New to the biz - Some questions

oh, I forgot, what about forums? anyone making money out of them?

Thanks in advance.

Welcome to GFY

Welcom to GFY and good luck with those questions.

Thank you, nice to be around here.

Welcome to the board

Domains are so cheap I would just buy 3 or 4 that you like and start from there. Or if you just want to test out some niches you could set up some free accounts on Thumb Blogger.

Not sure I understand your third question.

Thanks again,

My third question,

Actually I' going to put just a simple page with advertisements with no to the niches, just ads, because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do with that page and I only have one domain so far at the moment.

So the question is, wether or not should I list the other sites there, that would be the niches, the blog, etc.

Welcome to GFY
Here is the thing. You should build a bit deeper site then just 4 pages. It should look like a HUB site with warning page, main page and at least 9 niche pages (subfolders or subdomains). Niche pages should have links to free hosted galleries and sites + banners and adv text. It would be good thing to update those pages from time to time with fresh content (SEs would love that) but be careful, don't give surfers to much of free porn. Blog is also a good idea. This HUB can be used later for all sort of things like traffic filtering, 404, could be transferred to link list ....
Surfer forums suck ass coz all surfers are there only for free porn.

Thanks for the input,

I'll keep on improving my templates by now, so they can fit a deeper site than just a few pages.

I'm leaning to use that HUB layout as my host plan does not allow me to point multiple domains to different sites, I could just eventually buy more domains but all of them should point to the same site, and as for subdomains I can make up to 5.

Thank you everyone again, I really aprecciate your advises, and I guess a lot more are yet to come.

Then use subfolders as niche pages and make from one of those subdomains a blog.

#1 If you are going to run say 7 websites, each with it's own unique theme (niche) and design then purchase 7 related domain names (one for each website). Don't use sub domains, there is some evidence that sub domains don't rank as highly anymore as dedicated domains and as domains are so cheap there is no reason not to get a dedicated domain name.

#2 Make sure your web hosting company gives you a dedicated IP for each domain.

#3 All of your websites should link back to each other.

#4 Build up a quality website first, then worry about advertising (affiliate programs). The better quality your site, the more money you will make from it. If your site is shit, then you will most likely have shit for traffic. The key is to track what you have and where you are going.

Start a spreadsheet and track a few things for each website. First is the traffic. List off every website and then how much traffic each one gets each month.

Ideally you will (over time) see that number go up. If one month you see a MASSIVE drop in one of your websites, you know to go back to it and find out what the hell is going on.

Next track your affiliate programs that you do business with. I track how much total traffic I send them per month and how much I earn per month (total). I also divide that by day so that I know

Total Traffic per month, Average per day, Total earned per month Average earned per day, and then finally how much each click is worth, which you get by taking your total earnings divided by your total traffic.

It can be below one cent per click with some programs and much higher with others. You should focus on getting that number above $.05 per click. Any program not performing like the others, drop and get a new one. Doesn't really probably make a lot of sense to you now, but a few months down the line you'll appreciate having this spreadsheet full of stats.

At the bottom of all of these I add up total how much I earned for all programs, including total traffic sent, total earned, etc.

Then I calculate how much total traffic my websites have, how much total I sent over to my advertisers and I get an overall idea of where I can maybe improve. For example one site sends 22% of all its incoming traffic to my advertisers yet another site sends only 18%. I work when I get a chance on improving the ads on the 18% site. Placement, quality of design of the ads, etc.

I have a friend who never tracked his stats prior to me discussing it with him and he was floored to find that out of his total traffic per month he sends about 5% to his advertisers. He was actually able to improve that number slightly this month to 7% just from being aware of it.

Each time you add a new domain / website to your collection and trust me over time you'll add a ton ... remember to add it in to your spreadsheet and track it like the rest. It's important to know where you are at, to be able to know where you are going.