1.
about this guide
The purpose of this guide to help webmasters who are running ATX and ATLite to use more of the potential of these programs.
By no means is this a thorough step-by-step tutorial to traffic trading, although several general trading tips are given of course.
If you're new to the world of trading traffic with adult sites start by reading forums and sites that are designed to explain this.
The contents of this guide are as follows:
part I - preparation
* 1. about this guide
* 2. not an anti-cheat guide
* 3. get the right script
* 4. verifying your installation
* 5. customize the template
* 6. settings for trades
part II - tweaking & tuning
* 7. general settings
* 8. skimming traffic
* 9. copying bookmarkers
* 10. Dynamic skim: prod and return
* 11. outgoing list - slots
* 12. outgoing list - bonus mods
* 13. new trades
* 14. archive pages
* 15. alternative main pages
* 16. frequently asked questions
2.
not an anti-cheat guide...
Both ATX and ATLite are packed with tools that will help you in your war against cheaters.
With the proper knowledge of these tools and the working order of cheaters you will be able to
detect and block 99% of them. However, this topic is one apart and deserves a guide on its own,
so the topic will not be discussed here.
We are currently preparing an anti-cheat guide for ATX and ATL users, but there's no ETA at this point.
3.
get the right script
Before you continue reading, make sure that you are running ATX 1.2, build 01 or higher,
or ATLite 3.0, build 08 or higher.
Many of the features and settings discussed in this guide are only available in these releases.
Also, some major improvements in the scripts internal functions are available only in these (and later) releases.
The latest version of ATlite 3 can be downloaded on this page.
The latest version of ATX is being distributed to testers right now and will be released to all users in a matter of days.
To verify which version you're running, login to the admin and look at the bottom of any page.
There you will see 3 lines of data:
0
server time: 09:40:02
Arrow Trader Lite III .08
The first line shows the execution time of the file, the 2nd is your servers local time, and the third shows
the script you're running and the build number. It is always recommended that you upgrade to the latest version of ATL.
4.
verify your installation
- ATL 3 only
All installations of ATX are done by arrowscripts staff and double checked to make sure
no problems will come from bad installations.
However, ATLite is usually installed by the webmaster and experience has taught us that by far
the biggest part of all problems is caused by bad installations.
For example, running the install.cgi file multiple times can result in corrupt databases,
random deleting of trades, incorrect stats and abnormal behavior of the script.
So it pays to check your installation.
Every minute a file of ATLite (cronx.cgi) is executed by the cron daemon. The crondaemon is a "program"
that runs in the background and executes commands on set times.
This file makes a log of every run. To open this file, open your site in ftp,
go to the directory yoursite.com/cgi-bin/atl3/l/sys/ and open the file cron.run.
If you see something like this:
09_23_12_18
09_23_12_19
09_23_12_20
09_23_12_21
09_23_12_22
09_23_12_23
then everything is fine; every minute the cron runs once.
However, if you see something like this
09_23_12_18
09_23_12_18
09_23_12_19
09_23_12_19
09_23_12_20
09_23_12_20
09_23_12_21
09_23_12_21
with every line appearing twice, then you have a bad installation;
there are 2 cronjobs doing the same thing.
Check the crontables and remove the double cronjob, until the cron.run file looks like the first example.
Once you've verified that the cronjob is running stable and only once, login to the admin of ATLite and
go to menu --> logs --> cron log, and make sure there are no errors about file permissions.
If there are, run the install.cgi file via shell and select option 2. reset file permissions.
5.
customize the template
ATX and ATLite can show over 40 types of stats in the columns in the main overview.
Only a small selection is required for your daily work and for this guide.
The following stats will be used, so please enable them:
Trade Info
trade id
domain
60 Minute Stats
hits in
hits out
effective clicks
effective click prod
return %
24 hours stats
hits in
hits out
effective clicks
effective click prod
gallery prod
trade prod
value II
return %
Trade Settings
Forcetime / Force
R.E.D.
Stats
The reason for using effective clicks and effective click prod instead of raw clicks and raw click prod
is because only the effective clicks are used when the AT cron re-evaluates your trades and places
them in the outgoing list. For example, a site leecher can create a very high raw prod because it
follows all your links, but this should not affect the real prod of a trade.
Keeping an eye on the difference between raw and effective prod is a good way to detect
the more basic cheaters / hitbots, but that's out the scope of this document.
