not sure how I missed your post kush, I must have skipped right by it --
couple things I'm not sure are contrary points or perhaps you are just reiterating them?
"If you're going to create a LOT of free sites, which is want you need to do to bring in more $, "
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No IF here -- the only way to get ahead with feeder sites, gallery pages and standard avs is to have many many many many and then build some more.
"make mirror entry pages with subfolders of more generic names, like
free/index.html
host/index.html
xxx/index.html.....
It's all about speed and accuracy - if somethign takes too long and really isn't work it then dont do it ....'
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Lists get pickier every day, I haven't had to deal with submissions on a daily basis in a long time now, but I read threads like these and I know they want way more than they did three years ago. In some cases I'm sure the subs dont work any more than the other way.
My comment about finding the porn was pretty clear on making sure it didn't keep you from a listing -- if you can't get traffic you can't make sales any way you look at it
As for the counters? I'll stick by what I said -- your host has stats, and one thing I am absolutely not going to change my mind about is the fact that free and avs sites need to be on paid hosting PERIOD. Link list and se traffic is way more productive than anything I hear on ratios from tgp or picpost traffic I wouldn't dream of wasting the traffic by giving it away to the free host.
I've got hundreds, probably even thousands of free sites and avs sites tucked away on cd down in my garage -- 85% of them template generated -- before I had software programs to do the substitutions for me, I went in and did search and replace on a mass scale to make the changes.
I used a little perl script to rename all my images and make them substituble too, based on the layout of the site and the structure of the html -- many of these sites ran cgi scripted ads which are instantly changeable with almost no one on my part, after I entered all the banners and link codes into rotation. Alot of work but once it was set up it would nearly run itself -- upload the images, change a few things around and be ready to submit... have enough different templates to not burn one up with over submissions...
I was on the phone today with Steve and one part of the conversation came around to how things that we take for granted are still new to the newbies -- and that one of the problems with the conversions might be that the newbies haven't learned how to market to the surfers they have just yet.
I still believe the same simple formula that worked two or three years ago would do just as well today with very little tweaking