It’s important for me to state that not ALL designers are con artists who love running up the tab on you. However, if you do not know what you are doing or too lazy to learn you are going to run into problems. I will give you a prime example of this.

I am working on this huge network of sites for not only ad spots to add into my existing network, but also adding in link trades and some other things for tracking and what not. As you might imagine, building 30 sites in 30 days is a hefty task and can be costly to boot. For this project I already had a site that was done some time back that fit the mold for what I wanted in this first batch of sites.

It would be running on a centralized server script where I can have one central DB/admin panel with 10,000+ sponsor galleries but I can have 100 different sites pulling from this single DB daily. I would set up each new site with different domian, colors, header, and parameters to pull from on the DB so that no two of the 100 sites would have the exact same content.  I would also set up my link organizer on each new site as well. So I would, again, have one centralized link management admin panel to handle my entire network of links. I figured I can do one of these per day.

The part is can get tricky with is design work. Most would look at this project, and think they need a whole new design for each site. Even though you are looking to use the same type of look and template for all sites as you launch them. You throw out some posts looking for bids and they come in from $50.00 Russians, to your main guys saying they can do it for $100/250.00 a pop.

While these are fair prices more a less for a NEW DESIGN you really do not need one. After all, you are simply changing up a free graphics and some headers for the most part. Although some designers will tell you that you need a new design. Not so if you have a demo site with a working CSS and some basic HTML skill.

Now, before you try this yourself. You need to make sure you do a complete copy of any code on your site, and save it in a text file. That way, should you fuck something up you can easily cut and paste the original back in there. You should ALWAYS do this if you do not know what you are doing, and are trying to do something yourself. Otherwise, you could screw up your site and not know the steps to back track in your code.

Ok, so you would want to open up your CSS/HTML on your site to see if you can make some basic changes like a background. I take a peek at my main demo example site, and….

On this example, you can easily see where the background color to the site and style sheet (CSS) is controlled by the HTML. I can easily switch this up myself by finding color codes and replacing it for each new site. You can find color codes by doing a quick Google search.

“html color codes”

You find a color you like, replace the color in the “CODEHERE” in between the ” and save. This should change the color of whatever you are doing in that HTML code. So in this case, it changes the background color from a light blue to purple.

So now you ask, WIIFM (what’s in it for me”? Well, this little trick just saves you a lot of time and money. Instead of $250.00 for a new design per site and 1-5 days to cut and install it each time (assuming that is what thye would do) you now can change it yourself, and only need a designer for the header graphic and some minor other graphics that should be around $10-50.00 per site. Depending on what you need.

Sometimes it PAYS to learn these little HTML and other tricks to save yourself time and money.

Originally Posted by mike

For the past few weeks I have been launching a bunch of websites adding to my traffic network.  They are a mix of blogs, membership and tube sites, forums, TGP’s, landing pages, among other things. I integrated my Smart Spots ad script, as I talked about the other day, and replaced my OpenX.

I have 80% of my sites running with the new ad rotation script and I notice some changes. While my celebrity sites, blogs, forums and other things are doing really well with their CTR (click through rates) my tube sites were not (To be fair, I have not intalled the Smart Scripts on my tube pay sites. Their CTR is typically much higher) the tube sites were terrible.

I have years of tracking data from my OpenX, and normally the sites all have CTR ratios of less than 1:250, and tube sites typically are more like 1:500 or less. But the traffic tubes were running like 1:1700 in a week’s time of installing the new Smart Spots. So I am thinking, that can’t be right!

I only had a half dozen banners in rotation at that time, so I figured I would add in a few more sponsors, and also  change things up a bit with some simpler banner ads. In two days time that CTR on the tube sites had dropped down to 1:746 and keeps falling. I now have around 18 banners in rotation, but have switched up almost all of the ads. Some banners I made myself because I did not like theirs.

