[Toby]

There are two facets to improving productivity.

First, and easiest to control is the layout and design of your site. Things like placing your trade links and/or referrer toplist in prominent and multiple places on the page. If you're using a trade script to skim to trades, getting the settings configured to optimize results with as little skim as necessary.

Second, and little more difficult to control, are the sites you select to trade with. The closer their content is to yours the more likely you'll see productive traffic from them. So in your case this would mean similar niche and also text link. You're unlikely to get good productivity trading with thumb TGP's, although there are always exceptions.

I try to return about 120% to trades. Meaning that if they send me 100 unique visitors I try to return 120 to them. Some of those 120 will get lost along to way, for various reasons, which is why you over send slightly.

A good minimum productivity for incoming trades is 100%, meaning that for every 100 unique visitors sent those same visitors click at least 100 of your gallery links. Most of my top trades are in the 250% to 350% range, with a few even better than that.

My two most established TGP's have an overall productivy well over 300%

Like anything else in this biz, it takes trial and error, lots of reading and continual learning.

P.S. My thumb TGP's seem to sell just fine. My overall conversion ratio for 2007 was 1:700 and that traffic was nearly 100% from my own TGP's.