Virgin to link/traffic trading

[selena]

I have a fake site that is on the brink of going legal, as I really want it to have more than fhg's and my own stuff. It's got a little bit of traffic to it...it's a PR3, even though I don't think that means dickall.

I think the traffic could be more if I did two things.

1). Opened up and solicited submissions

2.) Established some link trades to get traffic swooshing around.

But even though I have read and read, the traffic stuff still confuses me. I know that right now, I am not interested in the skim stuff. Not for this site. This is going to be my site that I keep clean as I can.

I know there are people who just trade hard links. That is more what I'm about. But can you do that without some type of script? If you can't, what type of script is both suitable and hopefully with a free version? (I can see it on Christmas morning "Sorry, boys, I bought a script for my porn site instead of gifts, I knew you'd understand) And what sort of things do you have to watch for to make sure you aren't getting cheated?

And I don't know what to do first, traffic or get some submissions coming in. To me that seems like a chicken/egg kind of thing. Traffic will increase if there are quality submits. But in order to intice submitters, it would be nice to have some traffic to offer them.

I'll add to that that at this stage in the game, I am not open to getting submits by widely advertising it or by adding my site to some auto submitter. I only have a free version of a script running on the site, and I am not sophisticated enough business wise to catch cheaters and stuff on my own. So I hope to find niche submitters from this board, and maybe another or so. Known names that I can hopefully trust.

Any advice you knowledgeable people can give me is very much appreciated.