How long does it take you to make a FS?
 

Takes me about 2-3 hours in total, considering everything from choosing the site to promote, doing the design, text and everything. When I started out, someone told me it should only take 1 hour to make a FS, but I don't know, tends to take me a whole lot longer...

Making a freesite takes me about 1.5-2 hours. Submitting it to the 36 LL's I submit to now takes me another 40 minutes, don't ask me why it takes so long but it just does :)

my record is 3 hours, I can't make it less. all depends how fancy you want your freesite look like, do you watch how good every link stands out, match one link to another, bottom describe what mentioned on top. do you use tables, find right colors, spend time searching for the right keyword combination for title, etc. many factors.

submitting takes me 45 mins minimum, 118 link-lists manually.

When I make a fs it takes me about an hour. Then a few additional mins to submit.

I was thinking about the same thing, and figured that once you created some fs's (around 30) you could use them as templates for future galleries which would cut the time considerably. Other than that it is pretty much switching images, banners, text, color, and submitting. Am I thinking too far off here?

Well, if you're building plain old blah-blah shit sites, then an hour is about right. I've seen a couple of your sites on the board, I think, and, as I recall, you shoot for a more refined design. I also know that you are an SE person, so those elements are going to add to your build time as well. If you're quality-conscious, you have to expect your endeavers to require more time. When I started, it took me literally all day to build and submit a single site. I eventually knocked that down a couple of hours, but my sites, I must confess, were still not as nice as yours or many other builders out there. I still build free sites for others, on occasion, and the time it takes me to create a single non-graphic HTML template is still all over the place.

Depending on my level of inspiration, how much I recycle from other freesites, how many trips to the bathroom, trips to the kitchen to re-heat my coffee, cats that need petting etc. etc. and any number of unavoidable urgent distractions that require my immediate attention, I'd say anywhere from 1 hr to the whole day.

LOL - yep, that's about right.

I build from the pictures up so I generally don't use templates, although I will use the same design concepts. If I end up doing a graphical title or something then it takes longer. Plus if you have to do a lot of work with the pics, etc etc...it's so hard to give a definitive time frame to build a good freesite.

Ponygirl

With 4 kids under 8, one cat and a husband, it takes me all day to build & submit a free site. I used to be able to do it in a few hours but now I have to stop/start what I'm doing so much that I seem to never get stuff done. Plus I don't like using templates so most of my sites are built from scratch.

holy crow - I'll give you a medal just for geting up in the morning, never mind getting freesites built :D

Ponygirl

I use pretty much ~3 hrs. to build a freesite, that is, when the galleries are allready built.
If i should build a freesite from the bottom up, with galleries, mainsite and the index i would say 4-5 hrs.
I am using too much time to custom build banners and buttons, and way too long on the texts, but i would say it is better to build one good site and get accepted , than to build 5 and get rejected at most places :)

Interesting replies... I have been having this discussion with another submitter on ICQ. He's putting far less time into his FS, working with a few plain templates and producing them quickly enough. Mine get accepted almost everywhere, most of the time. His less so. However... his are producing more sales and he says it's because their plain ugly, so go figure lol

ladydesigner, I hear you sister. Only two kids here (under 5), one hubby and 3 cats, but it sure teaches you how to work in spurts, doesn't it? my hubby says he could never work like that with so many interruptions around, but I tell him it's that extra X chromosome that lets us keep our focus for longer ;)

I think Lemmy's given the definitive answer! :)

I can take anything from 1 hour to days if I start daydreaming. Also I find changing to a new niche is very time-consuming as it requires changing all the recips. |waves|

This has been a reassuring thread. Procrastination is always a problem for me when it comes to free sites. And then I tend to build them from scratch half the time, just because that feels like a good thing to do. While I never managed to make the 30 templates, mine still tend to look a bit similar.

15min including submitting and no these are not templates, just been doing for so many years its second nature.

