Making Money with Free Sites: Building for Efficiency and Bandwidth Control (Part Four of Five)

Well, the fourth installment is already upon us and I still have so much information to impart upon you! Now we are at the point that puts the other three parts of this series all together and gets your site live on the Internet.[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

Well, the fourth installment is already upon us and I still have so much information to impart upon you! Now we are at the point that puts the other three parts of this series all together and gets your site live on the Internet. Building sites can be done in so many ways (too many to count!), with different styles and different levels of graphics. It will be impossible to tell you what is the best. Everybody is different and everybody has a different level of knowledge but I can give you some generalities that will make your site both appealing and at the same time efficient and cost effective.

Assuming that you have a domain that you purchased specifically for your free site campaign, let’s first talk about directory structure. Take my word for it… start off at the very beginning organizing and keeping your server tidy. Trying to clean it up after you have designed 50 sites is a pain in the butt and will waste considerable time. Make a point to build a directory inside your main domain folder called “ads” or “banners”. This will be where you place all the banners for all of your affiliates and money making banners. This is important for two reasons. One, if you ever decide to put some sort of rotator on your banners you will need a central place to call them from and two, more importantly, is bandwidth. If you were to build a site and call the banners from within that site, then every site you build will recall that banner from its own site. This means even though that graphic is already on someone’s computer in their temp files it will call it again. If the banner is in a general file and all of your sites refer to that file, then if it is in the surfers’ temp files, it will not need to reload from your server.

Let’s do the math. For easy calculations let’s say you have a banner on 10 sites and you use the same banner on 5 galleries. The banner is on each site, so the banner is called 10 times. Let’s say that you have 1,000 visitors a day to those sites. That is 10,000 times that banner is called per day, and if the banner is 20K, that equals 200,000K of bandwidth used. Putting the banner in a central file with the same stats, the banner will be called from your server once for 20K thus saving you 199,980K (as long as people have not emptied their temp files.)

That, my friends, is A LOT of money when you have 200 or 300 sites all calling the same banners. Please don’t hold me exactly to these numbers, but I think you get the idea for the need of a central folder for your banners and advertising graphics or any graphic that you may use that is called from more than one site.

Still on the idea of saving bandwidth, let’s discuss the optimization of images and sizing them to be adequate for free site usage. Remember, the sites you are building are free sites. You do not need to have huge images. In fact, I discourage it. Instead, first size your portraits to 400 pixels wide and landscapes to 600 wide. Also, cut down the quality of the image, trying to get it around 40 to 50K without losing the image all together. This is easily done with a good graphics program like Photoshop. Greens such as grass are the worst I have found as they are harder to lower in quality. I feel that you should never have an image over 100K.

You might be wondering that if the images are small like that and the quality has been reduced, people will not buy the paysite membership that is sponsoring you, thinking the images there won’t be good. You should include a tag on each gallery page stating that images have been reduced in size and quality to allow for faster transfers. You could even take a picture from the site you are promoting, put it in that “banners” folder you created and provide a link stating, “See Actual Size and Quality Image Here” and link to the image in your banners folder. Now the surfer can see the real image, and you will know the bandwidth bill will not be more than your rent each month.

In addition to cost, remember that you want your site to load as fast as possible and never forget that because you have a high speed cable modem does not mean everyone else does. If an image takes someone a few minutes to load, the quality will not matter because they left long ago and went to someone else’s site that loads faster. The guy that is at your site has a task in mind and it is not a research project to see what the average penis size is. His problem is at hand and he needs your help urgently!

Now with all this is mind, process your pictures and make your thumbnails, set them in your site and add in your banners and text links. The power of a text link should never be ignored. Many surfers are wary of banners and stray away from them, so a text link like “See More Hot Pics of This Stud – Click Here” will often get you a lot more traffic than a banner will. Be flexible and creative and try both options. Remember that with your affiliates’ stats, most times you can see where your traffic is coming from. Pay close attention and see what is working. When you find something that is working leave it alone. The saying I like to use is, “If it isn’t broken, do not fix it.”

You will do a lot of experimenting in your adult industry career looking for just the right mix. Don’t be afraid to try new things all the time. Keep a little notebook of the results you are getting, record the change you made and then record those results. By doing this, if your results are not what you were looking for, you will remember what you had previously and can go back to it.

Also understand that what will work for one affiliate may not work for another. There is no magic button you can hit. It takes time and consistent tweaking to get each site to work the way you need it to. Spend the time to do it at the beginning and make it part of your building routine. You do not want to have to go back and try to make things better after you have copied something 50 times that did not work. It wastes your time and more importantly, it wastes a lot of good traffic that simply passed everything by. Working smart each day will save you considerable time and will give you better results than putting up 50 new sites in a week.

Patience is the key. From the beginning, I have been saying that success does not happen overnight and you need to repeat that to yourself every time you start to fall into the trap of “throwing enough crap at the wall and counting on something sticking.” Sure some will, but you have wasted so much traffic, and even worse, if they came from your hub and they don’t like your sites, they will not bookmark your hub and that surfer is gone forever.

Next week, our last week together in this series, I will talk about link listing, getting traffic and more! This will be the most important installment yet, because no matter how hot the pictures are and how simply awesome we all told you your site was, this is not Field of Dreams. Building is great, but just because you built a magnificent site does not mean they will come! You will have to work to get traffic and the way you work to get your traffic will be a big part of how much money your site will make.

See you all next week for the conclusion of my series!

Tony is the owner of Exxxtreme Adult Designs, a design company offering custom free site, AVS site and TGP gallery designs. He also designs banners and logos.

Tony can be contacted at tntdesign@charterinternet.com, via ICQ# 166558226 or you can call him at 802-479-0053.