6.
settings for trades
To change the settings of a trade, go to the main overview, and click on the 'E', in RED,
which stands for Reset Edit Delete. Make sure all your trades have the following settings:
ATLite
force type: normal force
hourly force: 0
force time: 0
trade type: full
in toplist: on
skim: (no value set)
ATX
Trade type: ai ful
in toplist: on
in guardian: off
trade type: ai full
boost type: none
hourly force: 0
force time: 0
skim: (no value set)
These settings are the default on new installations so there's a good chance you won't have to edit anything.
Settings like min prod, min value and max return are not enabled when the trade type is set to 'full'.
Under most circumstances, there's no reason to use capped mode for a trade. Changing the settings of the outgoing
list is usually a better solution. By leaving the skim field empty (make sure there's not a space ' ' in there!)
the skim percentage set by the url is used.
7.
general settings
In the admin go to menu --> extra --> ATX settings (ATX) or menu --> settings (ATL)
1) Maximum amount of counted clicks
Already briefly explained in paragraph 5, this number sets the maximum amount of clicks that AT will consider
being real.
When a surfer or leecher comes from a trade and downloads your entire site or just clicks every link,
the raw productivity of that trade seems to go through the roof and at first sight it will look
like the best trade ever. And without this setting, a trade script will return traffic to it according
to that assumption. Fortunately AT can cap the amount of clicks that are really effective.
If you set this number too low, to say about 2 or 3, then the productivity of your trades will start to look alike,
because high prod from a trade often comes from surfers who click 5+ times.
However, if you set this number too high, then you render this entire module useless, and bots / leechers / cheaters
can click all they want and kill your site.
How high you must really set this number is based on your productivity; if your prod is 0 - 100%,
then a number around 10 should do. If your prod is above 100%, then around 15 is enough.
If your prod is very high, like 300+ or 400+, then there are probably a lot of real surfers clicking
more than 15 times, but this is normally not very likely.
recommended setting: 15
2) Watchlist Range (ATX) or Active / Passive Trades (ATL)
This number sets the minimum size for a trade; he must send at least this many hits
to be placed in the outgoing list and receive traffic back.
This number is more important than you probably think;
every site has a real minimum size for trades, the more traffic you have the higher the limit.
The minimum is created by what we call rest traffic. On a 500k site for example,
even the trades at the bottom of the outgoing list will usually receive around 200 - 400 hits per day;
these hits mainly come from surfers who click sites at the bottom of your toplist and who
click every gallery on your site and thus see all trades.
This is why it looks like AT can oversend to the smallest trades,
while in fact it just prefers any trade over exout.
There is another reason to keep this number as high as possible;
small trades, of 10 - 200 hits per day are often very unstable in their productivity;
one day their prod is superb, the next day it's a disaster. This is because you don't
receive enough traffic to get a representative number of the real quality of the traffic.
It's unlikely for example for a 10k trade to have 100% prod one day and 400% the next.
recommended setting:
0 - 0 for new sites
0 - 10 for small sites
0 - 50 for medium sites
0 - 100+ for large sites
0 - 250+ for very large sites
Experiment to find the right number!
3) No Cookie Traffic Handling
Most trade programs, including ATX and ATLite use cookies to track
surfers accros your site. When a surfer arrives on your page, he receives
a cookie that holds the referrer data (where he came from), and when he clicks
a link, that cookie is read to determine which trade should be credited for the click.
For this reason, when a surfer doesn't support cookies, you should not send him to a trade,
because even though your trades will be able to see where the hit came from (you),
any clicks generated by these surfers will not be counted as coming from you.
So not only do you send traffic that doesn't increase your prod on your trades,
but it actually harms the trade, because it will make your outgoing prod go down,
because you're sending traffic with 0% prod out.
A better idea is to send nocookie surfers to galleries so there's a chance
that they will bookmark your site and comes back later with cookies enabled.
recommended setting: Send to Gallery (set skim to 100%)
4) No Referrer Traffic Handling
Around 75% - 80% of noref traffic are bookmarkers. The other 20% - 25% comes from surfers who have the
referrer field blocked (some firewalls do this), or from spiders / bots / etc that don't carry this information
at all.
There are at least 3 theories of what to do with this skim percentage
1) set it low: give your bookmarkers lots of trades because their productivity is high
and so they will help you grow. In my opinion this is a bad idea because there's a high risk of losing the bookmarker.
2) leave it empty: this way your site stays the same for the surfer, and like he bookmarked it is how he gets it.
This will provide you with a fair amount of productive outgoing traffic generated by bookmarkers.
