TGP Tutorials & Articles
Buying and Trading Traffic
by Andrew of AdultWebmaster101.net
Traffic Trading
Finding new traffic trades is easy. Find some TGPs in your niche that you'd like to trade with and look for a link at the bottom of the page that says "Trade Traffic" or "Webmasters." This should take you to the signup form for the TGPs trade script. You can use a TGPs toplist to find more trades, and you can also solicit traffic trades on webmaster boards.
Most of the time, you simply fill out the signup form and your site will be added as a new trade immediately. Some TGP owners have disabled new trades by default. If the form is closed or if new trades are disabled, you may want to contact the TGP owner directly via email or ICQ and set up the trade.
Once the trade is set up on the other end, go to the admin page of your trade script and add the new trade. You'll generally have to force some hits to activate the trade. Sometimes your trade partner will specify how many hits you need to send. Set a force of 20-40 hits (or whatever number they request) to get the trade going. If the trade is successful, the other TGP will start sending hits back. If you're not receiving any hits yet, force 20 more hits. You may have to send the TGP owner a message and have them enable the trade if you're not receiving any hits.
Trade scripts generally return visitors based on productivity. In the stats page of your trade script, there should be a number indicating overall productivity, (or "prod") generally expressed as a percentage. For example, a productivity of 100% means that on average, each visitor is clicking at least one gallery link. A prod of 200% means that each visitor is clicking an average of 2 links.
The trades that are sending you the highest prod will receive the highest ratio of traffic back. If you are sending high prod traffic to your trades, then you will likely receive lots of productive traffic back. The inverse is true for low prod traffic and trades. To acheive maximum growth, you want your productivity to be as high as possible. More clicks means more trades, and thus more traffic. For most TGPs, an overall prod around 200-250% is acheivable.
To increase and sustain high productivity, you'll want to weed out trades that are sending unproductive visitors. If a trading partner starts sending traffic with less than 100% productivity, then you may want to consider deactivating that trade. If the trade was sending productive traffic before, then you may want to force some hits to increase your ranking on that TGP. Otherwise, simply let the trade die out on its own.
For your most productive trades, you can keep the trade going by setting an hourly force. This is simply a set number of hits that goes to a trade every hour. Trade scripts use advanced algorithms to determine which trading partner gets the next hit, and how many hits to send to each trade. However, you may wish to maintain a certain level of control over your trades, and forcing allows you to do that.
Buying Traffic
To feed your trades, you'll need to buy traffic. Traffic brokers generally sell traffic that has been skimmed from other TGPs. Clicked traffic is of the highest quality, while 404 and exit traffic are generally the least productive.
Use caution when choosing a traffic broker. Make sure you know where their traffic comes from! Some traffic brokers send low quality foreign traffic that, while cheap, is very unproductive. Reputable traffic brokers include Choker Traffic, Traffic Holder, Traffic Out and FPC Traffic.
Traffic is sold per thousand (1000) hits, with prices starting at $3 per thousand for low quality traffic to $6-7 per thousand for high-quality clicked traffic. Most traffic brokers have a variety of niches to choose from, so choose one or two that are relevant to your niche.
Make sure you've set up your trades before sending traffic to your TGP. Start with 10-15 trades and keep an eye on them. Once those trades are up and running, add 5-10 more. The first few days of running a TGP requires constant supervision. Keep the traffic flowing until you've reached an ideal number of stable trades. 40-50 is a good number, though you may prefer more or less.
While the basics of traffic trading are easy enough, the finer points of managing and maximizing trades comes only through practice and experience, and such knowledge is beyond the scope of this simple tutorial.
