I’m sure you’ve heard the old cliche, “Thinking Outside the Box”. How to out wit the competition and having more business then you know what to do with. Or build a better mousetrap?

So why is it this industry still shovels the same shit? Or the fact that their mousetraps are no better than the ones every one has in that over flowing junk draw in their kitchen?

Seems if your not doing Tubes sites, you not pimpin.  Sorry, was new and out of the box 5 years ago when Utube did it. Old news.

In reality it’s the same ole smelly crap. Just newly skinned tgp’s giving even more of the store away. Business as usual. Like this industry doesn’t have enough programs, lets just give out more free content. Johnny can jerk off without getting his hand even close his pocket. Unless he’s looking for something to clean up with.

It’ no wonder Johnny’s not buying much porn these days.

I usually get idea’s for my posts from adult webmaster boards I frequent. That’s were this one came from.

I guess you just can’t stop free hosting. Folks don’t realize, but it snuck in through the back door once again.

Years ago, there were services that hosted adult content for free. Some might remember the likes of Porncity and others I can’t remember right now, it’s been awhile.

It was a hell of a deal, you could host all your adult pictures movies and sites for free, no cost. Well the cost of having their ads on your pages, stealing the prime real estate on your pages. Which in reality was a much higher cost than hosting, but the herd followed.

It didn’t take long to realize, free hosts sucked. For one, all the ads, second many free hosting services did not play nice. Some would sneak in 404 errors when there was none, 404 pages with of course, their ads. Or redirects when their was no need. All this causing far to many problems for directories and link lists who ended up with far too many bad, dead or redirected links.

The biggest problem with the free host model is that it left out accountability. When your actually paying out your hard earned dollars you tend to take your business seriously. with free hosting there is little incentive to keep up your business, you had nothing to lose.

Sure webmasters who put up the cash disappear as well, but when the money is on the table, it’s usually a different mind set to begin with.

But alas…

Even with all it’s inherent problems, free hosting is back, now disguised as free blog hosting. Guess they must have some new tricks up their sleeves, ones we can’t see, to make it all better?

It’s no better and no different. It’s still free hosting and it will still be a problem.

It’s even more of a problem today because of all the software development and high speed internet access. Now days you can purchase software to automate the process or building and updating blogs. Basically churning out millions of bytes of crap.

Who’s losing out?

The poor guy trying to do it right by creating content by hand, real and unique content. He loses out because he doesn’t mass produce. Since he doesn’t mass produce he doesn’t have hundreds of listings that clog up the directories with useless garbage, garbage the search engines don’t even want because they know better. Yet blog directories seem to list any ole crap, day in and day out.

Sad it’s come to this where the crap rises to the top. It should be the other way around.

It comes down to this…

If you can’t come up with $20 a month for hosting and $10 a year for a domain name, you don’t need to deserve to be in this business. Your not taking the business serious enough, so why should any one take you seriously. That is unless you want to do blogs.

One use to be able to say, you’ll do much better with your own hosting, but it’s not exactly true right now.

It will be again… mark my words. It will come. Let’s just hope it will be sooner than later.

This is going to be a long one… but worth it…

It amazes me how hard people work in this business yet they are leaving money on the table every day, and probably quite a bit of money.

They work their butts off for many hours a day yet they skip one of the more important steps for making the most of their work or getting the the biggest return on their time investment.

What is it missing ingredient?

Tracking and testing.

As affilaites there is only so much we can do until we send our traffic to a affiliate program, but it’s enough to make a difference.

At the very least you could be tracking your website visitors, how they move and and even leave from your site. You could learn what content is most popular and create more of it. You might be able to understand why they leave your site and do something about it. You could discover how the traffic get’s to your site and ramp up promotion that works the best.

For blog owners, there are a couple fine plug-in’s for Wordpress that integrate Google Analytics into your site with a couple clicks of the mouse, providing you with incredible data about your site and how your visitors interact or do not interact with it.

The most productive tactic any webmaster can use, which few choose to do for some odd reason, is testing and tracking their ads. Your ads are how you connect your visitor to the affilaite program. Send visitor to program, if they buy, you make money. We all know this, but few seem to understand, they could be sending more potential customers with little extra work.

It’s simple really, if your ads convert at 2%, your sending 2% of your traffic to the affiliate program. For every 100 visitors, 2 will make it the sponsor. What if you double your ad conversions, you would double your traffic to the sponsor and in theory, double your income. Twice the income for the same work.

Do you even have a clue as to how your ads convert? You might be shockingly surprised.

The thing is, it’s doesn’t take that much work to multiply your ad clicks and increase your income. You put your ads in a ad tracking program such as the incredible free program, openads and let them run. Once set up, there is not that much work. You drop the ones with poor performance and let the higher ones run on full throttle. Add news one to test against the controls.

And It’s not just doubling or tripling your click-thurs and income, I’ve had plenty of banners that get a 10% click through rate or better.

You could say, “But golly gee, it would take me time to install and learn how to use the ad tracking program (whine..)”. Whine somewhere else. These same people that would whine are the same ones complaining they are not making enough money. Gee, wonder why?

Not to mention, once it’s set up and loaded with ads, how much work is there? Monitor the ads and switch out or add as needed. Would it be worth it?

Let’s be realistic here, when you started in this business, how much did you know? For most people, not much, it took time to learn how to make web pages, how to build free sites, how to submit, how to get traffic, blah, blah, blah. But yet they don’t want to take the time to learn and use one of the most important tools that could increase their income.

You spend time making sure your free site is done right so it gets listed and gets traffic don’t you? Other wise you get no traffic and you make no money. So why wouldn’t you make sure you ads are getting the most clicks they can? Same thing, no clicks, no money. People are missing part of the plan. What could be, the most important part of the plan.

Recently on one of the boards a new paysite owner was asking whether to use trials or not on his web site. Said he didn’t want to test them all… trying to take the easy way out. Course most of us do by nature.

Why wouldn’t you want to test each and every one? How are you going to know for sure which is really best? Opinions on a message board are just that, more often than not, they are guesses. Not to mention, what works for one site and their content, could very well NOT work for another program.

Going back to Google, they host an amazing webmaster tool called Web Site Optimizer and it’s free! With it you could test numerous price points and sales pages. Once set up, it runs for you and in the end tells you exactly (no guessing) what converts the best, or what makes the most from your traffic.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not to crazy about leaving my income in the hands of guesses and opinions.

Do I do all of the above? No, but I do most of it, thats what counts, I am in the game playing and I know it’s made a difference when those checks come in the mail.

The only question left is, What are you going to do?

For most webmasters it’s all about getting the sponsor converting, if they don’t convert well, they are history. I’m not saying thats exactly a bad plan, but here’s something else to think about…

Over the years one thing I’ve noticed about some sponsors, while they might be tough to get that first sale with the surfer, on the other hand, they can recur quite well. In the long run, numbers of rebills that keep on going can be a nice steady income. Some sponsors are just better at keeping members than getting them on board.

So before you blow off that sponsor because they might not be selling off the bat, look at your rebills or think about giving them a longer run.

I’m not saying to waste your traffic wad on a crap sponsor, just something to think about.