3) set it high: give your bookmarkers lots of galleries. Your trades won't benefit a lot from your bookmarkers,
but at least you can be sure that they will keep the bookmark.
The first option is a bad one of course; bookmarkers need to be kept at all costs,
they keep your site stable when normal traffic is low. They are much like rebills;
they build your checque when normal signups are slow.
recommended setting: no value, or 10% to 20% more galleries than your average skim offers.
5) Blocked Referrer Traffic Handling
(from the documentation)
When a surfer clicks a link that goes to /out.cgi, normally your own domain is set as the referring domain.
If the http_referer field however is empty, AT cannot tell where the hit came from, and worse,
when this surfer would be redirected to a trade, your trade would not be able to tell that it came from you.
So a blocked ref hit sent to a trade is a hit wasted.
recommended setting: Send to Gallery (set skim to 100%)
6) No Trade Traffic Handling
No trade traffic is traffic that comes from a site / domain that is not in your trades list.
For example, if you post galleries and have a recip link to your site, this may count as notrade traffic.
Notrade traffic can also come from forums where links to adult sites are posted, emails, etc.
And clicks made by Search engines traffic is (not counted but) treated like notrade traffic.
It's often times relatively easy to turn notrade traffic into bookmarkers,
if you give them a lot of galleries during their first visit.
Before you make a final decision on this setting, check the referrers list for notrade traffic
a couple of days to see what sort of traffic this really is.
recommended setting: no value, or 10% to 20% more galleries than your average skim offers.
7) Extra out Traffic Handling
(from the documentation)
Once a surfer has visited all the trades in the primary and secondary outgoing list
and clicks a link that would normally send him to another trade, the exout module is loaded.
You can select to send this surfer from that point on to a specific url or to galleries.
It's no longer possible to send this surfer to trades because AT does not send out raws.
If you have a nice banner farm you can send the surfer to this page of course and try to make some sales.
It's not recommended to send exout hits to another one of your sites as feeder traffic!
recommended setting: [...] then go to gallery url
8) Rebuild & Repair
Starting from ATX 1.2 and ATL III build 08, AT has become pretty good at auto-detecting
minor corruptions in the database, caused by a server reboot, file locks, temporal harddrive failure,
full disk space / full memory / etc, and it can auto order a total rebuild of the database,
so rebuilding the dbase every minute isn't neccesary.
Only if you keep experiencing bad stats (for example, negative numbers), select 'run every minute'.
Also, if you keep having bad stats, read paragraph 4. verify your installation of this guide once more.
recommended setting: 5. run when corrupted
8.
skimming traffic
How much should I skim? Do I need to skim on all links? Does first click to gallery really work?
It seems that almost every webmaster at one point asks these questions, and no one seems to know a definitive answer.
There's a good but also very simple reason for that, and that reason is the fact that every site is different
and thus requires a different approach with different settings. Nevertheless, there are some guidelines
you can follow.
* low skim equals low outgoing prod
When you only send 20% of your traffic to galleries and 80% to trades,
the productivity of your traffic (your outgoing prod) will be very low.
You can argue that you make up for the low productivity of your traffic by sending
a lot of it, but in the end quality is a lot more important than quantity.
Also, if you send too much to trades, webmasters will label your site as a CJ
and blacklist you for cheating if you try to trade with their TGP / MGP.
The opposite is also true:
* high skim (usually) equals high outgoing prod
When you give your surfers tons of galleries their attitude towards being redirected
to a trade will be a lot better, and this shows in your outgoing prod.
In fact, the best trades are those that use only or mainly perm links / toplist links to send to traffic
to trades. Examples of such sites are www.vidsvidsvids.com and www.thumbzilla.com/main.html.
The trick is to find the right skim; not too low so your outgoing prod is very low, but not too high either
because you won't be able to keep up with your trades anymore.
Unfortunately, a lot of sites still try to make up for low prod with high returns, while they should be doing the opposite;
make up for low returns with high prod. Because once your outgoing prod is high, your trades will start sending
to you like a madman.
So how do you get productive outgoing traffic? There are several ways to go about it:
* Create a toplist!!
Nothing is as good as a click on a toplist (well... maybe a click on a banner), so create one and make sure it's very visible
but not annoying. Use the toplist description field of AT to tell the surfer what he's going to see,
or if you're trading with sites that offer thumbnail-previews of their galleries, get some pics from his Hall of Fame (HOF),
and use those pics in the toplist image field. That way a surfer can click a toplist link like a gallery,
and on the trade he will immediately see that gallery link. This is a bit of added work, but several scripts keep 10+ to 20+
day old HOFs so it's do-able.
