What type of mainstream sites do you run?
 

I hear a lot of talk about webmasters going mainstream. But, I have yet to figure out what type of sites they're running. I'm not interested in mainstream sponsors. I just want to get a feel for what type of sites people are making. What type of mainstream sites do you own? I would like to get into the mainstream side of things, but I have no idea where to start.

so you believed all those fairy-tales about millions in mainstream as a side work told by gfyers

I invest/sell domain names and I build out some of my better domains into stores, white labels, partnerships etc... always good to diversify so if one industry goes cold the others might keep you stable. It takes a lot of work to be successful in mainstream as well as tons of competition. One good thing about mainstream is most sales cookies are 30,60,90,120+ days by default compared to 99% of the ccbill sites I promote with 3 day cookies.

The reason for me building stores on product domains is just because I have been investing in domains since 2002 so the good ones are kinda staring at me begging for some form of development even if light development. If your starting from scratch and not staring at hundreds or thousands of mainstream domains then I would pick something you enjoy as then you wont lose the desire to keep it updated or keep working on it.

most of people developing community sites and also sites related to fun and song etc.
its what i think they also develop a lot of types like shopping carts, blogs on heros etc.

Entertainment and educational sites.

Adult webmasters that I talk to online have spoken about people going mainstream. But, most don't seem to know what these people are doing. That's why I asked.

hot dog cart.

There is a lot more money in mainstream and these days it's much easier to get.. IMO you are foolish for not doing it. And what types of site? Anything big and competitive will obviously have a lot of money in it..

Gambling, weight loss, body building, beauty, loans, insurance, etc.

What do you mean by this?

there is no money in mainstream.

i am going to be honest with you idiots.

unless you have unreal talent or unreal bank get off the net NOW. only enterprise solutions are surviving. traffic is being cornered by the big dogs and it takes real talent or alot of money to compete now.

if you are the average guy get out now. things are only getting worse for the average webmaster.

Holy shit metaman is still here, that's awesome.

Bring back old avatar imo.

what was my old avatar? i only had peach i think.

i used to have my mario sigs.

o and i been doing this shit for over a decade i aint going anywhere. :)

I sell maps to BP managers homes:winkwink:

I dunno this was like 3-4 years ago. It was some pixel mega man type thing.

o hehehe that was mario and his cronies.

i have it on my old PC i should dig it up.

booze and political sites for now.

In mainstream I taught someone how to make money and they were basically banking off with $30,000 a month in a few months.

Yeah, i think there's still money in mainstream.

Holistic health, pet training, mobile games, golf info, and emailing affiliate stuff like zip leads for cash/credit/debt offers and related products of course, if they have easy lead offers that pay.

Start in the niches you like and have knowledge in, build a social presence that you're active and friendly on, ask those people for input and expand based on the input.

That's the key. If you like what you do you will do it better.

Never forget dating of course. On porn sites dating pays poorly (like porn sponsors) but with targeted traffic you can realistically earn between $.5 and $1 EPC.

Which mainstream dating companies do you use? Would love to find a few more paying $50+ a free sale.

At that, have any mainstream programs that pay more than the actual sale that was sold, like porn - been looking for that gift as well?

Can't go wrong with better paying programs that also convert.

How are the stores doing? I've been considering going through and developing a bunch of mainstream ones, and while I've been leaning towards info blogs w/ aff/CPA, stores seem to be getting popular in our industry for a mass development kind of thing, so just curious how they perform.

And to answer the OP, I buy and sell domains for a living. Adult domains make up about 5% of my portfolio and GFY is one of about a dozen venues I sell domains at. There's money in domains, but it's definitely not easy, and if you don't know what you're doing, you can be staring at a worthless domain portfolio you spent thousands building. I've seen it time and time again in this industry.

The areas in non-adult domains that have done well for me are financial, health, education, short brandables (popular amongst domainers and social media crowd), product domains of all sorts, and gaming.

All the dating I've promoted has been lead based. Usually $3-8 per free lead. I always do dating through NeverBlue they have a ton of dating offers with good payouts.

