I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here so I’ll use a reply that was on Reddit:

“If you aren’t in any private trackers yet, those two things don’t really apply to you. Typically, you are asked for both a profile URL and screenshot on a private tracker as a way to price that you can survive on a more prestigious tracker, so that only applies to upgrading to “better” ones. This is also what is meant by proof of ratio, your ratio for everything you have downloaded on the site is in your profile. You can try an interview with screenshots of your torrent client if you think they are worth it, but most sites won’t accept them. What you want to do is try to find an open invite/sign-up tracker and learn the ropes on that then once you have a bit of use in that and feel confident you know what you are doing you can start applying for closed ones (although most trackers have an invite forum accessible after you prove your value by seeding the correct amount and other metrics specific to the site, often time on the tracker and amount downloaded). Remember that the “lower-tier trackers” such as those with open invite/sign-up aren’t necessarily worse, in fact a lot of them are nearly on par in terms of new releases. Don’t feel like you are missing too much of you don’t race to the top thinking that more exclusive trackers are better. Enjoy the journey, if you stick with private trackers then you will “upgrade” fairly naturally and without a lot of stress. Last thing, I wouldn’t recommend joining IPT if you want to move to other trackers. It won’t actually hurt your chances, but they don’t have a good name in the community and very few people take a profile on there seriously as proof of anything.”