* Give your bookmarkers (noref traffic) a good skim
80% - 90% galleries for your bookmarkers will keep them coming back,
and they will treat you well by clicking a lot on your trades
* Get productive trades:
This sounds obvious, and it is, but I see a lot of webmasters ignoring it and keep trying with bad trades.
If 50% of your trades have good prod and 50% have bad prod,
dump the 50% bad ones and get new ones. There are plenty of porn sites out there to choose from.
The more productive traffic you have, the easier it is to get bookmarkers from them,
and the more productive they are when you send them to a trade.
However, when all your trades have a low prod, the problem lies most likely at site, not at your trades.
* Use (first and second and third....) click to gallery.
Yes, it lowers your trade return, yes it doesn't seem to increase prod that much, and yes you've read on forums
that it makes no difference. But it does :-)
First of all, when a surfer clicks a link on site A and is redirected to site B (you), and clicks a link
there and is immediately redirected to site C (your trade), how high is the chance that he will click a
gallery on that page, after 3 sites in a row? Not very high, unless your trade offers excellent content.
The best way to measure the effect of first click to gal is by monitoring it;
check your prod with your biggest trades, enable first click for 48 hours, and check your prod again.
Keep a close eye on your overall trade return and the ratios of the trades that you're monitoring.
Then you can decide for yourself if it's working or not.
In our experience however, especially when you're trading with productive sites,
first click helps build bookmarkers and helps your outgoing prod in the long run.
calculating the average skim
What is your average skim with s=70&c=3? There is no right answer to this question
as long as the click prod is not mentioned. People ask us this question on a regular basis,
so here's how you calculate the average skim:
example 1: ?s=70&c=3 with 420% click prod
1st click: 100%
2nd click: 100%
3rd click: 100%
4th click: 70%
20% of the 5th click: 70%
total skim = 100 + 100 + 100 + 70 + (0.20 * 70) = 384
avg skim = 384 / 4.2 clicks = 91.4%
example 2: ?s=30&c=2 with 165% click prod
1st click: 100%
65% of 2nd click: 100%
total skim = 100 + (0.65 * 100) = 165
avg skim = 165 / 1.65 clicks = 100%
The skim is 100% because the first 2 clicks go to galleries, and on average your surfers make less than 2 clicks.
important: This is all in theory! In practice, when you have &c=2 and 165% prod, your average skim is not 100% of course,
because some surfers click once, but others click 3 times and get skimmed.
Also, when you're using click pattern &c=3, and your average skim is say 70%,
then this does not compare in any way to using &s=70.
9.
copying bookmarkers
One of the cool features of ATX and ATL is that you can adjust the skim per trade,
something that allows you do all sorts of tricks.
The easiest of them is copying bookmarkers. This works especially well with trades that already have high prod on your site.
Here's how it works:
1) Select a site that is sending you productive traffic. It should be more productive than your average trade.
The reason why it must be productive is because normally productive traffic contains a lot of bookmarkers,
or traffic that is easy to convert to bookmarkers.
2) Give the site a high boost (atx) or a fast force (atl) for several hours, force time should be
anywhere between 2 and 6, even more if you have the traffic the spare.
This way you will rapidly climb in the outgoing list of your trade and get the best of his traffic.
If you really want to get high in his list, send a small amount of traffic for one hour,
then as much as you can for the next 60 minutes, then a small amount again, and keep doing this.
It doesn't work with every site, but most sites can be manipulated this way. It just requires tons of work.
3) Give the traffic coming from that trade a skim of 90 - 100% so they get many galleries.
Using first and second click to gallery will help you even more.
4) At this point you will be receiving the best traffic of your trade - so when a bookmarker
on your trade is redirected to a trade for the first time, he will most likely end up at your site.
And with the high amount of galleries they receive, and since it's in the nature of many of these surfers
to bookmark porn sites, you have a good chance that he will bookmark yours as well.
Do this for about 10 - 20 days and then move on to the next site because after that time most bookies
of your trade will have seen your site already, and you'll start to suffer from diminishing returns.
important: This can harm your site because it can and often times will (drastically) lower
your trade return. Keep a close eye on your site while you do this and don't expect results overnight.
But don't try it for just one day either; that's just a waste of both time and traffic.
10.
