A couple of newbie questions

[Jonno]

Hi everyone I have just started in the business and have found this board through submitting my first free site to link lists. I have posted questions on other boards before but this one seems to be the place where a lot of the really experienced folk hang out. I managed to get my site listed at several places and as I get further into this process new questions are coming up. Here are some of my latest.

I have tried to make a very clean free site as that seems to be the best thing to do for lots of reasons and I have not been rejected by lists (except one) for blind links etc. I have been rejected from a few for having a private Whois. I didn't realise that would be a problem, I don't think I have any reason not releasing my information could you give me pros and cons on this.

Also now I'm getting traffic to my site I'm trying to make sense of the stats. I have not made any sales yet but I'm not worried as it is still very early days and I don't expect this to be easy. These are the stats as they stand at the moment are they good, bad or what? The site has been getting traffic for about 4 days now, it got 2525 unique hits so far and the stats from my sponsor show that he has received 990 first page hits and 705 second page hits (not sure about the significance of those figures). Am I sending a good proportion of my surfers to the sponsors site or should it be more? as there are no sales does that mean that the quality of hits I'm sending is low should I try to filter them better? The site is in the mature niche if that helps any.

Any help in making sense of this would be very gratefully received. Thanks for being a resource available to us newbies.