do i have bad trades?
 

Ive been giving my trades some time to work but i alwasy send them more than they send me, it never goes the other way. Are these just crappy trade partners or what?

I woulda posted this in the trade forum but everyone there is inquiring about actually trading not general trade info.

I am glad that you brought this up. I have the same problem too, i send off hits to start the trade and 9/10 times get nothing back.

Some of them i contact by ICQ or email and usually get about 1/30 to reply.

This should be like any other business where relationships are important and proffesionalism should prevail. When someone signs up to my sites and i don't want to trade with them, i try to let them know, maybe they will have another site that will trade good.

You never know what lies in the future, a great example is that when i first started work i had a boss that i got on well with, some years later and in a different country i ended up being his boss - in other words don't burn bridges and always try to be proffessional.

My wife is calling me to go to sleep so i have to cut this off at this point! - And I don't want to piss her off.

Keep in mind if using a trading script, that perhaps 10-20% of the 'out' traffic you track will be lost before your trade can credit it. This is usually experienced surfers who know to close the browser/hit back as soon as they see they are being traded to another site and before the page fully loads.

Most good trade scripts only count traffic that actually clicks. If the surfer you send them does not click on anything on their site, then it does not count. If you are sending blinds, the majority will not click, so will not be counted.

That's not true at all!!!!! If the surfer goes to a site it is counted as an in hit (some are always lost) then from there the script counts clicks.

Theory 1:
If you are sending more hits to your trades then one possible reason is your traffic is not clicking on their site. If I send 500 hits to a trade and those hits generate 1000 clicks that is a 200% prod and his script SHOULD send me a lot of hits back since my trade is "good". BUT...if those 500 hits only generate 300 clicks then that is a bad trade and I will likely not get anywhere near 500 hits back from him.

In short, maybe the problem is your site. Maybe when they get to your trades they are not clicking much so the trades do not send much back.

Theory 2:
You do not have enough trades. Add more!!! (which you should always do anyway). Maybe the trades you have cannot handle as many hits as you have so they simply do not have the traffic to send back. Add more trades.

In addition to what Ramster said - Know Your Trades!!!
If youre sending traffic to someone that trades with just anyone - likely you are not going to get much productivity as they might not have the traffic or they might be just building "using other people".
Take a look at their sites and see what type of traffic trading they are doing before you send them traffic - see who is sending them traffic and then check those sites to see if theyre really trading with them or if they are just pumping their toplists

yea i just checked your page and you only have 3 trades in there. The way to really start it off is to load 10 or so trades in there and just force at them for a day a lot of traffic. don't mess with it for a day just let it force traffic out to them. Then the next day you should see how thing are looking with a trade. Ones that are productive you need to let those roll but maybe you already see one trade is sending traffic that isn't productive into your site. Ditch that one and replace it with a new one and force hits at it every hour for a day and see how it goes. You need to find a core group of trades that are going to be productive on your site and hopefully the traffic they send that you are trading off to your other trades will be productive there as well. When you find that balance that's when you will see things start to grow and you will be able to take on more and more trade partners.

Then one of the biggest things is are your trades sending you people that might actually signup for something. If not you are just burning bandwidth.

????????? You say that what I said is not true, then you spend a long paragraph going into great detail saying exactly the same thing as I just said. I simplified it to one sentence so as not to confuse a newbie, but your "theory one" is exactly what you said was "not true" at the start of your post. ??????????

yea i get what you guys are saying, the thing about adding trades is, if i add too many it seems like i cant handle it right now, correct me if im wrong but if i get say only 1-2k a day right now, shouldnt i wait to add like 10-20 trades until i have sufficient traffic to send them all, i mean i dont want to have alot of trades and send them all 5-10 hits a day right?

just for some info right now
my prod is at about 205 it bounces arouna little bit
reurn is at 55
skimming at about 70%

another question is, what should i be looking at for individual trade prod?

for example my sites prod is a little above 200, but my trades prod are all at or below 100 sometimes peaking above 100 and my bookmarkers are what brings it up higher. is this how things are supposed to work, or should i be looking for higher individual trade prod?

you need to have your trade partner prod be higher. You need more trades... at least 10 and you need those to have a prod above a 100 fore sure if you want to grow.

like i said though, should i add mroe trades even though if i had, say ten trades i wouldnt be sending them any nice amount of traffic?

It depends on your trades. Some WMs don't like dealing with small amounts of traffic, some don't mind, and some actually prefer it (the latter, I would guess, are those with low traffic).

Sorry, I misread what you were saying.

"Most good trade scripts only count traffic that actually clicks. If the surfer you send them does not click on anything on their site, then it does not count. If you are sending blinds, the majority will not click, so will not be counted."

It looks as though you were saying that if the surfer does not click then the hit is not counted... when indeed the hit is counted but no clicks are. You weren't clear about that but no worries.

I would also add that you need a decent trade script. It is very hard these days to find good trades due to all the cheaters and free scripts out there. established sites are not going to answer your icq until they see you on top lists of established sites, in my opinion. Once i started getting on toplists i just keep icqing and they start to reply later than sooner though