Here's something you may not realize: getting your site listed on good link exchanges can boost your search engine exposure! Many webmasters hide their links page behind their main page, which is not an indexable page and most likely has a robots.txt file to keep the search engines out. Do yourself a favor and replace the hardcore banners with softcore ones and submit the page to the search engines!

Not only do you get the extra search engine listing, all the sites you have linked will get a boost in "link popularity". Some engines (such as Google and Alta Vista) will boost a sites rank depending on how many other sites have a link to it. By helping your linked sites get more traffic, you get more traffic; after all, your link is on that page! It also helps your popularity to be listed on all those other sites!

Submitting your site can be a tedious job. It involves finding ADDURL pages at various link spots and filling out a form with your sites information. Here are some handy utilities that will allow you to program the function keys in Windows! You can CTRL-T for your site's title, and the CTRL-U key for your site's URL, etc. Just have a look at: Typing Master Web Site and Reg Soft. Registration is few dollars.

Now its time to PROFIT from that "wasted traffic": slip in a few sponsors! Most of them offer a "Free Picture Of A Day". This is an excellent method to increase your revenue without using tons of bandwidth from a banner ad! Just add a text link to their free picture and get paid per sign-up! It's done on their bandwidth and to the surfer looks just like any other link on the list! Be creative; if your sponsor lets you link into the free tour, then by all means put up a "free samples" link on your list. If you categorize links, you can also list your sponsors in a "pay site" category to increase your sponsor exposure!

It all goes to show that one man's garbage really is another man's treasure! If you effectively recycle this traffic into decent sponsors, then the old saying of "garbage-in garbage-out" no longer applies!