Virgin to link/traffic trading

[Wild_Unicorn]

From my experience I have found Ideally you want to try and do both gradually at the same time; get a little bit of traffic and a few submissions.
Once you have a few submits it will give surfers a reason to take a proper look around and stop them getting bored with them constantly hitting sponsor galleries / sites etc...

The simplest way to deal with hard link trades is to chat to a few webmasters you know or that you know are trustworthy.
Post a link in the link trades forum here on GG&J i'm sure you'll get some interest.

If you only have a few links it's simple to check the trades quickly by hand, otherwise if you are running a link list with any script such as Gossamer links, linkadmin, radlinks etc, you could get it to check the recips for you.
Otherwise there are specific programs that will crawl the urls on a page to check for a recip.

If you wanted to track all the in and out hits there are many free scripts that will help you do that, try these

http://cjoverkill.icefire.org/

http://www.turbotraffictrader.com/
http://www.cjultra.com/


When you say about wanting enticing submitters, but you need traffic for that; remember a nice 'empty' link site can often entice submitters.

Think about it... 'Mr Webmaster' submits his site to your amateur category, say you have only 3 links on that page, the likelyhood of his link being clicked on is dramatically increased compared to you having 50 links on that page and his being added to that.

Less links = Less competition for the same traffic.

Regardless of the fact that you have very little traffic now, it is obvious that you will work to increase that, therefor the submitter doesn't lose out in the long run.

Make some friends and do some good trades (But only with people you trust), build your PR and you'll get some good traffic from the SE's.

Good luck with your site