Dynamic skim: prod and return
- ATX only
ATX 1.2 supports dynamic skimming: the skim can automatically be lowered when your traffic seems to slow down,
to kick start it again.
As discussed in paragraph 8, quality is more important than quantity, but only to a certain extent of course.
If your traffic takes a hit, regardless of the problem, it's not a bad idea to send more to trades
for a couple of hours in order to get your momentum back. That's where dynamic skimming comes in:
Automatically lower the skim just long enough to get your site going again.
To find the right values, let your site run at normal traffic for a day,
and write down what your average trade return ratio is. Fluctuations are to be expected of course,
but these are usually limited to + 10 and - 10% of your return ratio.
So for example, if your global return ratio is 200%, then a temporal drop to 180% or a rise to 220%
is possible. And with a ratio of 50%, then 45 - 55% are also normal numbers.
These are suggested values of course and can be different per site.
recommended setting:
dynamic skimming: enabled
lower skim for trades: yes
lower skim for notrade traffic: yes
lower skim for noref traffic: no
You can also change the skim of noref traffic, but since dynamic skims are usually very aggressive it's not recommended.
How much you should lower the skim depends on how high it normal is. Take your average, subtract 20% to 30% and
you probably have a good number. The more aggressive you make the skim, the faster your site will rebound.
The return ratio of the last hour fluctuates more than that of the last 24 hours, so use a larger margin here
important:
* dynamic skim overrides the skim you set per trade and overrides the skim set in the url.
Click patterns like first click to gallery however still override the dynamic skim.
* disable the dynamic skim when you're playing with the skim levels, because a higher or lower skim
can have a big effect on the trade return.
11.
outgoing list - slots
The online documentation about the outgoing list is very detailed and worth reading,
but there are still several undocumented tips and tricks that fit perfectly in this guide.
splitting the outgoing list
Creating two- or threeway splits in the outlist is an advanced but also difficult technique of optimizing your settings.
The following list is an example of a three way split
| Slot | Points |
| 1 | 100000 |
| 2 | 75000 |
| 3 | 50000 |
| 4 | 5000 |
| 5 | 3750 |
| 6 | 2500 |
| 7 | 50 |
| 8 | 25 |
| 9 | 10 |
| 10 | 1 |
Because of the huge differences in points between the three sets, 50k - 100k, 2500 - 5000 and 10 - 50,
you are sure that the three trades in the 1st set are loaded first, that the three trades in the 2nd set
are loaded second, and the trades in the last set are selected last. Compare this to a normal list like
125 - 100 - 80 - 50 - 30 etc, where every trade has a reasonable chance of being loaded first,
even though the first slot may receive 2 or 3 times the amount of the 6th slot for example.
The question is of course, what's the advantage of splitting the list and when should you use it?
There are 3 advantages:
1) The trades in the first set of slots will receive the best of your traffic;
surfers going to these trades have not seen a trade before. If one or two (or even three) of your trades
are actually too good for your site compared to your other trades - he sends you more than you can return,
his prod is through the roof, and you need to constantly keep a high boost / fast force on him,
then a split comes in handy. By sending high quality traffic back, you make the trade worthwhile for both sites
and you can make up a bit for your lower amount of returns.
2) When you have a split and one or two really amazing trades, then it's like you give them a fast force or high boost,
but without actually doing so. The downside of such a force or boost is that a trade can change (drop in prod,
server goes offline, he deletes your trade, etc) and you can quickly waste traffic on it.
But by using the algorithms of AT to rebuild the outgoing list every minute,
you make sure you give your top trades an enormous push as long as they deserve it and not a minute longer.
3) Every trade that reaches your 1st set is repaid fast; this increases the rotation speed of your outgoing list
and when your trades aren't that different from each other in quality / size, then this will give your surfers
more fresh trades.
When you need to use a split is a different story. The answer is, almost never.
I only use it when I start a trade that's too big for my site, but I know that it will be worth sending
most of my traffic to it. For such trades you must use either a split or a boost. And when you want to find out
which trades can keep up once you start to grow and can respond to bursts of traffic a split is worth considering.
documentation links
http://www.arrowscripts.com/atx/reference/004.shtml (ATX)
http://www.arrowscripts.com/atl3/002.html (ATLite)
12.
outgoing list - bonus mods
In ATX, go to menu --> Statistics --> outgoing or in ATLite go to menu --> outlist
and scroll down to the bottom table that looks like this:
ATX users: select 'AI - atx v1.2' under return algorithm first!
