First things first, there are some fears I know some of you have, I used to have the same fears. You ask, "But why would I want to put someone else's banner on my site that doesn't make me any money? I am going to lose a potential customer. I can't have that. I worked hard for that surfer!"

I have been asked that question a handful of times the last few days. Bottom line is these surfers were going to leave your site anyway. You didn't have anything they were looking for. Now for the clincher, a lot of you are scared to death to let any surfer leave your site.

Guess what happens...... they leave and you have nothing to show for it! Nothing! But not us "smart" webmasters using banner exchanges. We were smart enough to learn and cover our back using a banner exchange. Earning credits for that surfer who just left.... "Hey if they leave BIG DEAL! I have a banner on another site somewhere that is going to send me someone new to take a crack at!"

Think about it this way - say you have a small site getting 1000 hits a day. Let's then say 200 of them ended up linking your banners and go to your sponsor. Goody that's what we want right? Well part of it, what about the other 800 surfers that were there? Where did they go?

If you didn't have some sort of banner exchange, you have just lost a lot of good fresh traffic back to your site. Let's take a look first at the 1000 hits to our site. That would have earned us credits for our banner to be shown in the system. BUT we are going to maximize those 1000 hits into hopefully 5000-10000 credits minimum.

How you ask? Most free sites have an average of 20 pictures, if you did your homework, each of those pics should be on their own html page. Guess what else is going to be on those html pages? Our banner swap code!

I wouldn't suggest placing these in our most "valuable" part of the page, you know the spot where all the money is made. :) Move them down the page a bit, give yourself some breathing room to make money. We don't want all of our clicks going out the banner exchange system.

So now you see what just happened? Johnny surfer came into your site and looked at about 10 pics. You just earned yourself 10 credits for one surfer. Multiply that by 1000 and you are looking good my friend. :)

Now that we have the basic of banner swapping out of the way, let's put this thing into overdrive. This is what I really like about banner exchanges, turning that weak traffic into banner-clicking monsters.

Most of you know that tgp traffic is really, really bad. Getting clicks on banners out of these surfers is really difficult, but, once again, not for the "smart" webmaster who uses banner exchanges. :)

Using a banner exchange on tgp galleries I am usually able to get more clicks to my money page than I got from the actual gallery itself that just got pounded with 20,000 hits of crap traffic.

How you ask? To make a long story short go get yourself some free host space that accepts crap traffic and make some galleries. Make sure you have your banner swap code on them and go and have a day posting to every tgp known to porn.

There are a couple ways to do this, some tgp's nowadays won't allow you to put your pics on separate html pages. This severely limits our banner showings because we can only put the code on the gallery once, but use them anyway.

Use the ones that do allow you to put the pics on separate pages to your advantage and paste the code on all the pages for the gallery. Remember the rule above about the "right" place to put them.