[amareck]

Welcome Noonan I'll try to answer some of your questions. To fully answer your questions would take many many bourbons and far more time than I have spare, so here's the basics you asked about

Firstly: Follow the advice of Joneze - start reading this board. It will be a damned good start.

Where do I even begin? The first thing that made me even consider this was after visiting nscash.com. To me it seems I could set up a page to basically promote all of their sites. Like I see with all these other thumb gallery sites that link to different sites all over the place.
I'm just really in the dark as to how to start this off.

Ok - there are many types of "traffic". Traffic means surfers hitting your site and therefore POSSIBLY clicking your advertisement as they are being subject to your craftily placed banners screaming SIGN UP for <insert porn description> HERE...

First step: get a domain. There are plenty of freehosting options, but they generally suck for one reaosn or another and you wont get far with them.

Second step: get a sponsor. You cant make cash in this bizo unless you're selling yourself, selling your product, or selling someone else's product. Personally, Id rather sell myself but no one's buying...so I opted for selling someone else's shit. The shit I sell is my SPONSOR's shit. nscash is a sponsor - they own sites that people pay money to access. You will want to find sponsors that own paysites that you wish to promote.

I see different things in the forum like "pay sites" or "thumb sites". Any insight is appreciated.

Here we go....

TGP = thumbnail gallery post. It is a single page with 10-20 pics (or some movies) on it. They usually have an add top & bottom and tend to be graphically involved. Considering your background, no great difficulty.

Free Sites are exactly that. A free site with porn pics or movies on it. It costs the surfer nothing to view and the concept is that the free site pays its creator by making sales. It has an index/warning page, a main page, and two gallery pages. So its kind of like a fat TGP, but with the index/warning page.

Pay Site: its a porn site where members pay to get access to assloads of porn. This is the product you are (generally) marketing. Referring to an earlier paragraph, this is the "someone else's shit" you are selling. You write a website with 20 pics of a hot big titty chick on it. You advertise Big-Tits-R-Us.com with banners. When a surfer clicks the banner, it sends them to your sponsor's paysite with your referrer code in the URL. Sponsor records your referral from the URL and if surfer signs up, you get some bling.

Also what type of income could be generated from average upkeep? How much time is usually invested in this?

Cant answer that one. How long is a piece of string? I was new to the industry and it took me about 6 months (at around 2hrs / day) to start getting approx USD400-600/month - I was very lazy and laid back about it. I left porn for almost 2 years and during that time did nothing. I've only just come back and Im STILL getting about USD300/month. The time you spend will increase earnings, and they are more residual earnings than upfront. Because your websites keep selling long after you built them.

What's with all these gallery sites linking to other gallery sites?

Search engines like text. They think its relevant or some shit *shrug*. They pay attention to link sites (an example is http://link-o-rama.com) as such sites link to many hundreds (or thousands) of other sites. So a link site may link to 10,000 of the free sites. Search engines pay attention. When linksite A and linksite B get special attention from search engines...it is good...when they link to each other, the search engines pay even MORE attention. What bearing on porn you ask? Simple: because search engine traffic is the best traffic. Who is more likely to buy? The guy who has a website in his BOOKMARKS (because he knows its free and updates daily) or the dude who goes to google, types in "mature porn" and clicks on the first site that looks promising?

In referential terms, DMOZ is a link site. A link site in porn is the same thing, except it lists USEFUL stuff...like porn!

Also, I see that some people use different types of applications to drive some of their sites? Are these necessary? I'm very savvy with php/mysql, javascript, html, xhtml, dhtml, css, actionscript, the whole nine. And also very good with layout and graphics.

You need this skill set if you are going to run a link site. Would you like to rebuild each page of a link site by hand? Of course not. You build a nice robust database, give a front end for submissions from webmasters, a back end admin panel, and some sexy templates to show off the final product. If you are doing this stuff be warned: it is a slow way to make cash. TGP & Free site works will get you money NOW. Link lists will take ages because you have to build up your traffic and surfer base and that takes TIME.

Some xh & dh is nice also...css is (IMO) critical, but most webmasters will tell you it ain't and technically it isn't necessary.... But none of this will mean a thing if you cannot sell porn. It seems to me you have the right skill set....but can you market? That's what you'll be making cash from - selling someone a concept of what they desire this very second while they are (Coincidentally) looking at your latest piece of art

So in a nutshell...

1) Find a place to start selling porn (your domain)
2) Find someone's porn to start selling (your sponsor)
3) Look around and figure out what vehicle you want to sell porn from (free site, TGP, link site, other)
4) Start building