First Things First

Long gone is the time when you could throw up a site and make a lot of money. These days competition is fierce. There are so many sites online that you have to ask yourself if you really want to add yet another one. Before you even begin building your site, you have to examine your goals. Are you in this for fun? Are you looking to strike it rich? Are you ready for the challenges that the adult industry will bring? If you clarify your objectives early on, it will be that much easier for you to succeed in meeting your goals.

Your Niche

You’ll quickly discover that narrowing your niche beyond “amateur web girl” will benefit your site. Some prominent examples are feet, pantyhose, redhead and bondage sites. It’s not absolutely essential to offer such specialization, but if your interests fall into a particular niche, it will be easier for you to reach your target audience.

Develop The Myth

Don’t overlook this opportunity to reinvent yourself. You can be whomever you want on your site. While it’s important to be yourself you should choose to accentuate parts of your personality that you want to explore. Who do you want to be? The shy girl, the dirty slut or the dominatrix? Spend some time creating your online personality. This will inform the name, look and feel of your site. Knowing who you want to be will help you attract the appropriate members who are searching for what you are.

Do Your Research

Once you have a clear understanding of what you want your site to be like, read everything you can find. Become a frequent visitor to all the webmaster resources. It’s important to do this while you’re conceptualizing your own site. You’ll pick up a lot of tricks of the trade from other webmasters. As a newbie, you’re going to make plenty of mistakes, but if you learn from more experienced webmasters, you can limit them. Hopefully, some of the common pitfalls discussed here and in my future articles will help newbies avoid some of the most common mistakes.

Legal Issues

Many times the legal issues are overlooked. Do you know about U.S.C. §2257? Do you understand the obscenity laws? Who are the lawyers out there that can help you? It’s essential that you spend time learning the legal ramifications of running an adult website.

What Type of Site?

In your research, you’ll come across various types of adult sites. You should then decide whether you want to begin with a pay, free or AVS site. In this series, I’ll be discussing the benefits of each and give a few examples of what type of sites convert well and why.

Are You Going to Do It All Yourself?

All of these issues should be dealt with before you actually build your site. Now that you know what you want, figure out whom you will work with. You will need a graphic and web designer, a photographer, a marketer, and of course the model. Are you going to fill all of these roles? If not, where can you find reliable help?

Getting Traffic

This is the big one. Understanding traffic does not come easily and really won’t be understood completely without experiencing it firsthand. In future installments I will talk about different types of traffic and share tips on getting good traffic.

Networking

In this, as in most industries, networking is vital to staying alive. Whether on the boards or at conventions, it’s important to remain visible and professional. It’s the same in any industry; effective networking will bring success.

I hope I didn’t scare away too many newbies. It may seem overwhelming when you consider all the work that goes into being an amateur web girl. But there is room for success in any industry. This series of articles will break down the larger issues into more palatable pieces for the new amateur web girls.

Nina Marachino is an amateur web cam girl for NinaKnowsBest.com as well as a hostess for TrueCash sites and regular staff writer for TheAdultWebmaster.com. She can be reached at nina@truecash.com.