Originally Posted by CozyBoard
I suspect that you're making a few simple mistakes that can be corrected quite easily. Looking at your site, it looks to me like you're trading with sites that are too small and don't get much traffic. The top trade you have on your list has an Alexa ranking of around 1.3 million. That means that site gets only a couple hundred hits a day at most.
You need to find sites that are getting at least 10k a day or more and preferabley, much more. Don't sign up with the ones that have a high minimum but you should be able to find some that don't have a minimum or one that's less than 200 a day or so.
Another mistake you're making -- which I've pointed out before -- is that you are showing the inbound and outbound hits on your toplist. Until you are getting a lot of traffic, I wouldn't even show either number, just list the name. Once you're getting a lot of traffic and add a trade link to your own site, you'll want webmasters to see the hits in, but still not the hits out.
Now, about buying traffic. Setting the traffic at 30 an hour is probably not going to accomplish much. I'd recommend 1k a day at least. Keep in mind that it's going to cost money to jump start the site by buying content, there's no real way around it unless you have some friends. In the case of the client I've mentioned, he found a few TGP owners that liked his site and what he was doing and they started feeding him some traffic to get things started. Not everyone is going to get that lucky and they need to pay for traffic to get things started.
Finally, and this is the really important part. The best way to ramp the traffic up quickly is to forego trying to make money from the site for a while. If you have your own galleries in the rotation, you will probably make some money, but what I'm suggesting is removing any advertising links other than the thumbs. Group your thumbs in groups of 5 rows or so. Maybe you have a 'hall of fame' and then today's galleries, yesterday's galleries, etc. In between each group, put 3 links to your trades with some nice enticing text.
Of course, you'll want to have the top referrer list as well, but the idea is that if you have no outbound links on the page other than the thumbs and the links to your trades, the only way traffic is going to leave your site is by either hitting their back button, clicking on a gallery, clicking on a link to a trade, or closing their browser. This means you'll be sending a lot of traffic to your trades.
I'm guessing that you are using a trade script that let's you skim a percentage of the clicks on the gallery thumbs to go to the trades. If not, you should add that script asap and set the skim at 30%. I like 30% because it's about 1/3 and if you trade with sites that have a 300% productivity or higher, you should in theory have at least one click on one of your link trades for every hit you get. Productivity means how many links on your page a surfer clicks on. If you are getting 300% productivity, that means that the surfer is clicking on 3 links on each visit. If you have your skims set at 30%, theat means that if the surfer clicks on 3 thumbs, chances are pretty good he'll send a hit to one of your trades.
Once you get the site running at at least 300% productivity and use a skim of 30%, as long as the sites you're trading with are trading at higher than 100%, your traffic should increase each day. The more traffic you get, the more you send to your trades and the more traffic you get. If everything is working correctly, you'll achieve a snowball effect.
P.S. I'm confused because you say you just past the 100 uniuqes a day mark and yet you say you're buying traffic at the rate of 30 hits an hour. That would mean you should be getting at least 750 hits a day just from the purchased traffic.
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