AT gives you the possibility to reward trades that do especially well in a certain area with a bonus that may
give them a higher position in your outgoing list.
There are 3 types of areas for which you can give a trade a bonus, which one you select
depends on what's most important for your site at that moment in time.
The 3 bonuses are
1) productivity: the higher the prod the larger the bonus
2) return: the more a trade sends you, the larger the bonus
3) effect: the higher value II rate of a trade, the larger the bonus
a short example will demonstrate exactly what a bonus does.
Imagine that you have 2 trades;
Trade A has a prod of 290% and a return of 125% (meaning you are oversending him).
Trade B has a prod of 235% and a return of 80% (meaning he's oversending you).
Your average prod is around 170%.
Trade-wise, trade B is the better trade because there is a large difference in return vs. the relative small difference in prod:
290% to 230% prod is a much smaller gap than 125% oversending vs. 80% undersending (or better, being oversent).
Remember paragraph 10: "quality is more important than quantity, but only to a certain extent".
In this case the return of B is so good that it overtakes the smaller difference in prod.
Normally this approach is a good one, trade B should receive a lot more traffic, because it sends a lot of traffic and it's pretty productive.
However, in other cases you want trade A to receive as much as possible because you want to get as much highly-productive
traffic as you can from it.
Now imagine that you give those trades, A and B a large bonus (150%) for high prod;
Because the prod of Trade A is higher than that of Trade B, Trade A benefits more from the bonus,
and there comes a point (in this case a bonus of 250% would do, but don't break your head trying to figure out the calculations)
where trade A actually becomes the better trade and is placed higher in the outgoing list.
So how do you use this?
Give a small bonus (<150%) to show what you want to achieve: if your site is already large and stable,
your main aim will be to get as much productive traffic as possible to build a solid base of bookmarkers
before growing to the next level. A bonus for high prod is the right setting.
When your site is new, your main interest should be in getting trade clicks (clicks that go to trades instead of galleries).
So a bonus for effect would be best.
And if you have a CJ, and all your trades give you 10% prod, it's obvious that return is the most important
factor, so you can place a bonus for that.
In most cases you will either give a bonus for prod or effect.
Most large sites (200k+) seem to work well with prod: 160%, return: 100%, effect: 110%
important: return must always be at 100% when prod or effect is not! Otherwise everything will cancel
each other out
note: although this feature appeared in earlier versions of ATL 3, it wasn't active until build 08,
so upgrade your copy if you haven't done so already!
13.
new trades
In ATX, go to menu --> trades --> sign up form or in ATLite go to menu --> new trades
In the forms on this page you can set the settings new trades get. The following settings are recommended:
webmaster page access: on. Via this special page webmasters can check the stats of the trade.
force type: normal force (ATL only)
force size: 0
force time: 0
trade type: capped. By capping new trades you won't waste hits on cheaters and you get a chance to review them before you switching to full mode.
cap - productivity: 0 - 100%. Decide for yourself what the lowest productivity figure is that's acceptable for you,
and set that as a minimum.
cap - return: 10%. This is the most important one; don't return more than 10% to a trade until you have reviewed it.
bg color: red, or any other colors that makes the trade stand out, so you quickly see them.
important: In the 'Trade rules' section, make sure that you explain that new trades are capped
until they are reviewed and initial returns will be low.
If your minimum trade size (paragraph 7) is very high it's also worth mentioning this.
tip: Personally I suggest everybody to keep their signup forms closed, and just post an icq nr instead.
Cheaters are less likely to contact you on icq. A good way to find trades is by checking the toplists.
Find a big site that covers the same niche as your site, and check the top trades in the toplist.
14.
archive pages
If you have a page with tons of archive / sub pages like www.ohgood.com, www.darlina.com, www.longestlist.com, etc
then you are probably receiving a fair amount of hits directly on these subpages: surfers may bookmark their favorite
niche page, SEs index all pages, etc. These hits are often not counted because AT in.cgi is only placed
on your main page where your trades send traffic to. Because in.cgi is not #included on your subpages,
surfers that skip your main page and directly load a subpage are not counted, but worse, do not receive a cookie either.
As a result all their clicks are counted as 'nocookie', and they are probably only getting galleries.
Placing in.cgi on your subpages like you did on your mainpage isn't an option because every surfer would be counted
double then, with your own domain as the referrer. You would be trading with yourself!
Fortunately you can instruct in.cgi to ignore hits coming from a certain domain by passing it in the query string:
<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/at/in.cgi?yourdomain.com"-->
With this code you can safely place the #include code on all your subpages.
