When is it time to move on?

[Simon]

Some excellent points in this thread.

Tommy can definitely send traffic. His fetish cat page is always way up in the top of our stats. Then there's his uniform, and asian, and lesbian pages, and... oh never mind, my point was just that getting listed by Tommy is a very good idea.

What I wanted to add was that from a stats perspective, there is a big difference in the kinds of traffic you may get from link lists.

All of the best link lists have a lot of inbound search engine traffic. Someone searches for 'fetish' on Google, clicks a search result to wind up at Tommy's or Greenguy's or another of the big lists. Now they click again to select the fetish category (or bondage or bdsm or whatever they like), and then select a free site to come visit.

Nice filtered traffic, and fresh from a search engine too. I love to get a visitor to our tour pages at that point.

But not all link lists are created equal.

Keep in mind that some link lists get most of their traffic from trading traffic with other link lists who trade with other link lists, and so on. With traffic of that sort, you can still make sales, but remember not to expect the same ratios you can get with link lists that have fresh SE traffic all day long.

Moby's questions about how you send the traffic are important to consider too. You can get 2-3x the click-thru with some copy changes, but not get one more sale from the traffic. You can also tune your copy and layout for less traffic but more sales.