Most webmasters I see trade with anybody and any website. It’s not totally wrong, but there should be more thought put into the process.

Course when your new, you don’t have much to give potential trade partners, often time you do need to, “take what you can get”.

When you do have something to give back, here’s a few things I have in my link trade process.

First and foremost you need Alexa, there is a great add-on for Firefox and I’m sure there is one for IE, not sure as I don’t use that browser much any more. Long time back I use to have official Alexa toolbar installed but found that it seemed to clog up my system, think it was a resource hog. The one I use for FireFox is SeachStatus and it’s great. Actually this plug-in does quite a few tricks. Of coure it has all the Alexa data, but it also has the Google info, most importantly Page Rank.

Disclaimer:

Okay, first off I know Alexa is not very accurate, but it does help tremendously as a gauge, at least to get some kind of an idea about a websites traffic. Also I know Google Page Rank doesn’t mean alot these days, but again, it is a gauge.

So, with that out of the way…

When I’m looking to trade, I look at a few things. First I load the site in my browser. From there I can see the Alexa Rank and the Google PR. While the Alexa rank is not accurate, if a site has a rank of 1,000,000 or more, you have a pretty good idea there is not alot of traffic there. A good guess at least. The same pretty much applies to the Google PR, but here’s a kicker, if the bar is grayed out, there is a good chance they have been banned in google. (they still do that don’t they? Can’t remember the last grey bar I saw actually).

Next I look at the site itself, if it’s a banner farm and looks like crap, it’s gone. Be real here a minute, who is going to trade with that kind of site? Probably ones that are not worth being networked with anyways. I don’t mean to put people down, I know there can be a learning curve when making websites. But honestly there are far too many resources available on the web, there is no excuse not to have at least a decent looking site. Or maybe I’m just an ass
Course some folks really need to get a second opinion.

Of course the site I am looking at trading with needs to have content that is related to mine. I also look at who else they trade with. Another important aspect is where they place their trades, if they are hidden at the bottom of a very long page, good chance you won’t see much traffic action. The exception being a very big and popular site where any link back at all is a good thing.

Last thing to remember, I for one have a mindset that this is a business for me, I am doing it to make money. With that said, some trades are just not worth it, I always try to get something out of the deal, other wise, why trade?

Well, thats all I can think of off the top of my head right now, and I need to get some other things done.

Hope it helps.

Fromt he great folks at Topbucks,

Keys to Webmaster Success - Pt. 2
By TopBucks_Trixxxia

I took the liberty to use some common questions asked and the answers in order to be beneficial to all levels of affiliate experience & knowledge. I hope that this is helpful to you.

I have years of pages/galleries/free sites still on my server not producing much - what can I do with them?

BLOGS/TGPS/MGPS/HUBS

Maybe it’s just me, but it “seems” many webmasters dont know about toplists, how they work or how they can build traffic. If you’ve never seen a toplist, it is basically a site that lists other websites. Toplists list other site according to how many hits they sent to the toplist. The more you send the higher up on the list your are. The idea is to use toplists to get more traffic back to your site or even recycle traffic that is leaving your site, they are leaving without buying anyways, why not trade them off for some fresh surfers. Also, usually the higher you are listed on the toplist, the more you will get back.

The main goal with using toplists is to do your best to get back more than you send. To do this you must have a very enticing or teasing name for you site, same for the description if the toplist has site descriptions. Most toplist are pretty easy on what you have for your name and description, others are not. The more exciting or tempting your site name and description are, the more surfers will click on your link. As I said, you want to try and get back more then you send to the toplist. Often you will need to tweak and change your listing until you get a good return.

Becareful in choosing which toplists you use. I never use toplists that dont show in and out hits, that is the number of hits you send in and the number of hits the toplist sends back to you. For one you dont have any way to judge the amount of traffic they have and more important you dont know if you can get back more then you send.

Choose the same niche. Although it sounds like common sense, I still see it happen every day. If your site is asian girls, you will want to use only asian girl type toplists.

One important thing to remember, toplist traffic may not always be the best. It can often be tgp type traffic or as mentioned, traffic others could’nt sell. Does’nt mean you can t sell them though, maybe you could sell them better than the last guy or show them something different. My thought is, if they saw my ads on my pages and click on the toplist anyways, there’s a good chance they were’nt buying from me anyway, so why not trade them off for a new surfer, another chance to make a sale.

Toplists can be a great way to build your traffic as you can get back more then you send, slowly building your traffic. They have worked well for me for some time.

Here’s a good example of a toplist and how it works: Anal Sex Toplist