Cybernet Expo

I will be attending my first industry, Cybernet Expo, this June 25th-28th.

When I first started learning about the adult industry, the advice I received was to attend a convention. This is the first time I have been able to do so.

One of the reasons I decided on this event was that two of my most profitable sponsors will be there:
Movie Dollars
Kinky Dollars

I'll also be going to San Francisco for the first time; hell, this is the first trip I've made (other then family vacations) since 2001, when I road tripped to Houston for a stock options trading seminar.

I am looking forward to meeting people in the industry and learning from those at the forefront!

Keeping your eyes open on a Part Time basis

The problem with doing adult webmastering on a part time basis is that things change. As an example, I had not worked on my sites in 5 months. In the meantime, the Thumblogger free blogging platform went down for almost a month, and the server on which some of my personally owned sites physically changed, which messed up some of my automated tasks.

So what can happen while your focused on the dayjob?

Sponsors can drop out of sight
Sponsors can get bought out and change all sorts of info (login, password, etc)
Your free blogging platform can shutdown or experience a hiccup
Your supporting sites can disapear or experience a hiccup - Example, Zipped sites , which I had reccomended previously, is no longer with us.
Another example, Feedburner, like Blogger before it, has been taken over by Google. An event such as requires work on your part to adjust to the current situation.

The point is not that you can't count on these sites. The point is that you have to keep enough of a weather eye out for these issues so that one of two problems doesn't kill all your cash flow. Make sure to use a lot of free blogging platforms, use a few different sponsors whom youhave found to be reliable, and to maintain a database of posts that you can re-use if some of your blogs go down for the count .

Also, not all problems are permanent. Twan, of Thumblogger, could have let his site, and all the wonderful support tools and advice, just go away after the problems that Thumblogger experienced. Instead, he dug down and brought this platform back up, with additional tools for webmasters to recover lost posts.

Resumption of blogging for this site

About a year ago, I took up a fulltime job that has demanded most of my time - in fact, it ate up most of the time I used on the adult web business. We have done a lot of hard work at that job to get to the point where the time consumption does not kill us down there.
What that means as far as this site goes, is that I have some additional time to continue with the lesson plan.
Today, there is no lesson plan - I need to do some cleanup and reorganization.

Lesson Resumption

A few quick notes on this site.

It's way past December, so this is the first update in a while. Here's the next few things on the agenda.

First, Lesson 5 needs to be updated; it was reformatted, and I lost the HTML coding I wanted to show you. That will be the first fix.

Second, I will post a list of sponsors that I KNOW pay well, and pay on time.

Third, I will post a NEW set of tools that will help you out. I really want to single out the Thumblogger set of tools. Twan does an outstanding job of providing tools and support for the freesite webmaster.

Fourth, I will discuss linking, and why it's important that you link all your sites to your others, but not every last one of your others.

I will go back through the older lessons, and see what needs to be caught up with.

You should be expecting a post on Saturdays and Sundays, at least one per weekend; hopefully, I'll be getting in at least one more post in during the workweek.

I do have a favor to ask of those using the advice on this site:
Start a blogger site in which you log your experiences in getting started. I'm not asking for a blow by blow ;> description, but major experiences, roadblocks, and help you've received, and insights you've had to make the job go easier.

OK, I meant two favors:
Comment on this blog - A. It will help me in site rankings and SE - and B. Feedback is very kind to my soul!

Thanks for reading :>

Lesson 6 in starting your Adult biz for free - RSS

What is RSS and how does it help you?

There are a couple of explanations running around on the web, but for now the one I like to use is "Rich Site Syndication".

Syndication.

That means that content from another site has been copied for you to use on your site. RSS mostly started for use with newssites which didn't mind allowing other websites to pass along their news feeds (FEEDS are another name for RSS type syndications). Also, by making a link to the original page, not only does the original site get inbound links, but allows surfers to get a feel for the site. By publishing RSS feeds for other sites, the publisher is getting free advertising.

Other uses for feeds have developed. By taking a subscription to a feed using a news reader application, a surfer doesn't even have to load the webpage into his browser, he gets the content delivered directly to him.

On this page, for example, if you look at the sidebar section entitled "Website Info", you can see that as of today, I have 4 people subscribed to this site. You can click on that graphic, and be taken to my feed, which shows copies of my posts, as well as links to suscribe to various newreaders.

The next link down is to the same page, but I have used a simple text link, to allow web newbies to get to the feed page without having to recognize the feedreader symbol. If you ever see that orange square in the top of a site, it usually indicates that a feed is available for that site.

