I'm not trying to discourage anybody from anything. I just think there's a ton of bullshit that flies around in this business, and like I said, I don't think it's nice to taunt people.

If it's so easy to make 50k a year just from freesites, where are the people here in this community, here at GG&Js, that are doing it? All I ever hear is talk about how little money most people are making.

I guess all the 50k from freesites guys only post at gfy.

If you make 360 freesites a year, and get an average of 4 $35 sales per freesite, you can gross 50k. Both of those are unrealistic numbers.

I'm not saying you can't make 50k a year in this biz, absolutely you can.

But, 50k a year from freesites? After a year? Starting from scratch? I don't believe it.

People have a tendency to exaggerate how much money they are making.

How do you think this makes the folks who are only able to make 15k or 20k a year from freesites feel?

Thanks for the great thread everyone! I make money off of my free sites. Not a 1000 a week but make money. I don't ever expect to make 50k a year it would be nice but I don't have my expectations near that high.

What I have done in the year and a half since I started is spend money. Mostly in content so far. I invested in content and housing before I was making a dime. I have a fake tgp with galleries that I link to on all my free sites. I also have a link list which has all my free sites and my sponsors free sites, plus submits. I have noticed that I'm getting sales now from my tgp, not my link list yet.

So I have invested the money and certainly the time, as I feel like I live on my pc! I usually make four free sites a week, on average. My next step is to invest in some better programs for my pc to make better sites, logos etc.

So can you make a living off of free sites that I don't know. My husband is the income maker this is more or less spending money, and unexpected expensive money for us. So I'm happy with what I'm making a month at this point. Do I want to make more money? Shit yeah and I can tell you I would not be sitting here an average of a least 8 hours a day every day if I didn't.

I hope I'm on the right track with how I'm doing things and it will continue to pay off for me. The first week if ever I make 1000 dollars you'll all hear me celebrating from here..... |thumb

Great advice everyone and good luck to all of us!

Life is about choices. Each of us make them every day. You can listen to positive people that try to help or you can listen to negative people who have a hidden agenda.

Most of the posters on this board need help and there are some willing to help them. Others want to shut you out to keep more of the pie for themselves.

The people that are making good money usually help people that are trying and appreciate their help. It's your life and your choice who to listen to.

Good Luck :)

Bill - please reread what I said - after 1 year with the use of all the tools (hubs etc) along with those 360 free sites (and hopefully people still submit to places like DMOZ and other SEs with a made for SE copy of their free sites) starting that second year $1k a week should be average - to break it down to a certain # of sales per free site is not realistic as you will get sales from your "mousetrap" sites, traffic pumps and hubs that you have built along with these free sites (hopefully) although realistically at the one year point you would really only need 2 sales per free site out there if you were still building as after one year you have 360 plus the sites you are building today.
To those making 15-20k a year from submitting free sites I would only say that you could increase your income quite a bit - its not an easy biz and unfortunately that is why so few actually stay in the free site end of it - that compounded with the fear generation that has plagued this industry for the last year has dropped the number of submitters drastically. To me that just means there are even more opportunities out there :)

yeah, 4k a month is a decent living but it taking one year of work just to achieve it is what i think isn't worth it. i'd imagine there are other more lucrative things you could work at for one year straight and make much more.

i know the online adult industry isn't get rich quick but it used to be, for me at least. when i first started doing this i was making 10k a month within 6 months. i spent years waking up at noon working for a couple hours a day and partying the rest still pulling in good money. i guess all of that has spoiled me because now all i can think of is how much better it was back then.

as for the reason i don't start a linklist now, its too late to be a greenguy, or a tommy, or xxxjays. no one is gonna submit to a site that doesn't have hundreds of thousands of hits per day.

i've just got to face the fact that things are very different now and will never return to the days of old but if i can't make 50k a year working 8 hours a day at whatever in the online adult world, i think i'll have to find another area of work but i can't for the life of me imagine working for someone else now, after all these years of freedom.

