A word of warning for newbies...
 

If you are just getting into this business and were thinking about starting right away with a pay site, you might want to reconsider. I've turned away two jobs in two days here from new guys with decent financial backing but zero experience in this business. Even with my guarantees on site performance, someone new doesn't have a clue about traffic and dealing with affiliates and the hundred other things that you have to have a grip on before you start. Someone like me can help you avoid a ton of pitfalls but wanting miracles is another thing entirely. Short of hiring an experienced management team, you need to have some experience before you go for it - consulting help or not.

This industry is totally unique and there are some nuances that you just can't get until you've been here awhile. If you're goal is to start a paysite, spend a year first as an affiliate of other pay sites. Learn to drive traffic... learn TGP/MGP submissions and working chat forums and whatever other angles you can get. Figure out what you are best at and make some allies... learn the weird high school cafeteria nature of our social circles and then put your plan together for a pay site.

HOw many of us experienced guys have met that person who bought a "turnkey" website only to have made $0 back the first year? Sure the site looks great and works fantastically but without knowing how to get traffic, you just made the coolest song that never leaves your own CD player.

I'm sure I just preached the gospel to about 4000 people here but there are a handful of others who were thinking they'd have the next biggest paysite just cuz they have a few bucks to spend.

[/rant]

by the way... I need a job!

Very true. I spent my first year experiementing with AVS sites-ProAdult Quantum, to be exact. I learned a LOT without having to worry about overhead like billing, hosting, and so forth. You really need to crawl before you walk in this biz.

Well Mark... ppl only learn by their own mistakes. Many are those who wont trust someone elses word....

Yeah those types of programs are great. Deluxe Pass, et. al. It's kind of like running a paysite without any of the equal hassle and cost. You can make plenty of mistakes and not lose any bucks. One guy who came out of that and succeeded hugely is my buddy Duke.

Yes but if I can save even one...

That's my Miss America Pageant speech. You like?

Great words of advice Mark..better to start out small and get a feel on how it all works first before investing all your loot and going belly up within the first few months

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh

I also want global peace!

I'll work my way in. I think I can make a couple bucks with a tgp that already gets traffic. I'll just have to get innovative!

Bump for a great post.

Understand where you are coming from and not trying to be a dick. I heard that same talk back in the late nineties and I ignored it and started my own site. In no way did I ever think it would be the biggest paysite ever or even close. I just wanted it to make me a modest amount, pay me enough to do this all full time, and give me the experience so that the next site would be that much easier.

It would of not helped in the least to spend time submitting to TGP's or MGP's for a year promoting someone else while I "learned". The only learning that would accomplish would be how to submit. Sure you would learn how to get your click through up and so forth but alas this is just as well applied to your own site. This can be said in regards to every aspect you stated to spend time doing.

This business is just like many others. Without proper research and a solid plan you more than likely will fail. At the same time though considering the costs involved going the trial and error route with your own site is not as risky as some make it out to believe.

You're not being a dick at all. There are always exceptions to the "rule" and I've agreed to build pay sites for a couple newbies over the years. What you say at the end of your post about doing research and having a plan is in line with my way of thinking and people can certainly succeed as newbies but it's a lot tougher than if you understand the business. Also you make the very wise statement that it comes down to being willing to spend some money just on trial and error.

I think the main thing for the vast majority of succesful programs out there is that they know what their affiliates need. If you've never been an affiliate, picking up on that can make for much more costly trial and error.

Great thread! Thanks everybody for your insightful comments.

I think the main error occurs when a newbie with a first paysite also wants to launch it with an affiliate program at the same time. I would typically never say this is all that smart of a move.

I guess I am saying, yes you can be a newbie and have a paysite. Just understand the costs of trial and error and of course risk only your own peril and not those of affiliates. If you can make your site work without affiliates, you will be way ahead of the game when it comes to having an affiliate program.

great advice mark. so many people i know in my non adult life think you can take 20k and make 50 mil in porn in a few months. they don't understand th industries evolution and constant change.

lol.

they have no idea everything we have to do, sun up to sun down and through the night to make what we do and be successful.

For sure. When you started how did you go about getting traffic? Even though it's through affiliate programs that I almost always see the really big numbers happen, the few rare exceptions of people who drive traffic completely on their own do pretty well too. Anyway just curious what worked for you early on?

As has been said, someone who wants to start a paysite could run it as an AVS first. That would limit their investment while they find out whether they can drive traffic. I guess they could build a traffic stream, sending it to sponsors initially. And until 3 or 4 years ago I would have recommended one of those options to a newbie.

But although it doesn't cost any more to start selling porn these days, the chances of success are much smaller than a few years back and every learning curve is longer and steeper. No matter what you do, to be making more than pin money in what most would consider a reasonable length of time, you are going to have to work hard, think a lot about what you are doing and likely as not, invest.

Against that changed background, I'm inclined to say that newcomers should aim straight at what they believe they want to do. I'm not brimming with conviction, but that's because most are only here because of the lure of easy money. They won't think much about what they are going to do before they dive in and they likely won't stay long when they get a dose of reality.

But that will be the same no matter what such people dabble in. Those with what it takes to succeed will make it.

Honestly sheer desperation and hard work. I had no choice it had to succeed. I just started with search results and went backwards. I would look up some phrases and see what they did by following my way back towards the paysite. I would then do my best to do the same thing without copying them. I would typically rank a considerable amount lower but with each attempt I got better and better.

I also checked out the big link style sites. PK, etc. and read the rules there and used that to my best ability. I would then check other links out that had a similar niche to my own and see whom else they were linking to. I then would just go and try to get listed there as well.