I have a ton of 2 word generic product .com domains so I wanted to do something with them. Doing your own articles etc... is probably a better road as then you have unique content but even on some of the ones where I did automated scripts or solutions amazon, ebay, shopping.com, for stores some of those are making $5-$10 a month + which isn't a lot but it pays the renewal fee of the domain and kicks in a little profit each year so it allows you to be more patient in selling the domain as something that generates profit each year is more of an asset than something you gotta fork out $7-$8 a year to renew with zero earnings compared to parking.

If your domain makes good cash parked probably better to leave it be but if you got some good product related domains making jack shit each month worth a try to get some form of earnings out of it. Even some of the ones I did with SmartName ecommerce stores that only take like 5-10 minutes to build are chipping in a few bucks a month and have held some google rank for months which is harder to achieve with a standard parked page.

I have all the pay per sale memberships cj.com, linkshare etc... but I have still been leaning more to adsense and shopping.com pay per click as the thought of having to update 100's of sites with advertisers new deals each month as they always come out with new banners and promotions sounds like a pain in the ass so I have stuck more to automated ppc ads on them but I should probably test a few on pay per sale just to see if the earnings increase over pay per click on the ones with better traffic as it would be worth the extra work if I saw a substantial increase.

Domains I wanna sell I usually just leave parked. Domains that are strong enough to where I am in no hurry to sell I'm trying to do something with them whether that means light development, full development or just an automated store script etc... Not making me rich but due to the quantity of them I have online it seems to be adding up nicely when you put them all together and you really only need to make over .63 + per month for the domain to fall into the profitable category which is better than the 0 category.

i sell advantage,revolution and capstar online for pets with fleas ,ticks and heartworm:thumbsup

I sale cigarettes for Native Americans http://cheaperbutts.com

If california goes legal on pot, I'll sale that too

I have a handful of travel based sites and collectively they bring in a solid return, but not one single site earns enough on its own for me to say mainstream is a great success for me.

Mine are TV and UFC sites.

I run 2 off road based online stores and a few racing related blogs

What did you teach them? :-)

Mobile Diaper service

If you're pushing mainstream stuff, please drop me a line so I can kindly ask you to try out TextNDate.com it does REALLY well on just about any type of traffic posted thus far. :)

Running a news and magazine site, setting up an underwater photography and scuba site.

retail ones..

Very cool, any that you can show us?

Im 100% sure i make more with my sidework then you with your shitty aff site.

I sell clothes and other chick related stuff. I'm a girl myself and I know what they dig so it works pretty well :)

This niche showed potential when I was looking into it a while back. I was considering moving on it, but I just don't know shit about scuba stuff so I backed out. It looked pretty open to some SEO domination, and there's solid options for monetizing the traffic in the way of affiliate shops paying decent commissions. Dip into the Adsense too, people are paying $5+ on a lot of scuba keywords. I say go on it...

I do mostly adsense stuff at the moment. I pick high traffic topics and write about them. Anything from various cooking styles to conspiracy theories.

try writing an ebook about how to write ebook about writing and selling an ebook.

Browse what people are selling on mainstream sites - gives you an idea of what is *hot* right now. The key is to filter out all the total shit though.

I have noticed the pet care sites get a TON of hits and I know someone who makes good bank on them.

But what is the 'structure' of the sites?

Are they parallel to adult? In adult you build blogs and freesites with images and vids all over them?

How do you build mainstream sites? Is it one page per domain? Several pages? How many blog posts per blog?

That seems to be what alludes me the most.

:)

lets hope for answers :)

Freeware/Opensource blog
Casino/Poker/Bingo blogs
Weightloss
Thousands of blackhat-sites where I promote as many niches as I can.

eco stuff.. my wife loves researching stuff so I tell her I want 5000 words on all forms of renewable energy.. she delivers. I give her another topic.. the SE's and probably school children doing projects love her.

gambling sites ;)

Have you considered Googling the phrase you would go after then looking at the sites currently ranking for it? I doubt anyone is going to draw you a picture.

I actually am not sure yet what I'd like to promote. The structure of a business is important to me in helping to visualize what I'd like to do or what I think will sell. In adult the structure is pretty simple. But I can't wrap my mind around how it works in mainstream.

Best thing I guess is to jump in and learn as I go. It's more time consuming but hey, if I want it bad enough....

Mainstream is so vast, look for something which interests you and go with it.