Linkster, I feel I know exactly what you mean. Working a whole system, taking advantage of all the traffic oppurtunities out there, tapping search engine money (which is a lot _slower_ these days than it used to be, remember, if you are starting from scratch), I agree, a skilled person could do it.

I believe I could probably do it, for instance. But I sure as hell would hate to have to try.

But that's not from freesites alone. The traffic coming from linklists alone is just not that lucrative these days.

I understand the point you are trying to make - but, I think you are splitting hairs here, and going fairly far outside the original scope of the question.

I don't want people to feel bad because they aren't seeing that 50k a year you are suggesting should be "fairly easy to make".

I keep coming back to one essential point - if it's so easy, where are the people doing it?

Because the only people I see doing it are the oldtimers with established networks and a wealth of contacts and skill and resources.

I think Linkster is trying to say if someone who is prepared to work really really hard at it can achive it. But I'd agree with you on saying dont get your hopes up.

I have read a few tutorials of experienced webmasters pretending they were newbies staring from scratch to show you can make money (LB did one on netpond) and they make it look much easier than it actually is.

But is the relationship straight line, as you suggest, or exponential? I don't know and maybe some of the more successful people can straighten me out but is there a threshold of sites and links at which you make more money than just a 1:1 ratio?

---art

Not required E. I was just trying to point out that there are other places besides the net to explore. And many other TV shows also.

artwilliams - it is pretty much exponential if you are using the things I suggest like hubs and other traffic filtering devices. Which is why I stick to the basic notion that anyone that is willing to put the 12-14 hours a day that this would require into actually doing it - I know for a fact that those levels of money can be made - Ive seen it done first-hand, however Im kinda reluctant to point out any names without their permission.

Bill - as far as having to be an old-timer or not - I dont believe that has anything to do with it - the people I have watched do this exact thing have taken it upon themselves to network on this and other boards, go to the shows and build those relationships over that first year that get them a few extra bennies with LLs and other traffic sources. Im sorry but maybe this whole "plan" I am talking about is outside your definition of just making free sites - and you are correct - if someone just wants to spend 2 hours a day making and submitting free sites every day - they are going to be limited to the 10-15k or so a year. I have always considered making free sites a part of a complete free site package which is what I kinda base my thoughts on :)

I just got into doing Free sites full time about 4 weeks ago. I'm not up to building one a day yet, I'm getting about 5-6 a week done. I quit my job to do this full time also. I saw the 1000/week # tossed around in this thread, and that's actually my goal. A year from now I hope to be making 1K a week. I would be extremely happy with that result. 1K a week USD is not bad at all when you live in Canada and are 25 years old. That's just my goal though.

I should add that I'm going to be doing 2 galleries a day on top of my free site. I've been told by some very knowlegable people in this biz that's the formula too follow.

So hopefully I'll be here in a year saying "Fuck yeah, I'm finally making 1K a week!". Not that a year is a long time! Buidling a business, any business takes extreme hardwork and dedication and it takes many years for people to get where thay are today.

It can be a tough business. There's people making money from free sites, the link pages of their own where they list them, the extra ads on such pages.. Their whole network of sites. I can see it in their stats, so I'm sure.
It's not just getting a free site to a link list though, it's building up from there.

There has to be a willingness to learn also, and attend the chats even if you think you know what you're doing and can do no wrong :) The old "80/20/10" rule is in full force at all times. You can tell 10 people exactly what to do to make money, 8 wont do it for whatever reason (too hard, too much work, dont understand etc), 2 will try to apply it, and only 1 will succeed with it. So you have to be that 1 in 10 person and sprinkle on a little luck.

Try new things. Here's something that is a truism I guess.
"If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten.".

So if you submit 10 freesites a week and get 1 sale a week and never change anything, then you'll get 1 sale a week for the rest of your life.