I would cruise the boards on occasion, typically being very silent and just reading along. I would watch for new traffic sources, link trades, or anything I could use to my advantage. I even picked up some very valuable tricks along the way that saved me a great deal of time and effort.

All in all I am fairly certain I spent the first year seeking traffic about eight hours a day five to seven days a week. Of course each week was a little easier than the week before.

I also made a whole slew of AVS sites that had the bare minimum required content in them and they also upsold my own paysite.

Lastly I used email to ask other sites if they would be interested in a link or content trade. Maybe one out of five would reply that also would send traffic.

I found out though that eventually the webmasters would come to you if your site was out there enough and looked decent.

Where in NJ you located?

Keyword - momentum. Takes time to build it. It won't happen overnight.

actually turned out to be a great thread

NEar Garden State Plaza in Midland Park. How about you?

Thanks for that! It's a bit of a recipe discourse on success.

I need some guitar lessons :)

Heehee... just check out the music link below......

no, you just need to learn how to spam before you start your own paysite..

I agree wholeheartedly with Mark, and I've had this conversation with more than one would-be webmaster.

My former business partner started in 2002, knowing nothing about the industry, and it took him a good while to begin to get some traffic. When he and I became partners, we still did a lot of trial and error, but we also fell into some opportunities by sheer dumb luck, and we've had the opportunity to learn a lot since then through the generosity of others in the business, lots of hard work and research.

I heard a sad story recently of someone who sunk $50,000 into a project that STILL (10 months later) doesn't have a functional membership website. They shot their own content, overpaid the models, had no plan for marketing and traffic generation, and were counting on converting a bunch of free traffic to their site into memberships (and they didn't understand that "unique hits" aren't computed on a monthly basis, but usually on a 1 hour or 1 day basis... so their traffic is much lower than they thought)

Newbies can still make $ in this business, but I believe that starting out relatively slowly, or hiring someone who really knows their shit (and there are a LOT of posers out there, as I've discovered) is the only sensible way to go.

You're pretty far north. I'm in edison, right off route 1 :)

My time spent at Lightspeed Cash confirms this thought. I've seen small affiliates start off sending one join a week, then five joins a week, then forty joins a month. A few years later they open up their own affiliate program.

It's a huge learning curve.

very true and excelent thread as always mark

The question is... why would they do so? Sending 40 joins a month to LS could be fairly "lucrative". Greed?

Ignore the first decade of this business: particularly during the first five years it was easier to stay dry in a monsoon than fail to make money. But now that supply and demand are more balanced and anyone starting today is facing a lot of experienced competition, there are going to be many more failures than successes. The point is that you are going to see people failing who seem to have done everything right and at the same time, you cannot draw too many conclusions from why others appear to have failed.

Over the 25 years before I began working in online porn, I started three 7-figure businesses from scratch. The most I ever invested initially was $10,000 and I had zero experience of the (three very different) markets. What I did have each time was a very clear idea of a gap I believed I could fill and enough arrogance to expect my mistakes to be little ones.

"Thinking outside the box" is something we talk about a lot, but in fact we rarely do it. Instead, we start learning about how other people do things, without realizing that condemns us to make their mistakes and more than that, puts us into head-on competition with other people who will often have a much clearer vision of what they are doing than we can derive from watching them. Even if we don't fail, going that route in a mature industry such as online porn is fast becoming, all but guarantees modest results.

That may be all many people want and although most will still fail, it is the safest way to go. But both logic and my own experience tell me loud and clear that if you want more success than that, you must go your own way. You have to make being different a credo, even if the difference can often be small and of course, it must be one which actually appeals to your potential customers :)

Sure, when people see you doing well, they will try and copy you. But then they will be the ones playing catchup and trying to figure out what really makes your business tick. You can be certain not more than a handful will ever get it right.

Most people commit themselves to failure or only limited success, the day they pick a business and then start trying to figure out how to make money from it. If you cannot see a gap on the day you start, it's the wrong business.

MarkTiarra, good text ! keep on :)!

Mark, good post but, most people will also fail with a muffler shop, restaurant, etc .....

Ah that's not far. I'm down that way almost every weekend for a baseball game. I'm headed down this week to look at guitars too. =]

We have to do an NJ get together again one of these days. Maybe John from NATS is fixing to do another party?

Great words from a successful guy. Thanks for sharing.

Very true. I wasn't trying to dissuade anyone from doing this business. My point primarily is that, for some reason, people come to our business thinking they can get rich with no plan, no knowledge, no experience and sometimes almost no money. While there are exceptions to every rule, Our business is like any other in what it takes to succeed.

this is a nice thread not only for the newbies but to all. :thumbsup

Agree 100% ... also, porn APPEARS simple in relation to most business.


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great post as usual Mark

Totally agree with your Philosophy on this matter Mark :pimp

fantastic thread - bookmarked!

Nice to see a biz related thread for once :thumbsup

I have some domains that I purchased to hopefully someday turn into pay sites but after reading this I went and bought an MGP domain to try at first. I was entering names to see if they were available and figured I would try psmgp (Porn Star MGP) and it was actually available. So hopefully I can get my feet wet trying that avenue and then try the pay site thing. Thanks for the good info. Hopefully I can get this going in the not so distant future...

Great words ... and great reading :D thanks...

:/
 

One thing that I clearly do not understand is why wouldnt someone such as the people who roam this site assist someone who is in a situation like that? I mean if you have someone who is sinking funds that drastically I mean obviously they are furnishing the materials to turn a buck, why not assist and get in on it?

For a few years now I have been visiting this site and I have spoken to many webmasters some extremely nice and helpful then others who boast about there greatness and throw out ridiculous examples but yet none that I have gotten a sense of togetherness from. I am not trying to be rude here but to obtain a better understanding.

Good, I did it too.