To answer your questions..
To go up past 2k (the traffic from LinkWhore) you really have to depend on stable trades. If you continue to add quality trades, feed out poor trades, and submit your site to linkdumps, you'll grow steadily. You can boost this by buying feeder traffic, but use caution -- you only want HIGHLY PRODUCTIVE traffic, like that sold by Traffic-Out. Just random hits won't help build your trades and grow your site.
First and foremost, you have to "be selling what they're buying" - meaning add content to your site that surfers will come back to day and day again. Update your thumbs and add galleries often. Set Comus to rotate them each day, and not more often than that.. nobody checks back to porn sites every ten minutes for new porn.
If you think of your favorite TGP's from before you got into the industry - or even now - think of what made you return to them.. maybe it was a free movie clip each day, maybe it was a blurb about the webmaster's life (I know that was interesting to me when I saw it on Sublime Directory), maybe it was quality thumbs, etc.
"Good trades" are those that are productive. If you login to TTT or your favorite trade script, you should see a ton of numbers, but most importantly the ratio of clicks per visitor, or productivity. The higher the percentage the better.. 130-150%+ is excellent. Let the trade run as long as you like.. use your own judgement.. maybe they're having a bad day, maybe a slow start with your site.. if for say 3-4 days you don't see any hits, or very low productivity, ditch it - replace it with 2 or 3 new trades. Repeat ;)
As far as skimming goes, be smart. A surfer won't come back if all they get is trades. If you're skimming 65% that means only 35% of clicks are getting to galleries, and your surfers are most likely getting frustrated. If you do plan to skim 65%, make sure you have a ton of trades (20-40?) - you don't want them going to the same 5 trades every 5 clicks.
To change the skimming percentage on a table-by-table basis, you need to edit a few things. First, the skim settings for Thumb and Text links in Comus (Settings>Thumb/Text Links). For me, the options are #'s 57 and 64. Let's say your standard TTT prefix is:
/cgi-bin/ttt-out?pct=65&url=
Change the percent to %lshave% and %tshave% for links and thumbs, respectively.
/cgi-bin/ttt-out?pct=%lshave%&url= for setting #57
/cgi-bin/ttt-out?pct=%tshave%&url= for setting #64
Now you have to edit your Comus page template so that the skim setting is set in the macros. I use Plural Macros for my template, if you don't - you should ;)
PHP Code:
<table border=0 width=500>{{THUMBS#60#all-thumbs-7-4-query-age1}} </table>
THUMBS is just a label, best to leave it as THUMBS or TEXTLINKS
60 is the skim percentage
all-thumbs is the category to pull from
7-4 is the number of thumbs to pull - 4 rows of 7 each.
query-age1 just tells comus where to pull from, you can change it to age2 for yesterday's, age3, etc.
In my own experience, TGP's weren't the way to go - for me at least. I don't have the patience nor the energy to constantly update trades and galleries, content and links. If you do, then stick to it.. the money's there, but it's nowhere near what it used to be. Use simple math to forecast your earnings:
(# Hits daily) * (Productivity / 100) * ([100-Skim]/100) * (Tour Ratio) *(Conversion Ratio) * (# Days In Month) * (Sponsor Payout)
I know it may not seem simple, but it is. I'll explain:
# Hits Daily is obviously the size of your site. We'll use 2,000 for this example.
Productivity/100 is the decimal version of how many clicks you're getting. Let's say you're at 110% overall productivity, the decimal is 1.1. This means your site is seeing 2,200 clicks each day.
100 - Skim is the decimal percentage of clicks that are getting to galleries. Since you mentioned 65%, we'll use that. 35% of your clicks are getting to galleries, so this value is 0.35.
Multiply 2,200 clicks by 0.35 and you'll see that 770 clicks are getting to your galleries.
Tour Ratio is how many surfers at your galleries click the "See More" links - let's estimate a generous 10%, or 0.10, since most surfers just want free porn. Multiply 770 by 0.10 and 77 surfers get to your join page.
Multiply that number by your
conversion ratio. This will vary from sponsor to sponsor, but I think a healthy industry average is 1 in 400, meaning for every 400 people that get to the join page, 1 signs up.
1 divided by 400 is 0.25%, or 0.0025. Multiply 77 by this number, resulting in 0.1925. That means that on average, 0.1925 people are signing up.
Multiply this by the
number of days in the month (31 for October) and you get 5.9675.
Lastly, multiply this number by your
sponsor payout - let's say $35 per join, a relatively average payout.
Assuming my calculations are correct, you could be making $208 per month. Now of course each value will vary - your productivity could be horribly worse, your conversation ratio could be significantly better.