Try a new format, try a new sponsor, try a new site at your sponsor, try a new niche you've never tried before. Try a different content provider, try making your pics bigger. Try asking a link list owner what category gets the most raw hits. Try submitting to new link lists, try old link lists you never really tried. Try finding link lists with search engines. *ANYTHING* new!! Ever open photoshop to make a custom banner? Try it!!

You can most definitely make money from "just free sites" as long as that doesnt mean index, main, 2 galleries and submit. It's alot more than that.

great read guys and I got a little bummed out reading what bill said, but I see what I am doing now and know what needs to be done to go to the next level, I remember what linkster said a long time ago - it takes a min 1 year just to get the hang of this and a good buddy of mine who is making well over 50k a year didnt make hardly anything there first year.. I am going on my 3 year and started a LL just after 10 free sites built..

Is the LL doing as good as I want it to be - NO but that isnt no problem, start another one and target a specific SE,

dont waste a lot of time in a LL early on - build and build and you will soon see that free sites just dont generate a lot of traffic, so go to galleries...

IMO you need a 100k a day of traffic coming into a domain root all filtered out to your free sites and galleries to make a good income... you got to see those big traffic numbers to make bank..

the older LL owners by 5-10 years have the traffic that makes them decent money and with free sites and galleries they can make killer cash..

heck some people have 2 or 3 LL a bunch of smaller hubs and been subbing galleries everyday for years and know wich ones convert the best..

the question was just free sites, I know for a fact that you can make 8 to 9 hundred a month steady off of 100 SE friendly that gets se traffic - so do the math..

yes this biz is a lot of work and when you work for your self it is a lot of work..

Tom - thats gotta be one of my favorite quotes of all time - and so very true! And it applies to everything in life - not just this biz - I used to have that and one other quote hanging on my wall of my office at the corporate job I worked for some time - and finally I "got it" and took the step getting into this full time :)

BTW - my other favorite quote was "you are either part of the steam roller or part of the road"

Funny thing, I started this debate thinking it would cheer people up, apparently it had the opposite effect.

So I reverse my position. Making a k a week is fairly easy in this business.

Me, I have to make a k a week just to make my nut. ("making the nut" means to cover business expenses, taxes, and basic living expenses - it's an old business expression) If I can do it, anyone should be able to do it, because, frankly, I don't work that hard.

So, everthing I was saying, I was just kidding. If you're not making 50k in a year, I'm sure you will be soon.

As I've always said, this is the best home-based business ever invented. I truly believe that.

So, like I said, I was just kidding.

I like the much more realistic approach to business than the motivational speaker approach. Most of us don't have the "if I can dream it, I can do it attitude" because we are realists. Being a realist doesn't mean were necesarily pessimistic either. We're just willing to acknowledge the known hurdles and toss in normal human behaviour. Most people aren't going to build 5-6 free sites per week and submit them. Why? It's bloody boring, that's why. Most of the shit we do is really fucking mundane. When I say that someone can't come along and make a living off of free sites, I'm not saying that it's entirely impossible. I'm saying that the average person couldn't. You'd need to be a mix of highly motivated and skilled. Most aren't.

nothing anyone else can say will discourage me. If I need to feel discouraged, I can do a fine job all by myself, thank you :D

the point to me is not 'can I get rich' doing this, it's can I make enough money to keep doing it ft, pay my personal bills & still have enough money left to put some back into it. So far, the answer has been yes, because to be honest, I really don't invest that much cash in it right now. Content & bandwidth is cheap, and I can see that freesites will provide me with enough to do what I want to do. A year from now, I will have more domains, more hubs, maybe get into more gallery posts, etc. whatever, but I won't be doing just freesites & expecting to be making 50k.
Most people here know that, I think.

It's a business. I didn't get into porn just cuz I like looking at naked people ya know :D

Being mean is not helpful, being realistic is. This discussion has been very helpful imo. |thumb

As long as I see more sales the harder I work, I'll be happy in this biz. And no, I won't build free sites every damn day because that'll drive me crazy. Maybe I need to sit myself down and set up a well-oiled system where i can build free sites a day in 30 min flat, but that's another story.

