Many amateur Webmasters want to create a quality Web site for their members, prompting them to pass on lucrative money-making techniques that they believe would degrade the quality of their site. In this article, Chef Jeff argues that amateurs shouldn’t pass on making more money with their existing traffic. Here are a few tricks you can use to increase your bottom line.Many amateur Webmasters want to create a quality Web site for their members, prompting them to pass on lucrative money-making techniques that they believe would degrade the quality of their site. In this article, Chef Jeff argues that amateurs shouldn’t pass on making more money with their existing traffic. Here are a few tricks you can use to increase your bottom line.
Business on the Internet is not what is used to be. If you want to survive in today’s market, you have to be willing and ready to adapt, change and evolve. There was a time when we felt that our business plan did not have to include members area “up-sells” and when we did not believe in using pop-ups… well, we no longer feel that way. We always believed that the customer should come first. We didn’t want to annoy members with pop-ups, and we didn’t want to water down our member’s area with features that they had to pay extra for. But that is not reality anymore. Reality is the size of the checks in your mailbox. If you have opened an amateur Web girl pay site in the hope of making more than a few thousand dollars a month, then listen up, cause it’s very tough to do with just one pay site.
KEEPING UP WITH THE BIG BOYS
The “big boys” of the adult Internet business have their shit together. Traffic generating programs like pay per-sign-up affiliate programs, pay-per-click programs, exit traffic, password traffic, 404 pages, e-mail marketing programs, gateway sites and pages for search engine traffic, gallery posts, members area “up-sells,” affiliate programs for their affiliate programs, they do it all. This is what amateurs have to compete with. The clear difference in traffic generating capabilities and lack of adequate advertising capitol is just the tip of the iceberg as far as resources that amateurs lack. For starters, amateurs cannot compete with the shear amount of content that larger adult Internet companies can get their hands on, and so, they retain better than amateurs can, in general. There are some ways, however, to maximize the value of your precious amateur traffic. After all, you want to try to get a few pennies out of every single visitor that eats your bandwidth.
Traffic trades are a staple of the amateur industry. Long established, well-run top lists and “friends” pages provide amateurs with fair traffic amounts, and are a decent source for new customers. But amateurs not also using pay-per-sign-up affiliate programs offered by some of the larger adult Internet companies are really missing some easy money. As much as it makes sense and is logical to send amateur traffic to amateur partnership programs, it just simply does not pay as well in the short or long term as high-dollar pay-per-sign-up programs do. There are many amateur themed affiliate programs that will cater to your surfers needs.
EXPLOITING AFFILIATE PROGRAMS
This is money that amateur affiliate programs cannot compete with, and should not be overlooked by amateur sites. Diverting some of your traffic to these high-paying affiliate programs is easy to do. Try adding a pay-per-sing-up affiliate program banner to the top of your friends page. These are most likely visitors that are planning on going elsewhere anyway. Even if your friends page doesn’t do a tremendous amount of traffic you may still be pleasantly surprised to find an extra check in your mailbox each month. A good way to test the waters and find the best performing affiliate programs is to rotate your affiliate program banners between a few different programs. There is a handy online banner rotating program at WebmasterMatrix.com. Simply input your banner URLs and the URLs to link them to (your affiliate codes), then just copy and paste the code provided onto your pages. This will evenly distribute the traffic amongst several affiliate programs of your choosing.
EXIT CONSOLES
Another option – add affiliate program links on your exit console. Some code for adding an exit console that will pop-up behind your page can be found here:
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/popunder.html
Although I still discourage the use of multiple pop-ups, one exit console is a whole different story. Once a visitor has decided to leave your site, why not offer them something else? One exit console is a good way to turn what otherwise would be lost traffic into potential sales. Many affiliate programs will even provide you with ready-made exit consoles. Simply upload these to your server and install exit console code onto your pages.
The bottom line is that you can combine good Web site ethics and design with added traffic maximizing features to turn a bigger profit. Do some research and find ways to strategically add affiliate program links to give yourself better money making potential.
Add one or two “up-sell” features to your member’s area, and you will start to see a few extra checks in the mail each month. Traffic trades are fine, but remember that if you are in this for money, then try to take advantage of the people that have some to pay out, and for the most part, it’s not the amateurs.
Chef Jeff is editor of TheAmateurVoice.com, and is a regular contributor to The ADULTWEBMASTER Magazine’s Amateur Corner.
