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| Operated and Published by the Eccentric Musician Company. If you need to return to the members area (from Social members page) then Click here: SFL Members Area Reach out to 'New England's Live Music Fans' via our music e-zines: www.SurfForLocalMusic.Net and www.NEOMN.com This exchange serves text ads, mini banners and wide banners to our two music e-zines as well as others on the net. This is a great way to get your message to New England Music fans! Add your website or blog to our external exchange advertising program. Loose the ads that are not paying off anyway and replace it with a block of our ads. Ads of small businesses and interesting sites from the New England area and beyond. Be part of a growing network of sites and blogs that have depth and meaning rather than the same old blah blah! * For information on how to do this visit our SFL Blog; SFL Blog! Our music fanzine's pictured below are tricked out with the SFL ads receiving additional back links, advertising and helping our fellow SFL members.   |
Site TipsThis page provides tips and suggestions to users from us. These are not to be construed as rules or requirements, merely suggestions.
Banner Exchange IssuesBanner exchanges are for banners. We've had a few people put sites into the banner exchange, so we want to clarify: banner exchanges are for banners. You can either link to your banner, or upload it into our system, but the record must refer to a banner. Banner exchange members need 2 settings: To put banners on the exchange, you need:
You do not have to have banners on the exchange to Earn Credits: If you put the script on your website's pages, you will earn credits. There are no settings required for this to happen. If you are earning through the exchange: We have a request: We'd like to compile a list of participating websites. Send an email containing the page where you've placed exchange, a brief description of the site, and a preferred landing page, and we'll create the list. This provides a hard link to your site from Surf For Local - New England, which will help your ratings on other search engines, as well.
General Site SuggestionsDownload times: This is a traffic exchange, and the main goal here is to get other members to view your sites as conveniently as possible. Also, remember that you are paying for bandwidth on your site. With that in mind, try to keep the eye-popping graphics to a minimum. Remember that some users have a 20-second timer, so if it takes 10 seconds to load your big-honking page, they will have probably less than 10 seconds left to read what you're trying to say. There are some 'post-card' traffic exchanges out there. While they are a great idea, many people starting with an affiliate site have to use what their company gives them. Home-page blues: In the same vein, realize that it is more effective to put up a reasonably short text ad describing your site. Save the graphics for those who click-through TO your home page. Putting your home page up in rotation (if you've got big, nifty graphics or multimedia content) costs you bandwidth, and your viewer's time. Spelling really does count: This is not specific to traffic exchanges. There are thousands of spell check programs, and most HTML editors offer a spell check function built in... use it. Nothing spells "sloppy site" better than "click heer". Relative links: We just got zinged on this one - when building a link on a page for display, don't assume the user knows what site and what folder you're in. If your link reads "<a href="../mypage.htm">, it won't work on several of the browser scenarios. This is also true for images and style sheet references. Always use the absolute reference (i.e.: <a href="http://mysite.dom/directory/mypage.htm">, so that it works consistently.
Banner suggestionsBanner dimensions: For ease of viewing, banners should be no more than 468 wide and 60 high. Your banner may get put into 'warning' if it exceeds those dimensions. Banner size: Just like the download times above, banners cost you bandwidth, and slow the viewer's experience down. (Remember: This is the Internet... slow is bad.) Please keep your banners to a reasonable size... with gif and jpeg compression, most banners can be kept under 60 Kb. We don't have an official size limit, but if we get enough complaints, we will institute one. Remember that banners aren't for paragraphs... they are for sentences. Remember you can upload your banners: This is especially important for people on slow/overloaded servers... you can upload your banner file, as a .gif, .jpg, .jpeg or .png file (and we do have a 60Kb limit locally), which means your banners will appear at Surf For Local - New England speeds. This also can save your site some bandwidth. To upload a banner, edit a banner record and blank out the "graphic URL" field, and you will be prompted on the next screen for the file on your computer to upload. |
 
        Honorary Annual Membership
To purchase a paid membership level you will first need to;
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