Quote:
Originally Posted by T Pat
I actually put some thought into this Walrus 
the way I see it is without a script to make things equal the newer the blog the more advantageous trading would be.
A well established blog is going to produce more traffic and then there's also PR to think about 
One last thing that comes to mind is the fuckme factor, I'm sure you can trust the regular board members to not do anything shady, but what if a newcomer comes along, without a script to monitor the trades you would have to pass on trading with anyone you don't know |
Since I'm leaning towards doing a top list style traffic trade, let me run through my way of thinking.
First traffic trades would have nothing to do with SE's or PR. You'd still want to setup some hard link exchanges for that, or even a linking system through your blog network.
I'd setup a preferable area in my sidebar for the trades. A place that would get noticed with a title to interest surfers looking to leave my site.
With LO, as I'm sure you know, you can have multiple templates. I'd have one that just displayed the top 10 links. Those links would be displayed in the preferable area of the sidebar.
This could be modified dependant on the number of traders and I'd adjust it to try to get the most traffic. In other words, if I found I got more traffic by displaying 15 links, I'd do that.
The rest of those that signed up would end up on a page so a small amount of traffic would eventually filter through to them.
So even a guy with a new site could sign up to trade, he would probably get the short end of the stick until he was able to send enough hits to make the front page.
In the new blog instance, he would be better served by working on SE's and hard links to start for the first few months and then look at trading traffic.
If you use a decent top list script instead of LO, the same applies.
Most half way decent top list scripts can detect the spam bots and what not so that might only be an issue if you do try to use something link LO.