The American Dream isn’t just about making a lot of money – it’s also about making a comfortable living on one’s own terms. And that Dream now extends beyond the borders of America to Europe, Asian, Latin America and Canada. Yet most of the financial opportunities available to average people have dried up. The known money pools are generally controlled by large corporations that block potential competition from even thinking too hard about getting into their games. Most of us know that it’s absurd to even think about starting a phone company, for example. But even the more reasonable-sounding business opportunities are difficult propositions.Want to open up a coffee shop? You’re going to have to contend with Starbucks. Thinking about a movie rental store? Not only will Blockbuster have something to say about your profit potential, but so too will online rental services like Netflix, plus an army of DVD-rental kiosk machines that now routinely stand guard at the exits of major grocery stores. Restaurants routinely fail. And all of these things require a large initial financial investment just to give them a try. Making money on your own terms isn’t a simple proposition anymore, no matter how hard you’re willing to work.

Making money with adult websites also isn’t as simple as it once was; but unlike so many other potential businesses, adult websites are not controlled by large corporations. The reason for that isn’t hard to figure out – big, public companies have to be careful about how they venture into adult entertainment. After all, they have shareholders to please. And in a country that routinely wags the finger of morality in the direction of those who have open attitudes about sexuality, large companies just can’t risk the potential backlash of being too intimately involved with adult entertainment. Someday that might change. Right now, their absence is an opportunity for the rest of us.

But how do you get into adult websites with just a small financial investment? Or maybe even for no financial investment?

Before I get to that, let me first talk about the expensive way to build a website.

Some adult companies are in the business of building what we like to call “pay sites.” If you’re not familiar with this rather self-explanatory term, it basically refers to adult websites that require payment of some kind before the bulk of their adult content can be viewed. Typically this payment comes in the form of a monthly membership subscription fee, but not always. Building a pay site can be expensive. Not only are the design requirements extensive, but in order to compete with other pay sites you need to license a whole lot of adult content to give out to members of the site. A few picture galleries and video clips won’t cut it. And many pay sites produce their own original adult content. You also need to get setup with an online billing company, and be ready to handle regular content updates and customer service issues. Unless you have a lot of money to spend and are prepared to hire consultants and employees, now more than ever it’s a really bad idea for newbies to start off with an adult pay site.

That doesn’t mean you can’t profit off of existing pay sites. Most of the best pay sites on the internet have an affiliate program. The terms of each different affiliate program will vary, but essentially an affiliate program lets you market these pay sites in exchange for a share of the profits. And quite frankly, most affiliate programs are more than generous in what they will give you for your efforts. Typically you can choose between programs that offer a flat per sign-up rate, such as $35 for every sale you make, or a percentage share, such as 50% of any initial and recurring sales you generate for the site. I won’t go into too much detail on this, since each affiliate program you encounter will explain its terms in detail. At this point, just understand that if you can find a way to send customers to adult websites, you can cash in on this ability.

How do you get people to visit these adult pay sites? Ah, that’s where the work comes in. A lot of newbies have tried and failed to drive any significant amount of customers to adult pay sites. Others have committed themselves to finding methods to accomplish this task, and have been rewarded handsomely for the effort. You could try building “free sites” that attract surfers with free pictures or videos, and then send those surfers off to pay sites through banner ads or text links. You could build adult gallery pages, which include ads of course, and then submit them to websites that list such galleries for their visitors. Email marketing is probably too risky for those of you who are just getting started, but you can try search engine marketing or even peer-to-peer network (P2P) marketing. Any web property that you can build that will attract the attention of adults is something that you can turn into a cash cow through the use of adult affiliate programs.

If any of this interests you, then stay tuned. In future articles we’ll continue to go over the basics. Everything from registering domain names to buying content, getting content for free, submitting to search engines, adult gallery sites, trading traffic with other webmasters, hosting your website, and more. Will you get rich quick? Almost certainly not. But if you apply yourself to this then you might start to generate a nice healthy additional revenue stream, and who couldn’t use that? Once you have mastered the art of adult website affiliate marketing you will then be in the position to consider where you want to go next – and that could lead to your own pay site, some other kind of adult online business, or perhaps even to shooting or producing your own adult content.

Stay tuned.