looking for free porn.

[phuckbunny]

I'm with Hammer, I don't see the point of using a script with a blog & I'm not fully sure what you have in mind.

As I mentioned or questioned before, word of mouth for a well written well designed blog will probably go a long way, the bitch is that it takes a long time to achieve it. IMO the sucess of blogs is partly due to the fact that they make the surfer/reader feel he's in a safe environment for lack of a better word. Any kind of skim or redirect from a blog and I would never revisit that site again, then it's just like a TGP. I think apart from the holy grail of SE traffic this 'surfer friendliness', avoiding a hundred popups and redirects is what made blogs take off.

I guess you can use a script like linkex or sth to track your hardlink trades and drop the non productive partners if they don't send you enough visitors over time. But what if your partners also subscribe to your feed and find something interesting that you wrote that they wish to reblog/plug at a later time.

I think some kind of top referrer script might be a nice idea, I've thought about trying out one of those.

At point I looked around for a script that would look like a tag cloud - the more hits your friends send the bigger the font gets. I've seen this on some site but can't remember where and I don't know enough code to write it myself.

[theviking]

The best way to 'trade' traffic on a blog is if you have a high traffic blog and set up a referrer script. That way the trades kickstart themselves.

[Cozy Monica]

Kind of hard to have a high traffic blog though if you are still trying to grow traffic

[Cozy Monica]

Interesting tidbit a little birdie told me: Fleshbot, a very nice blog, uses a traffic script.

Just a rumor.

[phuckbunny]

Really? Hmmm.... I wonder what for. You're talking about a site with a shitload of traffic, no trades, certainly no skim - which I can't imagine on a blog anyway, no traditional link exchanges, hard links, etc etc.... Maybe they use it to keep track of people linking to them and/or trading stories and content back and forth between Defamer, Gawker, Jezebel, etc?

[Cozy Monica]

I'm pretty sure they skim, but I haven't clicked around enough yet to figure out where.

[balls_deep]

monica, you are starting to sound like bill with you request for a successful blog.

[Hammer]

Talking about using a trade script on a blog does sound kind of desperate to me and just another example of how I keep saying webmasters can't seem to get past the TGP mentality, that it's all about traffic and damn the quality. All a trade script is going to do is possibly increase your traffic so you can tell people you have a high traffic blog, but if that traffic got to your blog from any way other than a direct hard link, it's not targeted and 90% or more of it will never come back or buy anything.

[sunfunbill]

monica, you are starting to sound like bill with you request for a successful blog.

Hey, what the hell does that mean!! Everybody wants traffic to their sites. But I have to agree with everyone about the script thing. No point in getting traffic that does not convert. Try more hard links.

[phuckbunny]

Originally posted by Cozy Monica
I'm pretty sure they skim, but I haven't clicked around enough yet to figure out where.

Monica, I'm a newbie and still an ignoramus when it comes to most aspects of this biz, but I don't see how that can be. I haven't ever surfed a blog that uses skim, and certainly not Fleshbot. Have you ever gone to the NY Times only to find yourself redirected to the Guardian and then to be taken to the Vancouver Sun when you click on an article you wish to read? I've been reading Flesh practically every day for years now. Unless you're talking about some other type of concept of skim, I'm really confused.