I have just started a top sites and a banner exchange on my site. Anyone have any suggestions how I can get people interested in joining either of them? I already have the banners on my site and in my link pages.
Your best bet is to contact people directly. For some of my topsites and directories I found good quality sites and invited them to join. It's best if you can get some pagerank for your site first. I know that might be hard if it's new. What I do is start a site...link to it from some of my sites...then wait. Eventually Google grabs it and within a couple months it has some PR. Even a PR1 or PR2 is better than nothing. I personally never join PR_0 directories or topsites. Totally worthless and low quality.
Well, since I link to it from my main site, it will get page rank eventually through that. I've never tried anything like this before and don't know if it will/can be successful. LOL...but I like trying new things on the web, and it is kind of fun.
Are you part of any webrings yourself? I know you are on mybbtopsite.net but what about author webrings?
For a while there I joined just about every author webring I could find, but then they started making it harder for the webring owners to manage, so a lot of them got canceled. I'm still a member of a few of them.