LAS VEGAS — A panel of speakers with decades of combined experience in the online adult entertainment market provided attendees of the XBIZ Summer Forum a wealth of sage advice, pointers and more than a few one liners during the Webmaster’s Guide to Generating Free Traffic seminar held Wednesday morning.

Moderated by Stephen Yagielowicz of XBIZ, the panel brought together Jay Quinlan of OCCash and Jay’s XXX Links, Greenguy of Link-O-Rama.com, traffic hub operator Harry Thomas (AKA MrMaryLou) and adult blogger Gram Ponante to discuss a range of topics related to the art of driving free site traffic.

Kicking off the session, Quinlan was asked what advice he would give to webmasters in the free-site space who are considering starting an affiliate program of their own — a transition Quinlan himself made as part owner of OCCash.

“A lot of people put the horse before the cart,” Quinlan said. “They have this attitude of ‘build it and they will come,’ and they jump right into starting up a program and launching paysites. That’s not the way to go; I would say develop your traffic base first, and then start your paysites.”

Quinlan estimated that upwards of 40 percent of OCCash’s sales come from house accounts, meaning accounts used to track traffic generated by free websites and portals owned and operated by OCCash.

Following Quinlan’s word of advice for prospective affiliate program owners, Greenguy observed that it is important to understand what a “free site” is, in the context of a discussion of free traffic, noting that a free site is not simply any site that offers content for free.

“Free sites are small sites with a warning page followed by a main page and then a couple of gallery pages and possibly a links page,” Greenguy said, invoking the “traditional” definition established in the early days of the adult Internet industry.

Greenguy said that while there is probably less traffic in the free-site space than in the TGP/MGP space, there are certain advantages that a free site enjoys over TGPs.

“Link lists and free-site traffic is a little better,” Greenguy said. “There’s not as much traffic, but the traffic is much more niche-specific. You know that customers coming from free sites are looking for a specific thing, and this makes it easier to sell to them.”

Next up, Thomas advocated the use of hub sites (central free sites which webmasters can use to send traffic to, and gather traffic from, a wide variety of individual “spoke” sites) as a means to expose surfers to additional advertising without running afoul of the rules maintained by TGPs, MGPs and link lists.

“You can do so much with hubs,” Thomas said. “Once surfers leave your free site or your gallery, you can be more flexible with what you do with that traffic.”

Thomas called hub sites a “win-win situation” for webmasters and the TGPs, MGPs and link lists that webmasters submit to.

By sending traffic to hub sites where there is greater flexibility in what the webmaster can do with advertising, Thomas said, “the link lists and the TGPs get a clean gallery or free site to list, and you get free traffic — and everybody is happy.”

Quinlan chimed in to observe another benefit of linking to hub sites from free sites and gallery pages.

“If you keep all your own sites listed on your hub, those links will be spidered by Google,” Quinlan said. “The [search engine] traffic will continue long after the link list and TGP traffic to your galleries has dropped.”

Ponante advised prospective bloggers to do their homework before they start a blog.

“With blogs, there is so much you can do to optimize who lands on your site,” Ponante said, adding that it is crucial to put yourself in the mindset of the porn surfers as they seek out adult content.

Turning to the subject of search engine optimization (SEO), Quinlan drew an analogy between SEO and the game of Monopoly.

“In Monopoly, people always want to get the big properties, like Park Place,” Quinlan said. “But the one [who] picks up a lot of smaller properties on the board is the one who wins the game.”

In the world of SEO, Quinlan said he’s observed a similar inclination: “Everybody wants to have top placement for ‘porn’ or ‘XXX’ and it’s nice if you can get that. But the competition is fierce, and you’re better off going for something very specific and niche-focused — like ‘black midget lesbians.’”

Seizing on Quinlan’s quip Greenguy observed that ‘black midget lesbians’ might be “a little too specific,” and advised that webmasters make sure that there is a paysite to promote that matches the keywords they target in their SEO.

The bottom line for operators of both free sites and pay sites, the panel agreed, was to employ a variety of site types and traffic generation methods in order to succeed.

“No one thing is going to allow you to knock it out of the park,” Quinlan said. “But a good soup of options and techniques will put you over the top.”