Newbie question on traffic trade skim.

[DaveM]

I'm new to traffic trading and I just set up TTT on one of my sites. I was just wondering what to set the skim percentage at. Its a new TGP and I'm looking to grow traffic but not be too aggressive and discourage bookmarkers.

Any recommendations on setting the skim and growth startegy using a trading skript would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Useless]

There are plenty of theories on this, but you are going to get mine first!

If you are just starting out trading traffic you are going to want to favor your trades and give them as much as you can so that they are under the false assumption that you have traffic. This means setting that skim fairly high. But here is the problem. You can pound your traffic at your trade partners all day, but you may not see a whole lot back. This means your productivity is low so their script is not going to return traffic. The key to productive trading is finding trades in the same niche. I trade with bunches of fools, but the those who send me the best traffic, maybe not the most, but the best, are those in the same niche. (As far as general TGPs go, Zilla's productivity kicks ass.)

Anyway, back to setting the skim. I lure my visitors into thinking that I'm not going to jerk them around to much by starting with a low skim on the top portion of my site and increasing the skim the further down you go. Frankly, if they are still robbing by bandwidth by half way down the page, I just assume they go to my trades, or die.
At my site the skim starts off with this:
/trade/ttt-out.php?f=1&pct=70&url= which means first click non skimmed, they get the gallery 70% of the time.
In the center of my page:
/trade/ttt-out.php?f=1&pct=50&url= still first click non skimmed, gallery drops to 50%.
At the bottom:
/trade/ttt-out.php?pct=20&url= They'll get a gallery only 20% of the time, which of course means 80% of their clicks will get my trades. That is the highest skim I have right now.

If you skim high, you should place some advertising at the top of your site above the gallieries. Once a surfer gets transferred a couple of times, he is either going to stay at your trade or move along anyway. Your money will be made before they hit the galleries.

[Cleo]

I run a small TGP that is mostly SE traffic. I can handle a trades of about 200 to 300 a day that I'm told has a high productivity.

I have mine set up so that the deeper you go into it the higher the skim. My thinking is be surfer friendly to the newcomers and skim the galleries more to the surfer just looking for free stuff. I think I have it set to 80% skim on my archives and 0% on the newest galleries.

[Surfn]

CJ traffic sucks. Most of the people I trade with don't use trade scripts.

[Cleo]

Have you ever noticed that starting a thread about traffic scripts is kind of like starting a Mac versus PC thread.

Scripts Suck

PCs Suck

Macs Suck

Scripts are great

PCs are great

Macs are great

They are all tools, nothing more. It is using the right tool for the right task in the proper way.

Just my 2¢

[Surfn]

Still sucks |raygun|