Unlike working for a boss, there's no one in this biz telling you you're only gonna get paid X dollars an hour after working there for 20 years or you gotta come into work at Y am or get fired because you messed something up.

Realistic is good, but no one really knows what real is. 50 years ago, there was no Ebay or ipod or HDTV. You can either accept that, or change it.

Hmm... that all sounded like a motivational speaker approach:D

Here's a dose of reality: "Many are called, few are chosen."

Very true...I've done the 'cranking out free sites' approach. Frankly, I pretty much burned myself out on it. It does get boring and tedious as hell after a while.

So, now I'm still lauching new free sites, but not on the 3/day scale I was doing for a while.

Yes, there is certainly money to be made in the business. The thing that keeps me going at it is I really figure as long as there are men on the planet...there will be porn :D

As has been alluded to already, it takes a wider approach than just free sites. It's actually one of the very cool things about this biz...there are lots of ways to generate traffic/revenue. And exploring some of those other avenues beyond just free sites also helps keep the burnout at bay to some extent.

The kinds of hours we work are certainly prime for burnout. I've been stuck in that mindset for the past few weeks, but think I've finally shaken it off and am ready to get jiggy with things again :D

It comes down to how motivated and driven one is. Either you do the things needed to be successful or you don't.

Of all the people I know who own successful businesses (there are a lot) not one of them got to where they are without a plan and working hard to execute that plan. There are no short cuts to success!

With that in mind I need to build some sites |thumb

You are on your way keep it up |thumb

Thank you, Surfn - that's very encouraging
|blowkiss|

this board has some of the best porn slingers around, you guys are such a wealth of information, anyone who hangs around here on a regular basis is bound to learn a thing or two ;)

I was going to post quite a long post, but it turned into a garbled mish-mash of shit, so instead:

Yes, I think you can make 50k a year from freesites. In your first year, starting from absolute scratch with no knowledge, no sales expertise, like many of us (myself for sure) started? Nope. In your second year? Yep.

i find writing down a schedule for yourself can help, or chop things up into days. make 7 free sites one day, use the galleries from the free sites to make galleries to submit the next. dedicate one day for SE work and another day for various other projects. its hard to keep up without someone on your ass but thats how it goes when you're self employed. i just gotta get used to working 8 hour days again. it still pisses me off how as the years pass we have to work harder for less income.

Well, this is a little complicated.

With the submit and forget strategy, it's pretty much a straight line decline. Over time fewer and fewer links will bring traffic to the site, and even if you are using unique keywords the SE traffic will also collapse.

If you support freesites within your own complete network, the length of time that the site draws in signups is much longer. This is what I do, and it's what Linkster is talking about, or rather, a part of what linkster is talking about.

But, when you analyze a freeites performance over a year, you will see for yourself that, on the average, it's possible to asign a value, a number of signups, for each freesite you make.

My measurements suggest a good free site builder can expect to get about 3 full value signups per freesite.

Why is this so low? Because you have to constantly vary niche, site type, and sale stechnique in order to get your 5 sites accepted to the big guys each week.

You can't always use the best content, the best sales method, the best banner, in the best positions. One does one's best, but some percentage of freesites are going to have dissapointing sales. For the freesite that makes ten sales there are two freesites that make a half sale each, or no sales.

You get an average.

Over on GFY blue_spade suggested that figure should be about $60, two $30 signups.

I think for me the average works out to about 3.25 sales per freesite built. I prefer $35 sponsors but you have to factor in the lower value signups. So lets be generous and average it out to $105 per freesite.

(edit: I need to amend this, it was that figure for me at the beginning of 2003. Now, that figure is much lower, but I haven't done the math. I estimate it at about $80-90. But, blue_spade's 2 signups could be closer to my current figure than I like to think.)

