Yes, I'm still here, and I'm still making money selling smut

Wow! A lot of time has passed since I worked on this blog. Frankly, I had all but forgotten about it. Back in the day I was so busy keeping my other blogs running, that this one fell off my radar. I see, however, that it has recently had an upsurge in traffic, so I thought I would come back by and see what might be bringing folks by.

The posts that have been offered, until today's of course, were written in the early days of my foray into adult blogging and internet work. It was, as the posts indicate, about the time that I actually started doing this full time. Yes, all these years later, I'm still making money by selling adult material on the internet. Business is good, thank you, though things have changed considerably over the last several years. Many of those that I knew in this business 10 years ago have left the scene. Others have come and gone. Some of the companies that I referenced in earlier posts have closed, too, or they have merged with others. Some no longer offer the same programs.

So, how have I survived? The short answer is that I have tried to remain flexible in a changing industry, and I have tried to focus on what I know will work for me. As a result, I work a few hours every day doing something that I enjoy and the rest of the time I do whatever the hell I want. The checks keep showing up in the mailbox (both physical and electronic), so I keep posting more stuff and avoiding the need to look for a "job".

It may be harder than it used to be but, yes, you can still make money selling porn online. I'll begin remodeling this blog, bit by bit: removing old, outdated material, freshening up the look, and - most importantly - adding new content that may of interest to those of you who want to make money looking at naked women.

Cheers!

Recession Proof Income?

Everywhere we turn these days we hear about the effect of the economic downturn. Whether you live in Europe, the US, Asia or have been shipwrecked with Gilligan, the financial crises around the world have probably impacted your country and community in some way. There is speculation that in the US alone, over one million people will lose their jobs this year. Businesses everywhere are cutting back as a result in the inevitable downturn in sales.

So how does all this dire news affect the adult web business? My suspicion was that we would all see a drop in our sales numbers. I anticipated that traffic would stay steady, or perhaps even increase as the recently-unemployed passed their days surfing for naked breasts. I further speculated that since money is tight, sales would be few. So far, I have been wrong.

Traffic to my adult sites has pretty well been on track with the patterns that I have watched over the last couple of years. I have seen some increase in sales as well.

Conversations with fellow adult webmasters tell me that I am not alone. So why is it that my neighborhood stores and small businesses have felt the financial pinch, while the adult business has not? It's because, for the most part, our business is not propelled by those who are sitting down with a calculator analyzing their financial picture and forecasting the numbers into the future.

Sex - and porn - is spontaneous. I see it. I like it. I want it. In the club, it may end there. If the girl isn't willing you can want it all night long, but you aren't going to get it. In porn, satisfaction is just a credit card away.

I am not yet willing to say that adult entertainment is "recession proof", but I would rather be doing what I am doing today than trying to run a car company. So if you are worried about your financial prospects, there may be no better time to begin your own adult empire.

Better Pictures with FREE Software

Take a look at the pictures to the right. Look quickly. Don't drool. The young lady is Denise Milani, an internet model who is quickly gaining some fame for obvious reasons. If you are interested, I can tell you that she was born in eastern Europe, now resides in the US and is making her living by having her picture taken. She does not do porn, nor pose nude; though she seems to be doing quite well for herself. If you would like, you can visit her site to learn more. I would think for those working in either a "babe" or "big boob" niche, she would be a natural.
For our purposes, however, I am more interested in the photographs themselves. Take another look. If you can pull your eyes off of the obvious for a moment, you will notice that I have used the same picture twice. The second picture has been altered.
First, I cropped it. After all, chances are good that those who come to your site didn't come to look at the water. They came to look at girls. So give them a look a the girl without all of the background clutter. NOTE: Sometimes the "clutter" is important. For example, if Miss Milani were exposing herself and there were some passers-by in the background, the keeper of a flashing blog might determine to keep that entire shot, since it is specific to his niche. Capiche?
The second thing that I did was lighten the picture just a touch. This is a pretty girl. We don't want her to be lost in the shadows, do we?
I know what some of you are thinking. "Now we have to go buy Photoshop or some other megadollar picture imaging software." Not at all. Remember, our goal is to do this for free. Even though I have some fairly pricey software, there are some great freebies on the net that will allow you to do some pretty fancy photo editing. I would recommend that you start with Picasa. Picasa is now available as a part of an free essential software package provided by Google. Over in the right column of this blog you will see a square that advertises that package. Aside from Picasa, it includes an Antivirus scan from Norton, a Spyware protection package, a new version of Adobe reader, the ultra-cool Google earth (serves no significant purpose, but it is addictive nonetheless) and a few other nice trinkets.
Picasa will let you crop, correct, add special effects, create albums and collages as well as organize all your photos. For a free program it is pretty robust, and will definitely serve the blogger well. So grab the Google Essential Software package and start sharpening up those pictures on your blog.

