AMATEUR CHATTER

So what seems to be the big secret on getting traffic to your website? I have spent the last year trying every different scenario possible other than direct e-mail blasts.AMATEUR CHATTER

So what seems to be the big secret on getting traffic to your website? I have spent the last year trying every different scenario possible other than direct e-mail blasts. I mean, who has $20,000 a month to advertise personal amateur websites, or handle a $3,000 a month (minimum) bandwidth bill?

We all know that partnerships can be the key to a successful business. But really, how many partnership programs are out there today? Make millions here, make millions there? When will the millions show up in my mailbox? The key is traffic and building relationships. Relationships lead to partnerships and the partnerships can lead to the millions (if you are lucky).

Ok, so I haven’t told you anything you don’t know yet. The reason I wrote this article is just to share my experiences over the last year with building traffic to your site without having to go for a second mortgage or team up with a top-notch affiliate program (if they even like you). So, instead of boring you with the crap you all know already, let me get to it!

I started off with a little website back in 1997 doing web cam shows five days a week. It sucked ass and I thought I was going to die and began to hate the business. Not to mention giving 60% of my hard earned money to someone else! Eventually I decided it was time to run things on my own. So by 1998 I started my own little company, my own little website, and I thought at that point the money would just roll in. (Are you all laughing now???) At that time I didn’t think it was funny to receive checks of $250 a week in the mail, but that was about all I was making doing it all by myself.

By 1999 I thought it was time to hit the market with something a little different – a niche site if you will. We called it the barely18club.com and decided to start hiring other girls to give the surfers more for their money and other girls to look at. It was about this time I started looking into building up the traffic. As the content was shot, I took twelve to fifteen images and started making TGP submission pages thinking that I would get immediate exposure to millions of people.

Boy was I ever wrong! Some of the TGPs never posted the galleries and the others who did were much smaller in overall traffic. To make matters even worse, I would submit a gallery a day and not see anything from the first submission for weeks it seemed. Little did I know that there were a million other Webmasters submitting their pages at the same time, later to find out people actually pay to get a TGP page listed. I will get into that shortly.

As an amateur site with a barely 18 niche I thought it would be good to start networking with other amateurs, trading content, links, etc. This seemed to help my cause just a little, but the traffic became very diluted with the amount of amateurs found on so called Friends Pages. Is everyone still awake? This can be boring, but I will reach my climax soon enough!

Just as our barely18club.com site started doing well, a company out of California had an attorney write me a nasty letter that told me to cease and desist or they would take legal action. OK, I was 19 years old, still wet behind the ears and was floored by this letter. In any event, I hired an attorney to handle this, but it turned out that this company owned service and trademark rights to any domains or business that was worded with barely18.

I thought I would be drinking cocktails on the beach by now, but as you can see, I was just learning how to really run an adult Internet operation. In any event, we shut down the barely18club and decided to take a break for about three months before getting to where we are today. There are many things to think about before building a website. Do you want to become an AVS, an amateur site or a niche content site, etc.? What billing company do you use, whom can you trust, and most important, how do you draw traffic to your site?

At this point I opened my “official” Taylor Lawe website found at www.fuckingonfilm.com, and I knew it was time to take traffic more seriously than ever. First things first… build a decent website that would appeal to not only the amateur web surfers, but the surfers who are looking for professional stuff as well. Once we completed the web design, I added my billing company and the partnership program.

My first lesson in traffic came from using a submit tool at www.shavenferret.com. Here you can submit to a gazillion worthless PIC and TGP sites. After taking weeks of generating folders for PICS and pages for these TGP sites, the return of traffic was really poor. Not to mention the conversions were even worse. At that same time I did have a links page on my site where I traded traffic with what I thought were quality sites and that the traffic trade would be worth it.

I had no idea how to gauge whom to trade traffic with at that time. A friend of mine shared a little tool with me that I use every single day. One way to find out who is doing well with traffic is to log onto www.Alexa.com. Simply type in the name of the site you want to check out and Alexa will return some really useful information including where the site ranks and even website reviews from Webmasters like us. The lower the ranking number, the better. Anyone ranking under 50,000 is probably worth trading traffic with in my opinion.

So far that has been the only bit of good information I think I have given you, but hang on… I am in my final stages of orgasm! Things were picking up slowly but surely, but not good enough to hit the beach with cocktails. As I looked around at other sites that did well, converted traffic and had high Alexa rankings, I knew exactly what I needed to do. Follow the leaders. What’s the saying? “Lead, follow or get out of the way?” No way was I getting out of the way. I enjoy sex way too much and I knew that I could make this work.

Following isn’t so bad as long as you have something to call your own. After six months of trading banners, submitting to worthless sites, dealing with bastard Webmasters who did nothing but “F” me, giving up my high quality content, begging for partners etc., I did away with it all!

Yes, all of it gone. Now what? I did a few syndicated radio show appearances and became good friends with a few guys on the show. This of course isn’t the way to make a huge success of your website, but the exposure is huge and if the radio show will become an affiliate of your site, even better. I became a regular on the Opie and Anthony syndicated radio show doing contest after contest and having girls go on the show with me to do wacky stuff. In any event, they have a website that generates an enormous amount of traffic where they feature my free pages.

While that was working very well, those guys were only one of my big affiliates. How to get more? I developed a nice little letter that went out to every Webmaster I could think of and even the ones I couldn’t think of. Slowly but surely I built my list of affiliates who provide a great source of traffic and revenue. Why not give up 50% to 60% of the revenue to people who keep you in business? Now we had a decent stream of income where we could use our heads in marketing.

I ran into Mark Shoals while at the Internext Expo in Florida. Mark Shoals works for a company called Cyber Cat, Inc., which handles the paid advertising for TGP submissions with some of the top TGPs online today – TGPs such as Sleazy Dream, The Hun, World Sex, Sublime and many more. This advertising is not cheap, but it works. These text links and banner ads do work, but what a major drain on your bandwidth. For instance, if we spend $4,000 per month on advertising our content, especially videos, you could be looking at $4,000 a month in bandwidth as well. So now what? I can only say that a very few Webmasters out there are doing what we decided to finally do about three months ago. Once we converted all of our content to our main site at www.eroticfilmgirls.com, it was time to get tricky with marketing.

Remember how I was almost ready to climax? Well, I have two fingers working overtime, so here you go folks… I e-mailed every single one of my affiliates and offered to host and develop TGP pages with our content but using their affiliate code. To top that off, I have made arrangements like this with some of the top TGPs out there and this has been working great for us all. Why would we want to host all of that crap on our end? The idea is to keep the marketing dollars down and give up on the bandwidth. I would much rather pay $4,000 a month in bandwidth alone versus, $4,000 a month in marketing then another $4,000 in bandwidth.

With that said, it’s up to you to find your own way of making traffic work, but I believe this is the best way. I hope you have enjoyed my solo masturbation for the day and if you are a Webmaster please stop by and check out our affiliate program!

Taylor Lawe is the owner of Taylor World Wide, LLC and the webmistress and star of her own amateur site at http://www.eroticfilmgirls.com. Check out her Webmaster affiliate program!