Hi Monkey Spanner,
Nice work, you sure have started out at a high level
Couple of things might help...
First get a good exit sponsor - saves wasting traffic on google and yahoo... you'd be amazed how many surfers will click on your exit link.
Second - try to get your sponsor text links to stand out a little more than your other site text, the way you have used them looks stylish but makes them less attention grabbingt... you might try using a stronger color for them of bold/highlight some of the keywords in them - kind've draw the surfers attention towards your banners and away from other site text.
Third - Pictures are big (file sizes) - bearing in mind the %'age of surfers still on dial up connections your 120,000bytes pics will scare them away - bandwidth isn't such an issue for free sites (although there's no sense throwing the money away) but you could easily optimize them down to 40,000 - 50,000 bytes without losing quality and besides these are free, they don't have to be perfect, just reasonable, surfers have to know they will get better content at you sponsor site, why give away such high quality free pics?
Great start though and welcome to the world of free sites