Track your visitors.

OK, so you have begun. You have set up your blogging account and determined your niche. You've found some webmaster affiliate programs, you have chosen a few free hosted galleries and you have created your first posts. Good for you! Now all you have to do is sit back and wait for checks to begin rolling in, right? In the words of that college football analyst, "Not so fast, my friend."

The first days of a blog are its most difficult. It takes a little while for people to even find you. When they do, they need to like what they see so that they will bookmark the site and come back again. They may stop by two, three or even four times before they buy. And - let's be honest - not everyone buys.

I would suggest that you develop a means of tracking the visitors that come to your site. There are several places that offer free site statistics. One of the best is called StatCounter. It has all the features you need to see how many people are coming to your site, what they are looking at while they are there, and what they are clicking on. With that information, you can begin to see what sorts of things are the most popular with your visitors and then tweak your site for maximum potential.

Frankly, StatCounter gives you a great deal more than just those basics. Want to know where your surfers are coming from? What keywords did they use in their search to find you? What page did they enter your site on? From what page did they leave? How long were they there? How many of your pages did they look at? You can also see what other sites are linking to yours, and even get a LIVE view of the visitors at your site at any given minute. No, you can't see them, but you can see everything that you need to know about their visit.

At this point, assuming you are a beginning blogger, you will undoubtedly be most interested in seeing the number of visitors increase every day. Over the next couple of days I will suggest some quick ways of doing that. Don't give up yet. Get yourself some free blog statistics softwareand start watching the traffic grow.

Program Spotlight - PAYSERVE

The programs that I will review and recommend are a result of my own experiences as an affiliate. Believe me, I have signed up with scores of programs and can give you a long list of those that aren't worth your time, energy or blog space. There are some good ones thought that covert well and pay promptly.

Just a few days after the first of the month, like clockwork, I receive my payment from Payserve. Since I live in the US and Payserve is a European company that pays in Euros, I get an extra "bonus" as a result of the conversion rate. Speaking of conversion, Payserve is one of my best converting sponsors. "Conversion" refers to converting a "click" to a sale.

Payserve is primarily known for being the home of the "Seventeen" brand. For years, Seventeen has been known as one of the best porn magazines out of Europe, featuring young, fresh-faced girls in explicit hardcore. Their websites have continued that tradition. With 14 sites in all, they are not limited to the teen niche. They also have some reality content, asian girls and - drawing on the history of their well-established company - classic and vintage material. Payserve releases new Free Hosted Galleries every week and has an arsenal of tools at your disposal to help you use their content to build a successful business.

Payserve offers both a recurring and flat fee program. Recurring means that you get 50% of all the money the surfer pays to Payserve for the lifetime of the membership. Recurring payments can build up long term income. If you prefer, Payserve offers up to 80% flat fee payouts. Depending on the conversion rate and the membership package the surfer chooses, that can be as much as $90(US)!

Payment can be made by check, wire or Epassporte. For those in the US, checks are mailed from an American bank, meaning your payment arrives promptly and securely.

Check out Payserve and see if they are the right fit for you.

Posting Pictures

A good blog is a good-looking blog. You will need some pictures to attract the attention of surfers and to let them see what you want them to click. After all, our purpose isn't just to have them reading, it is to have them clicking to see free hosted galleries so that they will buy memberships into our sites.

Thumblogger does not host pictures. That means that there is no way for you to put a picture into your posts without putting them somewhere so that they can be seen. The galleries themselves are hosted by our sponsors. But we need a way to post a sample on our sites.

Follow these simple directions and you will have pictures on your blog before you can say, "What the heck is hotlinking?"

1. Find a gallery. (I am assuming that you have already signed up for a webmaster affiliate program and know about Free Hosted Galleries. If not, read the associated posts) For the purposes of illustration, I will use this one. WARNING - This gallery is not safe for work, nor for those who are offended by nudity.
   
2. Choose the picture that you would like to use in your blog. I have selected the first picture in this case. I can use it here since it does not contain nudity. You should choose whatever you think will cause your blog visitors to click on it.
   
3. Save the picture to your hard drive. If you are using Firefox, just right click on the picture and "Save Image As". If you are using Internet Explorer you really should change to Firefox (see the link in the right column) for a dozen different reasons. But if you are steadfast in your desire to use IE, right click on the picture and "Save Picture As". Be sure to remember where you saved it.
   