Months. :D

or depending on how much i can coerce tart into making me a "pretty" but ugly template a day. the fastest I ever did was i think 4 hours but then again I hand pick my submits and try to mix them up with some long time LL and some newbie ones so everyone gets a little trickle of traffic and hopefully i get a HUGE surge!!

I used to be able to build & submit one in about 90 min or so.

But, I can build 5 in 2 hours, submit one & have 4 left over to submit every 30 or so days :D

Sometimes if I've been working on freesites for a couple days straight I can slap a decent one out in about 2 hrs, but I tend to get burnt out on them really quickly and can usually only stand to make them a few days a month. Generally speaking though, 4-6 hrs, mostly because I get picky about stupid shit which holds me up.

I've been trying shorten my time. My mentor has been doin this for quite a while, and he can get one out in pretty short order.

Of course, he doesn't mess around with some of the things I experiment with, like attempting SEO, trying out new lists, keeping recip tables unique, adding as much unique text to new sites as possible, etc... but he sells better'n me, so... eh. |huh

All told, 3-5 hours now, I think. But I think I can continue to shave off minutes here and there as I refine my technique.

Takes me around 4 hours. That is submitting and everything. I do alt tags, meta tags and make each site as eye catching as possible and very clean. Yeah, it takes me a while, but being as most LL only allow one submit a day I am fine by it.

Good topic BTW

Wow 4 under 8, now that is a handful, oh the laundry must be mind blowing!

On freesites for me, about 2 hours on a good day, 3-5 days when I can't concentrate which is most of the time lately |loony|

4 - 5 hours here. I know I make them nice & clean at least. Not sure how good otherwise, hehe.

Hubby and I will be shooting a crap load of content in the next couple of months, so will have a lot of new stuff to build around. |bananna|

Looking forward to seeing the new content |thumb

As to build times, I haven't done a free site in a while. But, used to take about 4 or 5 hours including submissions. The way I build free sites tends to take a bit longer as I mirror the entire site for each recip table, then change up the text on all the pages.

Do you find more of your pages indexed by se's using that method? I've thought about it in the past, but always figured it was more trouble then it was worth.. |huh Do you use unique directory names too? I think I might give that a try on my next go 'round.

I like to change up text with mirrors too, when I have the time for it. Although, I've noticed that google and yahoo seem to favor unique title tags more than anything else when it comes to making variance on mirrors.

But it doesn't take too long to swap out a few choice words here and there, and tweak your file names. If you can say the exact same thing but use a different words to do it then it's still unique. |thumb

The Hippy is on the right track |thumb

I use unique directories and altered keyterms to adjust to the directory names. Also, altered metas and other text on each version of the site to keep them completely unique. Since I do 3 mirrors of each site, I end up with 3 entirely unique sites wrapped around the same set of pictures.

That said, when I first started doing them that way...yes, google seemed to like it. Over time however, that fickle beast has dropped a LOT of the pages. Yahoo still has most of them...MSN has more than Google, but far less than Yahoo.

Worth the extra time??? Honestly, that's a toss up |huh

Built one today in about 1.5 hrs and .5 for submit time. I only submit to about 36 lists at this time. This one was from scratch but was not one of my better looking ones. Plus I manually thumbed/resize the images and created a quick banner all with photoshop so that takes a bit longer than using a thumb program. Also changed titles and some wording for the one mirror so they read as different sites.

Ive been doing galleries for a few years, 100s to choose from, so I use those galleries alot for my freesites. Knock the image count down, do a quick change of color-text-layout change to match whats going on with the index/main which is always done from scratch and that gives more time to concentrate on the better looking site while still keeping it around 1.5 most times.

Around 2 hours with submitting (54 LL).

Interesting thread...

I always thought I took too long on my freesites, but anything from 2 hours upwards seems to be average.

When I'm on a roll and doing 5 or 6 per week I can get them built & submitted quicker.

About 3 years ago I was doing one a day AND holding down a full time job. Now I struggle to do one every few days and I work full time in this biz!