There's one catch to this: surfers who have the referrer field blocked (~5%) will be counted double.
So the number of hits in for noref will be slightly higher than it really is.
However, this small downside does not outweigh the advantage of being able to send more traffic to your trades.
15.
alternative main pages
(from the AT news)
sept 05, 2005 - A free tool to generate htaccess code to support multiple landing pages is now available at http://www.arrowscripts.com/atx_htaccess.shtml
Alternative landing pages are good for many things: increasing your revenue, building bookmarkers, increasing click prod, etc.
To increase click productivity on your site with alt landing pages, one of the best things to do is match your trade.
For example, if your trade has a big toplist right at the top of his page, you can get away with that as well,
because the surfer will recognize the layout and he knows where to find the galleries.
Or if your trade offers a full movie scene, split in 20 parts, it's a great idea to offer this on a alt main page as well.
Sites, especially MGPs of course, are bookmarked a lot because of specials like full movie scenes,
so from trades that already offer this you can expect a lot of bookmarkers looking for more & different movies.
Alt mainpages are also great to test out different click patterns and skim levels at once in a short period of time.
Use a mainpage with &c=1, &=2, &=3 etc and keep monitoring the stats.
Or try out different toplists, one with only the site title, one with the title + description, one with title + image,
fill out all linktags and check the linktags-stats after a period of 24 hours to see what works best.
16.
frequently asked questions
how much can I force?
The sum of your hourly forces should not exceed 35+% of your outgoing traffic to trades.
For example, if you send 2000 hits per hour to trades, then the sum of your hourly forces
should not be more than 0.35 * 2000 = 700 hits per hour.
There are 2 reasons for this. The first is that AT reserves between 30% and 45% of your outgoing traffic
for forces. If you set more forces they will not be filled.
The second is that when you set large forces you interfere too much with the return algorithm:
it no longer has enough traffic to achieve the goals it sets.
should I use a normal or fast force (ATLite) / hourly force or high boost (ATX)?
A fast force is filled faster than a normal force. If the sum of your forces is about 10 - 15%
of your outgoing traffic to trades a normal force will do. If you're forcing 30%+ then
using a fast force is a good idea because that way you instruct AT to reserve more traffic
for the forces. You should limit the amount of fast forces you set; one or two is fine, but don't go much higher.
The same goes for a high boost: a max of 4 is allowed, but using just 1 or 2 is a lot better.
Instead of using real forces, read paragraph 11 on the outgoing list to learn how you can use the out slots
for forcing.
how high should my average trade return be?
On a normal site, aim for 110% - 115%.
If your return is around 70% - 80% you are undersending and unless your outgoing prod is superb,
your trades will have no reason at all to send you more traffic, and your site will not grow.
If your return is around 140% - 150% you over oversending. There can be several reasons for this:
* you've maxed out your trades. If you've claimed the top position in the toplists of all your trades
they can't send you any more than they are already sending. Start adding more trades, find one or two that you can really push
and grow on.
* you're skimming too aggressive. When you send 50%+ of your clicks to trades, your outgoing prod won't be very high,
but you will have tons of traffic to send out. But since quality is more important than quantity,
you can send a lot to trades but they won't return that much. Increase your skim so you send more to galleries.
As a result your outgoing prod will rise and this will hopefully make up for the drop in return.
how high should my internal prod be?
This depends a lot on how much you skim. When you send a large amount of traffic to trades it's unreasonable
to expect a high prod. When your prod is around 100% - 150% you probably don't have enough clicks to grow.
Above 200 - 220% with 60% skim is a good starting point. These numbers are very general and don't necessarily
apply to every site.
how much should I skim?
See paragraph 8. skimming traffic.
First get a decent internal click prod and then adjust your skim until you reach a trade return of around 110 - 120%.
Many webmasters require at least 60% content from their trades, so when you're at 45% people will think you're running a semi-CJ.
A skim of 80% or 90% is too high for new sites. If you think that you'll be able to build bookmarkers this way and become
the next Hun in 2 years you're sadly mistaken, unless you buy 200k feeder per day for a long time.
how do I get initial traffic?
There are many ways to get traffic:
from recip links, galleries, search engines, open directories, link lists, forums, traffic brokers, other sites you
or your friends run, etc.
And you should try to get a bit from all these sources. You won't be able to build a site on just SE traffic.
