Traffic Trade Basics

The primary meaning of 'traffic' is 'an aggregation of vehicles going in a particular locality'. Due to Internet growth, a new meaning of 'traffic' has appeared, such as 'flow of surfers to and from websites'. Traffic can be bought, sold, stolen, scripted and traded. Traffic trading is both easy and intricate. There are different types of traffic trade, and besides, numerous ways to go about obtaining trades. A traffic trade can be as easy as putting a link on your page addressing the cross-linked page of your friend; and as complicated as sending out tens of thousands of hits to numerous partners. But the most important thing all types of traffic trading have in common is...

A trade is a trade as long as you are sending each other a few hits. This differs trade from link exchange.

Why traffic trade is important? You know the answer, don't you? You know that nowadays it's quite impossible to get listed in major web directories such as yahoo.com and dmoz.org, that search engines change their rules more often than you update your site ;-) , that all sources of traffic are becoming more and more commercial. So, many of us need some alternative traffic source to keep our sites alive and growing. Of course, traffic trade is not a complete substitution of traditional traffic sources, but still it appears a good addition to them. Link exchange having the only one goal in mind to improve sites' PR in search engines has become obsolete. For better results one should upgrade to traffic management system controlled by special software.

Estimate the level of traffic management you operate on your site from the point of technical progress (from low to high):

1. Basic Link Exchange - Manual link exchange without any control of incoming and outgoing traffic.
    
2. Advanced Link Exchange - Manual link exchange featuring topsite-like link ranking. Incoming traffic flow is monitored manually via web stats.
    
3. Basic Traffic Trade - Automated link exchange using toplist software. Weak control of traffic flow without abilities to manage outgoing traffic. Quality parameters are not considered. Ineffective anti-cheating mechanism (the remedy is worse than the disease).
    
4. Advanced Traffic Trade - Automated link exchange using special traffic trading software (usually free). Outgoing traffic is monitored equal to incoming; outgoing traffic management is also supported. Trades are driven by quality parameters for fair traffic distribution between trade partners. Advanced anti-cheating mechanism (depends on software).
    
5. Automated link exchange using special professional traffic trading software (paid or custom). Features incoming and outgoing traffic monitoring, advanced outgoing traffic management considering various quality parameters, target audience filtering, country filtering, traffic source filtering, etc. Professional anti-cheating mechanism based on statistics and special "tricks".

The abovementioned ranking is obviously very rough and controversial but it shows for sure that the first two levels of traffic management remind the "dark ages" of the Web when people just traded links with friends. If you stick with those two you will finally lose, sooner or later.

There are dozens of reasons for upgrading to better traffic management level, no need to show them all. Those reasons vary from obvious ones like

• the person wanting to link to your site can send very little traffic back in return;
• the link to your site suddenly disappears once you start sending traffic to the linked site, or accidental deletion happens to the URL where your reciprocal link once was;

to intricate, like

• your are not able to send proper amount of traffic to you best referrer just because visitors of your site don't like the partner's site name and don't click it in you top list;
• using professional software, trade partner is sending you only Chinese (or any other non-buying) traffic.

What does 'quality of traffic' mean? In the beginning of script trading it was 1 for 1, 1 for 1.2, or 1 for 2 etc. Now it's based more on quality parameters. Among them, the most important value is productivity. 'Productivity' means output of any production process, per unit of input. As for traffic trade, it means the ratio of hits to clicks. If I send you one hit and the visitor closes his browser window without clicking a single thing on your site, that hit's productivity is 0. But if he clicks on 1 link, that is 100% productivity. So, if that given 1 person clicked on 10 (tracked) things on your site, that is equal to 1000% productivity etc. There are many ways to estimate productivity depending on target audiences, site types and, after all, from site to site. Note that you need at least 300 hits or so from a particular trade partner to count productivity with acceptable accuracy. It means that quality-driven trades work only on big sites. But even if you site is not that big you can gather stats for longer period of time than 24 hours (if your script allows you to do so) and use the information to make proper decisions.

Where to read more about traffic trading? It is adult sites industry which stands on the edge of traffic management technical progress. So if you want to know more about this ART, you should visit and study many adult webmasters resources including message boards because it's very hard to find a good educational materials on this point (even there). Furthermore, you will need to adapt obtained knowledge to your site, because adult sites have number of peculiarities that probably don't match your own case. Trial&error methods are also available. To start, you can simply visit our software page, choose any product and start using.

Good luck!

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