There are several types of feeds; RSS, XML, ATOM. For our purposes, and also because I haven't taken the time to learn them, it doesn't really matter. We are going to use a service called feedburner, at www.feedburner.com to regenerate our feeds from whatever original source we have to retrieve them from.

So WHY are feeds useful to us?

In the first place, as we set up our blogs, we are going to use RSS feeds to publicize our sites.

In the second place, we are going to retrieve content from our sponsors by using RSS feeds they provide for us, OR we are going to create RSS feeds for our use from their content.

And in the third place, we are going to make updating our blogs as easy and automated as possible by using RSS feeds.

So strap in for the next set of lessons;
the first of which will be
A list of RSS tools to use in setting up your Adult Site

No, I haven't forgotten this site

No, this site will be regularly updated after Xmas.

Some of the free tools aren't working as they had in the past; there are others that I am testing to see if they work better then the ones I had used previously.

I can give you an update of where we're at.

First of all, use Thumblogger to start with. It's tools are more easily learned, and the site customization is much easier then with redlight blogs. In addition, it is much easier to add your PPC adds here.

There is a downloadable app for Thumblogger, Thumblogger Client, which you should download and begin to play with. Basically, it is an editor that allows you to add FHG galleries to your Thumblogger blog with a preview pic. I'll go into a tutorial in a later post.

Cash Maniac's policy is to allow hotlinking, and I have tested out Thumblogger Client with a Cash Maniac's FHG
(see http://bondagewhores.thumblogger.com/home/log/2006/50/strict-mistress-whipping-a.html
for an example of how this looks).

Once you get the hang of this, add a few galleries to your blog, then go back and change the dates on the posts until you have at least one post a day for at least a month going back.

I am still having problems with a free hosting service which will serve our needs, but I'm still looking.

We'll get to RSS and building traffic soon enuff :)

New Tools and New Hosts Lead to Strategy Change.

When I started this lesson plan, I was going to show you the ways that I had been using the free blogs, services, hosts, etc that are available for you to start doing this quickly. As I began going through the sites, I have noticed an explosion of available services that you can use.

So instead of preparing a lesson for today's blog, I have been playing with quite a few of the new toys. Thumblogger in paticular has been outstanding in coming up with tools for use with it's sites; altough I have been unsatisfied with it's free image hosting service, Image Turtle. I have been playing with a free image hosting service that PAYS YOU per view, as well as a new Thumblogger miniapp that let's you post galleries with minimal effort. There is also a service that allows you to update your blog in an automatic fashion with sponsor content.

In addition, for experienced webmasters, I have not provided enough information to make this site overly useful so far. You may have noticed that we have not even used the Zipped Sites account we have set up, for example. One reason for that is that I have been unable to get the code to work for me as I have in the past.

So tonight, I am announcing a strategy shift in the way this course is going to be handled. I am going to add a couple of webmaster board links in the sidebar. These are valuable resources, and the people on these boards are friendly and helpful. OTOH, don't barge in there and make a post where you want to know how much everybody makes, or the board's favorite dumb question "How do I get rich in porn?". This should provide a lot of information (maybe too much) for the newbie, but give webmasters new to the adult biz some background.

The reason I bring up the boards is that due to our approach, we are going to be doing things differently from the conventional wisdom on how to start things off. That's not to say you can't try their approach as well as this approach, depending on the time you have to commit to the business.

The conventional wisdom is that you start by building free sites and free galleries for submittal to link lists, and to TGP pages. There is a minimal investment required for this approach ( at the minimum, ownership of a domain name, and a hosting service you deliver your product from). In general, for those that get it, that is the way to start the biz.

Our strategy is different; we are going to do this with NO investment other then time and work. We are going to be using the power of blogs, and especially of syndication services, of our own creativity, and of free services in order to compete with other webmasters USING THE SAME material we have, and we're going to make money that way. Once we've started making money, you can always invest it and your time back into the approaches used in conventional wisdom.

Our goal is to win traffic by build a blog with better formatting, choice of niche, choice of content for the niche and linking. Once we have a strong blog, we will hit every syndication feed with it and MAINTAIN IT on a religious basis. We are going to provide our surfers with everything they want, so that they either remain on our pages, or buy something from our sponsors. In addition, we are going to be taking advantage of every PPC opportunity that fits our niche.

I want you to have the best available information at hand, so instead of doing things the same way I have been doing, I need to look at these new tools. Which means I have bit off more then I can chew, and need to chew a little more thoroughly. Lessons will come a little more slowly then I have planned, but I do plan on posting at least something of value each and every day.

So here are your webmaster boards; surf em, but don't get overwhelmed. I want to stress this. You aint gonna get rich by tomorrow. Look at blog information in paticular.

http://www.awtalk.com/index.php


http://www.cozycampus.com/