Now, with good overall strategy you leverage that out over time, so the freesite maybe makes 3 sales the next year, two the following year, and four the year after that.

Over time, that means we folks with older networks start making pretty decent money.

Sure, it is a decline per individual freesite, but your overall traffic network is at a constant increase. Let's just say as an example that you submit one freesite every day and maintain about 3000 hits to your sites overall. After awhile, every single one of those sites is going to be picked up by search engines and add a little extra traffic. So, you will have the 3000 hits daily + lets just say 10 hits per day per each freesite, so you could almost say that as each day goes by, your overall traffic network increases by x (search engine traffic or whatever else) so there is an increase over time. Link sites, hubs, and otherwise will definetely increase that network and your bottom line as well.

In that quote I specified _submit and forget_. That will produce a fairly straight line decline of profitability. Test it. See if I'm wrong.

In the lines you didn't quote I described some of the numbers that could be seen, that I have seen personally, in a complete system. So, I already talked about what you just suggested as an alternative to my comment about the straight decline.

I said this, "Now, with good overall strategy you leverage that out over time, so the freesite maybe makes 3 sales the next year, two the following year, and four the year after that.

Over time, that means we folks with older networks start making pretty decent money."

Traffic doesn't increase endlessly. It tends to reach a average level, and, if you are good at what you do, stay roughly at that level. This level is based on how much work you are doing, and on your traffic strategies, and also on the seasonal and stochastic distribution of traffic generally on any given day or month.

Traffic isn't infinite, and adult traffic has in general been slowly declining and slowly becoming less profitable.

Search engine traffic has also declined, in general, altho some types of pages are doing better now than, say, two years ago. But, the little freesite has much less chance of a listing that will actually bring hits now than ever before.

(I'm simplifying the factors involved in average levels of traffic, for the sake of simplifying this discussion.)

The bottom line is that everyone has to do the measurements for themselves. Some niches and sales strategies might give a better average number of sales per freesite - shemale has that reputation.

So, I invite you to work the numbers. Count how mnay sites per week you can realistically submit, and average out how many sales you get.

So, if a person was to take many niches and target the SE's for several varying keywords (shemale sex, shemales fucking, shemale ass, etc and when they run out do bbw sex, bbw ass, bbw tits, etc and on and on) and achieves them to an extent (not necessarily first page, but getting some traffic) and they do this for every niche and as many keywords as possible, you say that the profitability will decline? Why is that?

At what point do you think the decline starts happening? 100 freesites? 1000?

I would just think that if targeting many niches with different kw's for the SE's, traffic would slowly increase over time, and not really plateau.

I guess there could be the eventual deindexing of old old sites that could most definetely cause a plateau. What do you think?

Oh, and sorry if this post doesn't make sense, heh...just trying to put my thoughts into text :)

Ahhh, I think we might be having some confusion about terms that I'm using.

When I say "a straight line of decline" for certain type of freesites, that is, build and forget freesites, what I mean is that a certain type of freesite is most likely to make sales when it is first listed, and is getting the most traffic it will ever get from new listings. Then, as time goes on, it's probability of making sales drops in roughly a straight line. It becomes stale, all the biggest linklists drop the listing after a certain number of months, and surfers have seen the site before.

Such a site is likely to make a total average of, lets say, two and a half sales during it's active lifetime. So, lets say it's worth 30+30+15=$75.

Lots of niches are lucky to see a sale per site. Lots of niches only make a sale every two sites. Some niches make 6-8 sales per site. But you get an average.

If you put that site into a complete system, where you link to it again and again from new hub pages, and use it as a listing in a fake linklist, and so on, you can extend it's value. But even in that case sites tend to go slowly stale. Sponsors get overused, content gets seen too many times.

This is another type of decline, but it's not what I meant when I talked about a straight line decline. A straight line decline happens with _unsupported_ freesites and galleries.

