Traffic-Trading for Sexy-Bloggers

The biggest adult websites in the world are among the biggest websites period. They got that way through crime extortion stolen domains the refinement of traffic trading techniques, and that’s still site’s you’ve never heard of can see a million visitors a day, three times what Fleshbot - which is written about internationally - does.

Bloggers are very fond of trading traffic. We love to put up ‘blogrolls’ (which I hope you all realize is a riff on ‘bogroll’ - Brit slang for lavatory paper) listing who we read and respect. It’s the simplest, dumbest form of traffic exchange and I think it has to change. The clicks in and out aren’t measured, the presence of a link back to you isn’t checked automatically, and there’s no way to reward people who send the most people to you. It’s friendly to the point of idiocy unless you can be sure that your link partners are trustworthy and of equal size (traffic traders call these ‘hard’ links).

Jizz-Bizz webmasters have addressed all of these problems and using software, have added a great deal of science to link exchange. Classic porn-site traffic trades work like this:

• Ivor Dong (sex-blogger) who’s got a big dick but a small blog, visits ‘WaddWorld’, a bigger sex-blog than Ivor’s, and fills in a form for ‘link exchanges’.
• The form immediately checks the URL Ivor enters for a reciprocal link. If it finds one, he’s accepted into the exchange and WaddWorld starts counting the clicks Ivor sends.
• WaddWorld only shows 50 links back to webmasters, but when Ivor’s sent enough clicks to show up in their chart, a link back to Ivor automatically appears at WaddWorld. If Ivor drops out of the top fifty in future, his link disappears.
• Ivor is now receiving a stream of visitors from WaddWorld. In the meantime, he’s installed the same software as WaddWorld and joined a couple of other link exchanges.
• The software treats visitors from WaddWorld in one of two ways, they all see Ivor’s blog, but the links they see to other sites differ depending on where they come from. Some links to Ivor’s other link exchanges, which enables him to send them enough visitors to start getting clicks back. Others see no links to partners at all and Ivor ’skims’ these visitors off and shows them links to his DVD store. The software is smart enough not to show visitors from WaddWorld links back to WaddWorld (Ivor doesn’t want that and WaddWorld doesn’t either).

By applying the send-receive-skim loop to a large number of sites, very significant quantities of traffic can be built up. Setting the ’skim’ low (or to zero) allows sites to ‘launder’ visitors from a number of websites, sending people from site A to site B and vice-versa. That allows a site to send more visitors to its partners than it’s getting itself.

(If this is confusing, imagine building a store between two malls. To get from one mall to the other people have to walk through your store. Each mall sees a stream of people leaving your store and coming into their mall, but you know 99% of those people weren’t headed for your store when they left home. You get credit for filling the mall, but in reality you’re just acting as an intermediary. It makes you money because many of the thousands of people walking through your store stop to buy your stuff).

It can be abused. If you skim more visitors than come to your site of their own accord, you’re leeching from everyone you link to. Worse still the ‘classic’ skim is to re-direct links, so someone who thinks their clicking on one thing, ends up somewhere entirely different - the type of abuse that got adult sites a bad name to begin with.

Done right however, smart trades are a brilliant tool, but one bloggers can’t easily use because trading software tends either to be expensive (hundreds of dollars) or ostensibly free and built to ’skim’ visitors for the benefit of the person who wrote the code. Even the expensive stuff doesn’t hook into blogs the way it should.

So it’s time for a Wordpress plugin to trade traffic intelligently and fairly. It’d make vastly more sense than a dumb ‘blogroll’ and could introduce millions of people to blogs they’d never have found otherwise - why has no one written one yet? (there’s this but I don’t trust it - could it be hacked into something better?)

I’d go as far to say a ’smart’ blogroll should be part of the standard Wordpress install. I’d love to be able to offer links from SugarBank to anyone whose blog I like, without having to commit to 500 outbound links, or linking to blogs than don’t link back.

Coders c’mon… let me know as soon as your ready (sometimes I wish I’d stuck with programming myself…) People want this.