Getting all traffic from a broker will cost you too much. Surfer-forums and recip links on galleries will send
you high quality traffic but in small amounts. But when you add all these small amounts up you should
have a good amount of starting traffic so you can begin trading. There is a lot of cheap feeder traffic available
if you don't mind not getting any sales from it: Chinese traffic is sold a dime a dozen.
And since your first concern should be getting traffic and not sales, it's not a bad option.
But don't push your luck here! Sending too much Chinese traffic will get you blacklisted on many sites,
because other webmasters are already in it for the money.
I have personally done great with galleries; make a good text link to your site so Search Engine spiders are more likely
to index it and you will start receiving good traffic within a short period of time. Plus the galleries that you submit
will make you enough money for feeder traffic.
where do I find trades?
- Most boards for adult webmasters have forums just for trades. Check out the resource sites for links.
- Check toplists of (big) sites that are in the same niche as your site. The bigger the site the less likely
a cheater appears in the toplist.
- Check sigs on forums; webmasters looking for trades sometimes place links to their sites / signup forms in their sig
to get a high exposure.
- Ask your current trade partners if they have any recommendations.
why is notrade so high all of a sudden?
- When you delete a trade, the stats of that trade (in, out, clicks) are moved to the row notrade.
After all, once the trade is deleted, you have received hits and sent hits to a site that is no longer a trade,
hence notrade. If you have deleted a trade in the past 24 hours, this is most likely the cause.
- If you have old toplist links on your site, then these can sometimes generate notrade outs;
when the trade in the toplist no longer exists, it will be counted as hit out to notrade.
- Check the referrers list for notrade. It's possible that a site is sending you traffic without signing up first,
or a SE that is not in your SE list is sending traffic.
why is nocookie so high?
You probably have a landing page that doesn't #include in.cgi. Check paragraph 14. archive pages.
how many exout hits do I need?
Between 0 and 1.
Once a surfer has visited all your trades then he will be send exout. You can either send exout to
galleries or to a specific url. If you have a lot of exout hits, you need more trades because
several surfers have seen all your trades but keep clicking.
why am I oversending to small trades?
- You have a poor outgoing list. If the slots of your outgoing list all have about the same amount of points,
you're not pushing any top trade to grow, and a lot of trades will receive too much traffic, simply because
the outlist isn't distributing it well. Your average trade return isn't necessarily high in this scenario,
but it can be high for a lot of individual trades
- Your minimum trade size is set too low. See paragraph 7. general settings, point 2.
- You don't have top trades that deserve a lot more traffic than the rest. Every site should
have at least one, and preferably 3 or 4 top trades, with superb prod and excellent returns,
that you can send the lion share of your traffic to. Not only are these great for growing
and building a base of bookmarkers, but they also help distribute better because
it's a lot easier for AT (or any trade script for that matter) to pick the right trade.
- You're skimming too much: check 3rd point of this paragraph on how high your avg trade return must be.
why am I undersending to large trades?
First, realize that a large trade is not necessarily a good trade. I've seen plenty of sites trading
with other sites that deliver 400+% returns but have horrible prod. These trades are worthless;
they make your counter look nice, but that's about it. Don't expect any sales from it, don't expect
bookmarkers from it and don't expect productive outgoing traffic from it.
So make sure that the trade that's not receiving enough is not a bad trade that's trying to compensate
for low prod with high returns.
Now, if you're undersending to a productive trade the first thing to do is change the outgoing list;
increase the points for the top slots. And since productivity becomes more and more important as your site
grows, set a bonus for high prod. (see paragraph 12. outgoing list - bonus mods)
why is my site not growing?
Growing a successful site requires all aspects of the site to be in order:
you need the right trades, the right settings in your trade script,
but also you need fast hosting, good content on your site, a good tgp script
that will help increase your prod, a good design with a simple navigation
and a color scheme that's easy on the eyes, etc.
If one of these elements is bad then you won't grow, no matter how hard you try.
They key to success is being able to find out what's wrong;
you can keep deleting and adding new trades because your prod is low, but if in reality your server
is having problems serving your pages at a decent speed, then you will end up blaming the wrong thing
without being able to fix it.
Make a checklist of all important things and step by step make sure everything is right.
Does your site load fast from different parts of the world? Do your trades match your site?
Do others like the design of your site? Asking for a site-check on a forum is not a shame ;-)
Take it step by step and you'll make it.
Questions / comments / feedback?
Please post it on the arrowscripts forum.
1st draft - sept 24 2005
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Feel free to skip parts of this guide, but pay special attention to paragraphs 3 and 4