Link Trade Question
 

Is the only effective way of trading links to skim off of your galleries, or do hard links work well?

A mix of both is the quickest way to expand your TGP. However, the hard links make your site a LOT more prductive.

Depends on what you're trying to achieve.

Just trying to slowly increase the amount of valid users that come to my site. It's only the second week that it has been up, so i don't know if i really have the traffic that would be required to keep up with link trades. Then again, i'm not too familiar with them. Just trying to come up with some more ideas to drive traffic to my site other than word of mouth, and link dumps.

Hardlinks are the way to go.

Skimming is bullshit and makes the surfer unhappy as well.