Michigan newbie needs some direction

You're barkin' up the wrong tree here hoss. Try some other forums. You may get some worthwhile replies to this though. Just give it time. Bump for you.

What's up Jason? Here's just a few of my thoughts bro.....

First of all, your not even sure if your going to have nudity on your website and being that this is an adult webmaster board that specializes in nude and/or pornographic content, I'm not sure why your posting these questions in here in the first place. However, with that aside, I'll try to be as helpful as possible regarding your questions.

Most of the questions that you asked can easily be answered by simply going to a search engine and locating that information yourself. You want to open up a paysite but you have no idea how much a domain name is going to cost? You have no idea how much it will cost to have a web designer develop the site for you? Your not sure if the word "server" is the correct terminoligy used to refer to the hosting of your site?

I highly suggest that you do ALOT of researching before you even think of opening up a site. Do the research and after you do the research....do even more researching. You never stop researching and learning new things. I researched the market and all types of aspects regarding webmastering/marketing 2 years before creating any of my sites.....(and I still research new avenues and I learn new things every single day regarding webmastering and what it takes to be as succesfull as you can be.) You can never learn too much bro.

Anyway, on to answering your questions.......

You stated in your post that you will not be purchasing content but shooting it yourself so I'll address that issue first. Is it more expensive to hire girls to be nude as opposed to not being nude? Of course, it is more expensive. I shoot all of my own content too and the pay that I pay out to the girls varies alot. However, I would not pay them as much if they were not nude. I've had girls model from anywhere from free to $200.00 per hour. Normally, I pay $100.00 per hour for nude shoots which contain no sexual activity. Obviously, for sexual activity, you would pay more.....(Of course, all of this depends on the girl and her rates.)

What steps must be taken to get started? lol....I could go on forever here but I'll make it as short as possible. As I stated before, you need to do alot of research on how the market works as well as learning how to work with html, website marketing/promotion, SEO (search engine optimization), banner/text link exchanging, the standard industry rates regarding whatever it is that you need the girls to do for your site, decide which credit card processing company is going to be processing your online payments, figure out the domain name that you want to use for your site...etc. (domain names shouldn't cost anymore than $10-$15 per year). I would suggest checking out http://www.domainsnext.com but there are plenty of other places as well. Just look around for them.

Do hosting companys take a percentage out of what you make? I've never heard of any that did. You need to contact a hosting company and have them set everything up for you for a monthly fee. What is the monthly fee? It all depends on how much bandwidth you need. What is bandwidth? Think of bandwidth this way.....whenever someone comes to your site, they suck up the "space" on your "rented" server. If you don't receive very much traffic then your "space" is not going to be sucked up that much. However, if you get alot of traffic then it's going to suck up alot of your bandwidth so you want to make sure that you have enough. (especially if you promote your promotional galleries through TGP's.) Every single picture/video link clicked, sucks up your bandwidth. As of now, I have 250 gigs of bandwidth per month and I pay approximately $250.00 per month for this. Not to mention, I'm running out and I'll need to upgrade soon to a higher plan so it also takes money to run a site. (and ALOT of your time....depending on how serious you are about it.)

How much does a web designer charge? Normally between $300 to $2500 but this entirely depends on the web designer. Hell, why not learn what you can in order to create your own design? Keep in mind that if you hire someone to design your site without you understanding html, how are you going to make your members happy by performing regular updates? By sending the videos/pictures to the designer every time you need an update? Sure, you can do that but expect to pay the bucks and I can guarentee you that the updates will not always be right on time either because nobody is going to be as serious and as dedicated as you are when it comes to YOUR site. Sure, you'll get signups if you have a site that is promoted regularly and is optimized for the search engines but this should not be enough for you. You need to get the RECURRING membership charges! You don't want to just receive basic signups. You want to keep your members as happy as possible by making them continue their memberships instead of cancelling after they've saved all of the videos/pictures that they've enjoyed seeing. Update the site regularly (and on time) and chances are, you'll keep most of your members because they'll know that new and fresh content will be arriving soon. That's very important.

Anyway bro, I just wanted to throw my 2 cents in. Hope this helps. But again, do alot of researching before you take the dive. You'll be glad you did. Good luck with whatever it is you choose to do.

Welcome Jason, and good luck to you

hey jason welcome, if you ever have questions hit me up on icq, ill try to give you some advise.

icq: 248-877-409