So in 2 days times, with tens of thousands of impressions, a couple of quick simple changes and that CTR was cut in half. It simply goes to show you that simple is sometimes a better solution when doing affiliate ads, and marketing techniques. Also, that you need to always be tweaking, tracking, and changing things up when they do not work.

Do not be afraid to try a new trick or two. Just make sure you have something in place to track those changes. Otherwise you are going about it blind and will struggle much more than you need to.

This is a question I get asked all the time on board, forums, and pretty much when anyone finds out I work on the internet or online. The story starts in 1997 and I have had a lot of experience in just about every segment of the online adult industry. In 13 years, you can imagine just how many successes and failures you can rack up over that time. It is much too long to put in a single post, but I will occasionally talk on the timeline for those interested.

So int 1997 was when it had began for me. I was getting out of college, and had entered the real world. While in college, I had spent a lot of my free time looking around the internet for fellow foot fetish folk like myself. There was not even 1% of what is available today, but there were a few people who had gotten in on the ground floor. Some doing celebrity feet, others basically copying old Leg Show pictorials and using them for content on foot fetish sites. A lot which I recognized from my collection and chuckled.

Anyway, after I finished school I wanted to do a site like others. I had not intention of reinventing the wheel but there were around 3-5 differnet celebrity foot fetish sites that all had some admirable qualities, but did not really have everything I wanted in one site. My idea was to take the best things from those sites I liked, and just make ONE SITE that had it the way I LIKED it. One problem… I did no know HTML, web design, etc..

So I went to Barnes and Noble and picked up a book on web design. Back then you did not have the programs you do today. Today you can get WYSIWG (what you see is what you get) editors that make it so simple a monkey could do it. However, I learned some basic code and web design and was off. I basically self taught myself how to do things over time.  In hindsigtht, I would recommend someone take a basic HTML class at their community college. It will teach you 80% of what you need for basic web mastering. But I digress….

So I started with a basic web page back then. I made every mistake you could have. Music on the page, all those glittery shit gifs and animations, it was a mess. Back then I thought it was lovely, as I had never done something like that, but over time I was unhappy with the design compared to competition. So I was always working on it. I worked full time in telco, and then would come home and work another 4-6 hours on my celebrity site.

Keep in mind, this was all static HTML pages and coding by hand back then. Today, you can get automated scripts that will do almost everything for you. So you can cut down a lot of webmastering tasks via server side CRON jobs, automation, content management scripts, content spiders and so on. Which gets your actual work time down to an hour or less a lot of times depending on the site.

Over time, the site started to take off. As shitty as it was, although I was always improving it, the site started to get a lot of visitors. So in no time the bandwidth was climbing up on the site. I was spending money out of my pocket to pay for that bandwidth bill as the advertising and other things I was trying at that time did not bring in enough to cover it. Bandwidth was much more expensive back then, and was costing me $500-900.00 a month. Something had to change.

I looked around the web and saw a lot of adult membership sites that charged a monthly fee for their site. I thought, this was a good idea. I would not charge $30.00 or whatever they had been charging. But I would charge enough to help pay for the bandwidth. After all, I was doing this site more out of my own passion then for money to start. I would charge $14.95 a month and if only a handful of visitors paid. I should be ok.

The concept worked. Although I had a lot more than a handful. The site actually paid for it’s bandwidth bill and then some. It was nice to actually be able to collect a modest pay check for the endless hours of time and trouble to collect and hard code a site for myself, and now others. So on top of my telco money, which was already a good living, I was making a few grand off this celebrity site per month. I looked at it as a hobby with a paycheck!

On this site, it did not matter if I made money or not. I was doing it for the passion of it. Which is something that I have come to find over the decade plus. If you truly are passionate about your site, your content you are producing, it does not need to be the best. My foot fetish and tickling content I have produced myself for my own sites was not the best. Camera shaking, girl next door types, no break out hotties, no males, no nudity. But when it came to sucking feet. The girls did it like I instructed and cha-ching! The money came.

I will pick up phase two on the journey at a later time. Hopefully you enjoyed part one.