Are you a newbie to the world of Adult Webmastering? Are you lost and uncertain about where to turn for help? Lacking confidence that YOU could actually build a potentially profitable site? Well, my friend, this article was written for you!
“Jerky for the Puppy” – while it is doubtless a strange title for a technical article on the intricacies of adult Webmastering, it is also a realistic glimpse into the life of a busy Webmaster. After all, spending most of my life in front of this damn computer, the ‘highlight’ of my week is Friday night, which is ‘party night’ – featuring shots of brandy, a 40oz bottle of “King Cobra” Malt Liquor, and a $9 bag of beef jerky, which I share with my dear friend, Jack (he’s my wife Dawn’s “Cowboy Poodle” – not one of those fluffy, sissy dogs, but a Standard Poodle / Balinese Fighting Dog mix who you don‘t want mad at you!)
Anyway, I tell you about this because one of the benefits of being in this business is that you’ll be able to feed your dog $9 bags of beef jerky. Of course, one of the drawbacks of being in this business is that doing so at 9pm on a Friday night is the ‘highlight’ of your week. But that’s not what I really came here to tell you about…
When I wrote yesterday’s article about “Spectacular Sponsors” and the lengths that they’re willing to go to in order to attract and retain productive Webmasters, I outlined some of the many free marketing tools and helpful features that they offered, using ‘Top Bucks’ as an example. In that article, I claimed that you could build a pretty decent Web site using nothing more than the free content that they offered, enhanced with some of their other offerings. Well, today I received an e-mail from a reader questioning whether this was really the case, and if so, how? And was it really possible for a total newbie with no experience in the business to build a site from the ground up with a single sponsor’s offerings?
Putting Theory Into Practice
As I sat and considered this newbie’s questions, I decided that it might be interesting to put the problem to the test, and so, half drunk and feeling a bit frisky, I’m going to crank up the music, and see what I can do in an hour’s time with nothing but a few offerings from Top Bucks and a very slow dial-up connection (24k – which will unfortunately preclude me from downloading tons of pics, etc.). Of course I do have one of their BIG free content CDs lying around somewhere (a “Ghost of InterNext’s Past”), but that would be like ‘cheating,’ so it’s off to TopBucks.com for a look around…
The first thing that caught my eye was the “Free Bannerless & No Header Hosting” – since you can’t have a Web site without being on the Web. I filled out and submitted the online form to sign up for this promising program, only to find out that I did not qualify. Being new to the Top Bucks program, I had not made the requisite “3 signups” needed to obtain free hosting, a requirement that would stop all “day one” newbies dead in their tracks. No matter, I have numerous sites, and plenty of hosting options, so this little roadblock would not deter me. Time to keep looking around and considering my options…
And then it ’dawned’ on me: why not build a simple Thumbnail Gallery Post (TGP) site? While the truly profitable operation of such a site can be challenging, the barrier to entry is negligible, and requires more in the way of persistence than capital (when compared to opening a pay site, for instance). I could use the Top Bucks free daily gallery pages as the top listings, since they handle content hosting and rotation, and pay on any sales made through the galleries, and then pad the listings with a healthy dose of clean submissions from XBiz’ own “Gallery Booster” listings – grabbed using their “batch listings” tool – and requiring nothing more than a quick bit of copy-n-paste into Window’s notepad; eliminating the need for complicated scripting.
Top Bucks’ hosted “Banner of the Week” program would ensure that repeat visitors saw a variety of fresh advertisements, as these regularly updated and highly productive banners would be strategically sprinkled throughout the gallery listings. A bold text link or two to the sponsor’s “live cam” page (which pays out on site membership sales) and a small “Bookmark Us” JavaScript snippet would round out this single-page site. Several link exchanges to jump start your traffic, and you’re well on your way to making sales!
While some readers may criticize my suggestion that a TGP “makes a suitable first site for a newbie,” the fact remains that it is a simple project that could require nothing more than a basic text editor and a slight knowledge of HTML to produce – along with a desire to succeed – in order to make it really ‘profitable.’ After that, the sky truly is the limit, as there is plenty of room to grow, and an in-house traffic pump to feed any free or AVS sites that come after (all of which can be made using Top Bucks tools and content).
If you’ve been wondering what it would take to get into the world of building adult Web sites, why not try a ‘simple’ project like the one outlined above? Who knows, maybe in a short time you’ll be able to feed YOUR dog $9 bags of beef jerky on a Friday night! Good luck ~ Stephen
