A Year In The Life of TDW: A Cautionary Tale
 

A Year in the Life of This Depraved World: A Cautionary Tale

I know, no one likes to read long posts. If you don’t want all the details just scroll down until you see the colored numbers and you’ll get the drift.

Most of you who have spoken to me in individual chats know that I am very open about my incoming and outgoing traffic, my profits and my search engine placement and optimization results. Honest to a fault.

I remember reading Kristian’s thread about documenting his own linklist journey and I thought it was a good idea to expose what most people outside of linklist owners do not understand about the time and effort it takes to build and run a reputable site, build traffic and turn that traffic into profit. The only problem was Kristian’s journey was skewed from the start.

See, the problem as I see it was that Kristian was already successful in adult websites and this gave him a clear advantage. To begin with he could pump traffic into his new linklist from various traffic sources in his existing network. He also had the funds to pay top dollar for a script and a css designer to create the framework of his linklist for him. This is not the start that most average linklist owners would have.

This made me realize that I should have been documenting my linklist journey. I should have given potential linklist owners an understanding of the struggles of building a successful linklist from the viewpoint of a complete novice to linklists with but a handful of existing traffic and no paid labor. Unfortunately I did not have the foresight Kristian had, but I still had something I could contribute to potential linklist owners.

What I did have was a small background in both accounts payables and accounts receivable, access to Quickbooks and an understanding of how to segregate both income and expenses so that I could more easily track my existing projects and determine where my profits and losses were actually coming from. So with that I am going to share the expenses and income of my linklist that is exactly one year old, my baby…This Depraved Word!

Keep in mind the figures that I will be listing pertain only to This Depraved World, not to its’ companion blog, not my other linklist, not any of my hubs and certainly not any of the feeder free-sites that I have fed to good traffic sources. Where the income and expenses were mixed I tried to either split it by percentage or in some cases – like non-referral sales – I had to use my best judgment and look at where I was sending the most traffic to that particular site to attain that particular sale. These figures also do not reflect any cost of doing business expenses like business licenses or a trip to Vegas to meet with fellow webmasters. ;)

One important thing to note is that I am not including my labor costs and the lost income in passing up mainstream projects that I instead put into the building and maintenance of my linklist. I don’t even want to think about that, so don't bring it up. These figures also only reflect cash on hand. The $15’s I have scattered here and there awaiting another sale or two before I can collect them don’t pay for my meds so what good are they?

$325.00 software
$18.40 domain purchases
$69.95 hosting
$50.00 mixed use hosting split
$176.35 income
$287.00 total loss


Now it should be noted that there are some things I did not do, like buy traffic, push for ‘hardlink’ trades as hard as I could have or create a confusing navigation scheme to get more clicks to my sponsors.

But I did build feeder sites to pump in traffic. I got valuable SEO advice and implemented most techniques. I conversed with submitters to help them get listed. I sent out rejection emails with unique explanations of why the site was not listed. And finally, based on my internal stats I can tell that I am sending out more traffic then a few other linklists that have been in this game longer then I have. In that regards I consider my linklist a success if not a financial one.

And on that note I’d just like to take this time to unveil the new template for my category pages: This Depraved World: Hardcore Sex

Feel free to post any questions you have here and I hope this helps someone out there. |thumb

Kudos to you for your honesty |thumb

It is the same thing for me as well. If it was not for freesites, galleries, hubs, etc... I would not be able to do this full time. Well, mostly full time since I take a bunch of contract work from the company I quit after 18 yrs. I knew that it would take longer than I thought but I am good with that, most times :)

Wow. Fascinating and surprising. For a "hope to run a successful link list one day" guy like me, posts like this are incredibly helpful.

I would never have expected TDP to be making a loss, not in a million years.
I do have some questions if I may, sorry if they are too intrusive!

1. Has TDP's generated income grown month by month in it's first year?
2. Has TDP as a Link List grown steadily in it's first year? More & more visitors each month etc?
3. What's next? Do you have any plans that you will implement other than a new design? (The new design looks really nice, by the way).
4. Are you going to post follow-ups to this post? Please?

Thanks for the honesty, Preacher. It really helps keep things in perspective.
:)

I mean this as no offense to you Preacher, because I know how intellegent and capable you are, but I'm not surprised. ;)

Thanks for sharing.

I think a lot of people confuse SE traffic with profit. Quality traffic is great, but traffic does not always = sales. When I look at my stats, unique hits per sale, it's my freesites which do most of the selling.

