There are many ways to generate traffic for your website and some are better than others. TGP traffic is probably the easiest to get but also very low quality. Search engine traffic is typically the hardest to get, but along with paid advertising, is usually very high quality. Everything else falls somewhere in between. One of my personal favorites is toplist traffic.

The quality of toplist traffic is actually close to or equal to that of search engine traffic, in my opinion, but is much easier to get. Unlike TGP surfers that are primarily looking for free porn, toplist surfers tend to be a bit more discriminating and similar to the search engine surfer, are usually looking for something specific. I'm not suggesting that toplist surfers are all sitting at their computer with their wallet lying next to the keyboard anxiously looking for someplace to use their credit card, but you will find that a higher percentage of them will end up paying for something than the typical TGP or link list surfer.

Although you will not get anywhere near the sheer volume of traffic that you will from TGPs and link lists, toplist traffic can be quite substantial if you find enough good ones. The trick is making sure that your site is high on the list at all times.

There are a few toplists that base your position in the list on the amount of traffic your website gets, but in most cases, your position is based on the amount of traffic that you send to any particular toplist. Depending on what type of website you have, sending traffic to toplists might be as easy as including their links along with links to galleries and other websites. With other sites, like pay sites, or any site where you want to avoid traffic leaks and keep your surfers focused on your site, it gets a bit trickier. In those cases I find it best to place links to the toplists on a links page or some other page on your website that is somehow separate from the main tour. One trick I like to use is to put links to toplists on an exit popup, in which case the surfer won't see them until they are actually leaving my site anyway. The thing to remember is that the traffic you send to the toplist must come from the same domain that they are sending traffic to, but it doesn't need to come from the same page they link to.

A big factor in the results you'll be able to achieve from toplist traffic will be in getting listed on the right toplists. First of all, you'll want to make sure it really is a good toplist and the best way to do that at a glance is to look at the in/out list. If you see that most of the sites in the list are getting close to or more than the same amount of hits they are sending in, that's a good sign. You should also check to see how often the toplist resets the in/out numbers. If they update once a week and the numbers are still high, that means they probably get a lot of traffic. If they update once a month or more, you'd expect to see much higher numbers than if they update weekly and if you notice that they're last update was 4 days ago and the number one site in the list has only gotten 15 clicks, chances are that toplist doesn't get enough traffic to make it worthwhile.

Another important thing to consider is how targeted the toplist traffic is for your particular niche. There are toplists that focus on most of the popular niches and the more closely your site fits the target audience of the toplist, the better your results will be. For example, if you have a gay webcam site, you won't find any better quality traffic than you'll get by listing your website on gay webcam toplists.

Although you will never see the huge traffic numbers from toplists that you will from TGPs and link lists and you'll find that the conversion rate will be much higher, you should carefully consider where you're sending that toplist traffic. Certainly, a thousand hits a day sent directly to pay site or webcam site will produce far better results than sending that traffic to a TGP or another toplist, for example.

One of the nice side benefits you'll find when you get listed on several toplists is that the traffic will actually feed on itself and multiply. Let's say that you're listed on 10 toplists and you get 50 hits a day from each of them. If you are creative with how you link to the toplists, what will happen is that a certain percentage of the surfers from toplist 1 will click on the link for toplists 2 through 10 at some point -- hopefully when they are leaving your website -- surfers from toplist 2 will click on toplist 1 or 3 through 10, and so on. Out of those 500 hits a day you would be getting from those 10 toplists, a good number of those hits will end up clicking on one of the other toplists and the more clicks the links get, the higher your position on the toplists, and the higher your position, the more traffic you get.

Just like any source of traffic, you'll need to experiment, but with enough trial and error and tweaking, you will eventually get excellent results.