Banner Link Exchange Howto
The TopSites banner link exchange program is pretty straight forward as far as usage however if your new to this I created a basic howto. Hope this helps.
Pretend this is your links page and you have the following banner you want other sites to use when linking back to you.
Right click the banner picture and choose properties to discover the address of the image and use it to create your link back to your own site. Select the address and COPY it so you can paste it into the registration form.
If your hosting service doesn't allow hot-linking your image then you can either host it using image shack or other free image servers and link to it there or email your banner picture to DBranson@TheRaggedFence.com and she will host your banner picture in the gallery so you can link to it.
It's best if you host it yourself because if you decide to change your banner you simply replace the banner picture on your site and presto... it changes on the topsites list and any other link exchange you're participating in.
In this case the address to the image is:
http://www.wolgamot.com/files/tutorials/tutorial-images/TopSites_Tutorial_Banner.jpg
Once you know the link address it can be used to create your top sites banner exchange.
Next, go to Top Sites page and click Join in the link bar at the top of the page and fill out the form.
Choose a username, password, and insert the address to your banner image, and insert your web adress you want your banner to send people to etc... Pretty much self explanatory.
There is a security question that you need to answer to complete the registration.
The question is silly but since its a human readable question so it helps deture robots from auto-registering spam sites
Topsites software will email the admins so they can authorize your banner link.
Most importantly you will then receive an email with special link code that you need to place in your links area or somewhere on your site.
This code will create the banner for The Ragged Fence on your site and will notify the topsites software everytime it is clicked and will increase your ranking in the topsites list.
It also makes sure that the link exists on your site so if you fail to place the link code in your site or modify the code then topsites cannot see your incomming link and your banner will eventually drop off the list.
The Ragged Fence banner will look like the following on your site.