Lisa

That'll teach you to quit your day job :D

It's all about doing them in batches imo - I think it pans out to less than an hour for me when I do many at once with templates and batch image cutting.

My best is built and submitted in 1 hour - but usually it takes 1.5 - 2hrs. Each FS has about 100+ words of unique text per page and is keyword optimized. Submit to 65 LLs and some BBS and linkdumps too. Also make a blog post for the freesite too (also with 100 words). On average i submit 5-6 freesites a week.

Of course there is always the extra time of building the templates in the first place, finding good sponsors to promote, getting the content, managing the submit database, and gradually replacing templates and sponsors that don't convert with ones that do.

Making the freesites good for SE traffic only adds about 30mins to the total time and is well worth it. From freesites alone I am building a network of niche sites which are regularly updated and have a lot of pages with unique optimized text.

I personally get enough content for 4 sites done in a batch. Then build a free site from scratch which takes about 1.5 hours but then change the look, retarget the keyword text, add the new content, all done 3 times, so by the end I have four different new free sites that I can submit one a month for the next four months. All that takes 2.5 to 3 hours.

Each time I pick a new paysite to make free sites for I get all the content in order, make the thumbs. etc, I usually spend a whole day doing that, but then I have content and thumbs and all that good stuff ready to go for usually at least 20 sites or so just for that paysite. I make my designs pretty simple and clean but I write ALOT of unique text for each site, usually a good size paragraph for each page. On a pretty simple one I can make it in a little less than an hour on my more elaborate ones it can take a little less than 2 hours, but usually its around an hour and 10-20 minutes. I submit a free site every single day, but I try and build at least 2 a day, 2 a day I consider a decent day, 3 a good day, any more than that and its an awesome day :) There have been days where I have built more than 5, I think a couple days I have built 7 or more. I submit a free site every single day, so I obviously am building more than I can submit but I do take the weekends off from building and since the weather has got nice I have been slacking really bad on building. What I build and cant submit yet I just incorporate in my network of sites I am starting and it sits there waiting for its turn to get submitted. For example the site I submitted today I built in March :) Submitting is really quick and easy for me, usually takes less than 10 minutes since I have only been submitting to 12-15 sites and the handy dandy robo form. I do plan on expanding my submit list to around 30 and make a mirror, but I havent figured out yet how to exactly go about that just yet.

Might as well jump into this too.

It takes me 4-5 hours to build a freesite, but I'm very anal, and so are about half of the freesites I make. |worm

I was getting very anal when I started and I have not built many. Maybe 30 or so. I found myself having to get orginized very fast. Once I did that it now takes me about 3 hours with submits, if I don't get disturbed. My next project is to just make 30 templates, get 30 differant sets of content and start that whole rotation thingy. But 1st must get game plan in order. :)

3 hours... in 2-3 blocks of time. If i got picky (on myself) it's something like 4-5 hours & even with that time it's still ok, I've created 10 unique designs and from that I'll be able to do 30 free sites.

After such session for a few hours or few sessions over 3-4 days everything's ready and I've got more time for new projects. Of course with that technique it's still good to give yourself 10-15 minutes with each site, sometimes i'm getting a new idea for adv. text, sometimes I catch something to correct or improve etc. etc.

Need to prepare a special one today. I'm curious will it go faster or even faster than I currently think it will go : ) Last times i'm listening to some kind of weird shit (personally i love it!) about effectivnes, concentration, memory & all those "mindy" things |shocking|


what do You think about preparing base of texts? they could be general or niche specific... if you're good at writing texts or simply like it it gets only better & better as such base should work pretty nice on creativity : ]

now it will take me days to make one and realy almost an hour to submit it to 16 linksites ....yeah laugh ....laugh all....ones you all get older to|catfight|

I try to keep the text relevant not only to the niche, but to the specific paysite and often even to the content of the freesite. I'm doing lots of movie freesites lately, so that's more inspirational for text writing... I just describe the movie basically and try to get them to realize the full version is real interesting and available only on the paysite ;)