Continued from Part 1
Another way of generating traffic by trading links is to join what is called a web ring. Web rings are essentially a bunch of similar sites that are grouped together in "rings" where each site is linked to others by a simple navigation bar. Web rings form a concentration of sites, allowing visitors to quickly find what they are looking for by going from site to site through the ring. Each web ring is created and maintained by an individual web site owner called the ringmaster who determines the look and feel of the ring, as well as approves and manages the member sites. Ringmasters help to develop virtual communities based around the ring topic while encouraging other sites to join. Creating your own web ring would be a free and easy way to link up with other similar sites and send users between them.
If you check any of the major portals out there today, such as Yahoo or MSN, you will see that they have what are called clubs or groups. These clubs or groups are generally free services that allow you to bring together people with similar interests through a web site and email list, offering you a convenient way to connect with others who share the same interests and ideas. There are already hundreds of thousands of clubs that you can join, or you can take the time to create your own. This will allow you to interact with both surfers and webmasters that are into the same things as you, hopefully generating traffic to your site in the end.
Along a similar line are newsgroups. Newsgroups are discussion forums for particular subjects, generally consisting of notes and images posted to a central internet site and redistributed through Usenet, a worldwide network of news discussion groups. Newsgroups are organized into subject hierarchies, with the first few letters of the newsgroup name indicating the major subject category and sub-categories represented by a subtopic name. People who belong to newsgroups are those that have an interest in a certain subject. If there isn't a newsgroup that pertains to your site, start your own and start generating some talk about your theme. Post your pictures and get people interested in your content, since you never know who might sign up with you.
Back to more widespread traffic tactics, there are a few other fairly well known avenues you can take to attract more traffic to your site. Link lists and top lists are a good way of getting surfers to come to your site. The way these sites work, in essence, is to get a lot of sites to link to them and send them traffic, in exchange for a link on the list site. The catch is, your rank in the list all depends on how much traffic you send back to the list site. Send a lot and get ranked higher, getting more traffic for you, which will likely end up sending more traffic back to the list site getting you an even higher rank. While this can work very well if you can start off sending a lot of traffic to them, it can be hard to crawl up the ranks, since those that are up there tend to stay up there, since they have the massive traffic already. Not too sure about the quality of this sort of traffic either, having not worked with it myself, I cannot make any sort of recommendation. But, as I always say, you have to try anything and everything, so this is something you should add to your traffic building arsenal.
Since we have already discussed TGP and TGP2 sites, there are other sites that have a similar idea - the pic posts and movie posts. These sites are based around webmasters submitting a single picture or movie, as a teaser about what they have inside their site. Generally they post your submitted image or video with an ad for your site, so that if the surfer likes what they see, they can click the link and go to your site for more. Not too sure myself, but I wonder if these sorts of sites are on their way out, since I just don't hear that much about them anymore. Mind you, I am sure there are a thousand webmasters out there who will argue with me and say that they are as big as ever. I will leave it to you to investigate and find out for yourself. Another good way to get surfers to your sponsor's site, or your site if you are running a pay site, is to build an AVS site.
If you are running a pay site, you may want to create yourself a free site to help with your traffic plans. Generally, the aim of the free site is to be a tool to generate traffic and get clicks to sponsor banners and hopefully get signups for them and commission checks for you. The beauty of the free site is that it gets you away from a lot of the limitations of galleries and TGP rules. Most TGPs will allow you only one banner and maybe two or three text links. You also have to have all of your thumbnails link directly to the pictures, not a picture on an HTML page. You have none of these limitations on your own site. As an added bonus, you get a central repository for all of your galleries. Now that you have all of these galleries on your domain, you can use them to generate search engine traffic. Also, your own site gives you full control to go after link trades and banner swaps and the like. Remember, a lot of high quality traffic comes from the search engines, links and banner swaps - not from the TGPs. Again, there is a fine line between quality and quantity that you have to walk, trying to find the right combination of the two.
Another good way to get surfers to your sponsor's site, or your site if you are running a pay site, is to build an AVS site. You can use your AVS site to promote affiliate programs or your pay site - in fact, most AVS sites promote pay sites inside their member areas, giving the site owner more chances to cash in on the same surfer. If the visitors really like your content, they should be inclined to pay to become a member of your site or your sponsor's sites. And, since you know that they already put out their credit card number to join the AVS, you know they are willing to pay for online porn, so they should be willing to shell out for a pay site membership.
Anyway, that is about all the major traffic topics I can think to cover here. Each separate traffic building channel would pretty much warrant an article of their own, so I have to leave you with a brief outline of each. I hope there is enough information for you here to be able to build a comprehensive plan to get the visitors to your site and make some money!