People will tell you about "That old site I built years ago just made another sale...", and that is a very real phenomenon, but this is a type of selective perception - they forget about the dozens and hundreds of other old sites that are making fewer sale sthan they used to make.

In the search engines, pages are constantly being forced further and further back in the serps, and you have to work steadily to keep your pages alive. Unless you are using a centralized strategy - basically, unless you have a sucessful linklist or tgp with a steady flow of thousands of incoming links, your freesites will tend to dissappear. This isn't an absolute for every site, but it is pretty much an absolute for your 'average' site. On the average , all pages are falling out of the serps.

A hard worker, who is constantly exploring and exploiting new traffic sources, can slowly increase their average traffic pretty consistently - but this is substantially harder that it sounds in theory, becuase everyone else is also trying to hold and increase their pool of traffic.

Ok, yeah, I think I did misunderstand ya at first. I always thought of the submit and forget principle a little differently, which included adding the sites to hubs/etc. I guess that is not really forgetting :)

I totally agree that if just creating generic freesites that after a certain period, they would go bye bye...just like galleries to an extent.

I know what you mean though about the eventual decline in All sites from the search engines over time. I think that once you reach that point though (if you submit constantly and support those sites) you should be doing pretty well though, so the decline won't affect you too hard.

great info here :)

Noob question : Could I see an exemple of a hub please ?

Here ya go ;)

It's not funny .... well actually it is |jester|

I was more waiting for this in fact but anyway |huh

You folks are insane!
:D

There's a few examples of what people consider to be hubs in this thread from a while back:
(I think it's still relevant two years on)
http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...ead.php?t=3130

Hope that helps.
:)

Hubs can take a thousand different forms, from highly niched to very general, from a single full page ad to a thousand page fully developed search engine content site.

Here's an example of one of my hubs, which looks like a small linklist.

http://www.2freeporno.com/

I have a few dozen hubs of various types. When you are starting out, one will do perfectly fine.

It's basically a page or site on which you list your own domains, pages, freesites, gallerys, and whatever else you want. It can include reviews, full page ads, link exchanges with your friends, listings of your friends freesites (friends who list your freesites on their hub), articles you write, jokes, images to attract google images traffic, and whatever else you like.

The example I gave is a clean hub, no popups or tricks, but some people swear by dirty hubs that pop chains and are filled with blind links and traps.

The common practice is to include links to your hub on your freesites as part of your allowed links.

Ok I get it, thanks bill that's appreciated

Thanks for the link too. I'll read all that carefully

I have to disagree with you here man. Sorry I did not reply to this sooner but I dont get alot of the posts in my email and I guess thats a good thing as it would drive me crazy. But look at what you just said here. Honestly I know people that went to college for 4 years, became lawyers, finanical consultants for huge fortune 500 companies out of NYC and it took them at a minium 3 years to even make that type of money. Hell my one friend thought he would leave law school and start out with a 6 figure gig. HE was shocked and very depressed for a long time when he looked over his bill from school and then saw his 35k a year paycheck.
Sure there are more things someone could do for 1 year and maybe make more money,but are they legal? But I'm going to go out on a limb here and think you are somewhat young and have no idea. Cause if you did you would either be making more money or not saying that comment. When I was in 11th grade some came into my school and asked us what we thought we would be making or expected to make right out of school in a job. I said 50k and he laughed. I thought he was wrong, be he was right. Dude 50k is not something easy to come by in any job. Look in the papers, internet or where ever and tell me what jobs you think someone can pull in that money with 1 years worth of exp or less.

wow, juggernaut - I have never responded to one of your posts before but I gotta say this was excellent. You are right - I had a govt job that would be considered 'cushy' and it would've taken me probably another 2-3 yrs to make that kind of $ (in comparable CAD of course :))

the thing here is that I WAS making 35k, which is not too shoddy, now |pokefun| me - I consider myself lucky to get a cheque each week :D

but I know that it's coming along. It's getting there that hurts lol, and a lot of folks can't wait that long, that's all.

Ponygirl