To the small affiliates
 

As competition gets tougher and more new sponsors launch every month, I notice the gap between small and big affiliates in adult getting bigger.

What actually keeps you away from getting bigger and making a good living of it?

Missing motivation? Lack of ideas beside the usual TGP/LL submitting game?

Explain please. :thumbsup

It takes time and alot of money to grow big!

Build out a network of related sites
Link like a madman
Throw in a dash of SEO
Watch results, tweak as necessary

Rinse and Repeat

Unfortunately, a lot of webmasters only get through one or two "cycles" before they give up.

depends

wrong, as an affiliate you can still grow with little investment, this is not about starting a cam studio or producing shitloads of exclusive content for your own paysites

its hard to know where to start sometimes. i used to make lots of money in the celeb niche but things aren't so great there these days, for me at least. i am looking to get into other areas but people say you can't make money from galleries, linklists, etc. seo is good but where do you get all the backlinks? the only thing keeping me from being big again is not knowing the best area to invest my time in. i don't want to spend months on something that ends up not producing results.

There are a few people making a decent living through TGP submitting but it only works when you make and submit new galleries every day to the bigger TGPs using lots of partner accounts and additionally paid listings and paid partner accounts.

Otherwise you creep around with some standart list maybe making 150-300$ a month for loads of work.

Galleries are nothing that really pulls in long term traffic from SEs, also there are more submitters each day who want to make some quick cash by doing something simple, which results in even more competition due to high saturation.

Spamming, linktrading, buying, but there are certain niches that are already taken over big the big ones such as traveling etc.

Read up on webmasterworld, seochat etc.

Do your research first, find your niche(s) and an actual way to get good steady traffic that starts to generate the first sales within a month in it on which you can build up.

If you want SE traffic to a new site which you build for SEs only, fill with content daily, organize good links and making it known prepare for a waiting period of 6-12 months till you'll actually see desired results, there is no way around it.

Gene aka $5 submissions had a good blog on unconventional traffic generation methods which he sadly deleted.

too many people take advice from others who they think make big cash, but don't.

yeah i tried galleries for a couple months back in 2003, i never saw much money come in. i wanted something that made 3k a month at least. but im still making 100-200 bucks a month now off those 15 or galleries i submitted back then. i hear people say they make sometimes 20k/month from galleries but submit lots per day, i would do it if it would work. i don't mind working lots at all as long as i see a return not too far down the road (bills need to be paid after all). if i would of started galleries back in 98 when i started doing this, i'd imagine all the bits of traffic rolling in from all those galleries would add up. i thought they were a waste of time at the time tho because i was making so much my own way. lesson learned: never put your eggs in one basket.

i tried doing this once, setting up some free sites that aren't the typical submit and forget but when i emailed people for link exchanges, no one emailed me back. my biggest success in this industry was probably my network of celebrity free sites but the method doesn't seem to convert well anymore. as trade scripts became more popular it became hard to trade traffic with people. i used to get good traffic from google but as they changed my google traffic practically died. maybe one of my bigger mistakes is wanting to trade larger amounts of traffic with only a few sites rather than have 50 some links on the main page to other sites. and good celeb sponsors these days are very hard to find. its too bad that in the niche porn market there doesn't seem to be sites quite like these. and the ones i did find didn't seem interested in trading links with my site, maybe because it was just starting out but traffic has to start coming from somewhere.

as for spamming do you mean comment spamming? thats something that interests me, especially once i get my network of blogs up and running.
yeah i've been researching for years now, and i have my own interests which i think would help sell the niche. i think i can make good sites that convert well, its just a matter of getting the traffic. thanks for the advice, i always appreciate it when someone is willing to lend their thoughts on traffic generation. something i think needs to be discussed more but isn't because people don't want everyone jumping on their methods.

create CONTENT,

Content is the KING of SEO.

Johndoe, is that a check to you in your sig? Dam, let us know how we can be big like you? A hint or something.. And let us build off that hint.. Or are you giving them already?