Great thread, Labret, I can't imagine having to sell ASCII porn, I rememer my Dad printing out an "X" and "O" naked lady on his dot matrix printer, and he would haver to post it on the wall and have his friends stand 10 feet back to see the naked chick, and they all "oooed and awwed" over it, found out later he paid for those pics. Boggles the mind how people could have sold memberships to those old boards, but they did and alot made a mint on them.
Anyways, enough bowing down to the porn god fathers.
Today and for last 3 years, it all comes down to one thing.. traffic. Newbies either don't know how to get it, or get it, but don't know what to do with it. You can build the best site, have the greatest affiliate program, whatever, but if you don't have traffic or don't know how to convert traffic, your gonna be a newbie for life.
No successful webmaster will ever tell you where to get instant traffic, it is food out of our mouth, we tell you, you tell 5 other newbies, they tell 40 other webmasters, and the traffic stream is dead, and we get fucked.
The best advice is to work 16 to 20 hours a day 7 days a week, and breakdown your time like this:
12 hours of site building and submitting to AVS's, TGP's, linklists.
1 hour reading message boards and articles.
1 hours of posting GOOD specific questions and posting replies to other people's threads when you can, whether it's biz related or not.
1 hour chatting with 5 people you met on the boards via ICQ/aol/yahoo about anything.
1 hour checking stats and recording them, studying your trends and coming up with a gameplan for the next day.
If you can still see your monitor at this point, surf to your favorite pornsite and jerk off, cause you will never be able get off from porn after a year of this, enjoy it while it lasts! Take some Xanex and get a good 6 hours of sleep.
Rinse and repeat for a year, and you will be making more than any of your 9-5 friends.
This is what it takes 90% of the time, and maybe 1% of the newbies have the ballz to do it, which is why they all fail, or just become webmaster board junkies