4. We will use ImageVenue to host our picture. It is a free service made for bloggers. Open ImageVenue in a new tab or window. Click the "Browse" button and select the picture that you downloaded. Select image content (It's probably "not safe for work"). Then click "Send File(s). Now you can see your thumbnail image. My example thumbnail is on the right. All we have to do is get it to your blog.
5. Copy the code from the second box ("Hotlink a clickable thumbnail...). For convenience, lets paste it into notepad. You will notice two URL addresses. We are interested in the one that follows [IMG]. That is the address of the thumbnail. In our example, the address is http://img7.imagevenue.com/loc888/th_62950_test_123_888lo.jpg.
6. Log into Thumblogger, select the correct blog and click the "Add a New Log Entry" button.
7. Click the picture icon over the big text box. It looks like
8. When the new box opens, paste the address for the thumbnail into the Image URL field. Be sure to copy everything from http:// all the way to .jpg
9. Type an Image description and title. Use some "key words" for your blog.
10. Click the appearance tab. You will probably want to choose either left or right alignment. I have aligned our practice thumbnail on the right. That makes it appear on the right side of the post.
11. Putting the number 5 into the Horizontal Space field will keep things from getting too cramped. You can leave the other fields blank. (Or experiment to develop your own "look".)
12. Click "Insert". Viola! You have added a picture.
13. Left click on the picture in the Thumblogger new post box. You will see that the picture becomes highlighted.
    
14. Click the "link" icon. It looks like this .
15. In the "Insert URL" field, paste the link to your GALLERY. Be sure that the link includes your affiliate ID. If you used your webmaster program's gallery generator, it probably does.

That's it. Now write your content, adding a text link to the gallery and you are done. 15 steps sounds like a lot, but you will be flying though them by the time you have done 3 or 4 posts.

Get busy and get ready to start checking your stats.

Writing for Search Engines

A picture may speak a thousand words, but not if you are trying to generate web traffic, therefore you are going to have to write a few lines.

The toughest part about any business is advertising and publicity. Until people actually know that you are there, they can't very well buy from you. In a traditional "brick and mortar" business, the owner carefully selects his location for maximum exposure to his intended market, he takes out an ad in the yellow pages, he advertises in every available medium. All of that to let people know about his business and woo them to his store.

On the web, we all pretty much have the same location, the yellow pages are not a factor and advertising is only available for a price - and we are trying to do this for nothing, right? Don't despair, there is still hope.

The best advertising is good old-fashioned word of mouth. We'll talk about that another day. Your greater priority at this stage is that second form of internet publicity, the search engine. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Dogpile and AskJolene are the buses that will bring the curious masses to see what you are up to. So you need to begin your blog with them in mind.

Search engines can only read what you write. They will concentrate on your page titles, your headlines (blog titles), the titles for your pictures and the text you put in paragraph form. If all you do is post a picture with a link to a gallery, the search engine has no idea what your blog is about. You may have a thousand of the best pictures of girls with green socks on the net, but without written words no one will be able to find them.

Not a writer, you say? Stay calm, you don't need to be Hemingway to attract web traffic. All you need are a few lines that incorporate the "key words" that web surfers are likely to use when looking for pictures, videos and other information about your niche. Let's go back to our green-socked girls for some inspiration. What would you type into a search engine if that is what you wanted to see?

girls with green socks
teen green socks
green socks girls
babes green stockings
redhead green socks

Ok, the last one is a little more specific than our blog, but we want to get that guy too, right?

Make sure that when you write, you include those phrases and any others that you can think of. It is not necessary to include ALL of them in every post, just hit one or two.

"Yesterday, I was at the mall and noticed how many girls were there. None of them had green socks. I wish this redhead would have been there, to see her gorgeous legs wrapped in those green stockings would have made my day! Click here to see more pictures of this great looking redhead."

OK, so you weren't at the mall and that is probably the dumbest bunch of rubbish you have ever read. Agreed. But after you write a half-dozen post or so using those phrases, google will begin sending folks your way. Besides, if you are really into girls with green socks, you are going to come up with something better than that!

A quick side note. You aren't going to "fool" Google, Yahoo or the other search engines. People have been attempting that for years in an effort to attract more traffic to their sites by acting like the site deals with something that it does not. The search engine gods are working harder and harder (thankfully) at making sure that a site delivers what it promises. Be honest about what your site is, and the search engines will bring you people who are honestly interested. In the end that is what you want. People who are tricked into coming to your site aren't interested in buying what you are selling anyway.

OK, get busy. You need a half-dozen posts or so before your site is search-engine ready, so you have work to do!