And anyway, my entire network of freesites all together bring in more SE traffic than all the pages on my LL, though their pretty close.

Well, I'm glad it was helpful to someone. :D
Like I said, I'm honest to a fault and there are few questions which I will consider too intrusive.

1) No. I rarely saw any income from the linklist in the first 8 months or so. A sale here and there but nothing worth writing about. Honestly, the last two months have really picked up...but I don't have any checks in my hand for those efforts.

2) Yes. Unfortunately I did not keep the logs from my first hosting company, but if I recall correctly, the first month's daily average was about 150-200 uniques a day. This month I had 2 or 3 days of a stats outage, but I bet I'd be pretty close in saying that I am seeing about 1300-1400 visits a day.

I took a significant hit in my search engine traffic in July which at the time I believed stemmed from to factors. Google's enforcement of reciprical linkage penalties and MSN finally determing that my site was nothing but a linkfarm. It really hurt to lose that MSN traffic.

My google traffic has since self-corrected with absolutely no structural changes to my pages, I am at loss to explain why. Yahoo however has steadily increased pretty much every month.

3) The new design actually began when I took that very noticeable hit to my search engine traffic. The goal was to make the site more search engine friendly, including removing all the tables -- which was quite a feat for a completely tabled site and listings template (and yes I know that there is still one table on the page). Now that google has self corrected I was almost hesitant to implement the new design, but I put too much time into the redesign to just toss it away. :D

My original main concept behind TDW was ease of navigation, and I think moving my sponsor links off the firt page a surfer hits and reducing things down to two columns has only helped in that effort. I left in the functionality of those old third column's information in the tabbed laballed pages.

I may have an inside track with one of my sponsors that will allow me to do some unique advertising in place of one or both of those screen caps, other then that I have no long term plans as I have found it much more useful to be flexible and make changes based on short term results and long time trends.

4) I don't exactly know. I know that breaking things down by class in Quickbooks has created some very confusing reports. I was thinking about redefining all the classes just back to adult so I can read the reports without sidescrolling through a ton of classes, like free-sites, free-site rebills, blogs, blog re-bills, no-referrer, 2 different linklists, etc...

I've been looking forward to this post since you asked me if it was ok to post it - great info |shake|

(and I'll take credit for the idea of Kristian posting actual income & expenses - that was one of the things I asked him to do before that mess started)

You might have been surprised a year ago though. When I first set up the linklist the general opinion being thrown around at the time was that it would take at least a year for a linklist to become profitable. So I took on this project with that knowledge and general assumption.

Maybe a month or two in, it seemed as if the general opinion suddenly shifted to three or four years.

Would I have put the majority of my efforts into building a linklist if I had heard about that time-frame at the beginning...I just don't know. But now that I'm in and I'm emotionally committed, I plan to stay in. :D

Thanks, that means a lot to me actually. :D

Some good info you gave there Preacher. I can say that SMilingPussyLinks.com had a slow start too but is on a roll now. So just hang in there and that loss will turn into profit for sure :)

Hi Preacher

Nice infos you posted there, I wish you all the good traffic in the world (btw thanks for the traffic you're sending me |thumb ) and I hope your LLs will grow up eventually.

The template you unveilled looks nice, one suggestion though: you could try to light up a little bit the color used for the left column because as it is now, the surfer's attention is caught by the free sites listed (don't know if this is what you want).

Keep up the good work!

Those numbers are better than I would have guessed, but of course, I suck at this. New link lists take forever to become worth owning. If only we were all addicted to internet porn back in the day...

The key, I find, is to maintain a sense of humor about one's lack of success. You need to be able to laugh along while Dr. B, GG, and your own wife mock your inability to make a dollar even though you spend 16 hours per day in front of a computer. |thumb

I blame much of my own net poverty on the fact that I was never patient enough to let anything simmer in its juices. I'd build the site, see that there wasn't any traffic, and change it to something else. (WW has been a TGP on at least three separate occasions, a paysite, a massive free site, and a variety of other nondescript sites.) I dream of the day that I own something worth selling.

We weren't talking about me, were we? Shit, I did it again.

A good read Preacher...thanks for the honest and open disclosure :)

Your tale is very similar to my own experiences and those of others I've spoken with on the subject.

Having banged around a few different areas of this biz, I decided on going the link list route for the long haul. Yea, it takes a good long while get things tweaked right and establish any sort of consistency. But, it can be done and it should be longer lived than many other areas of the business.

That said, it's a long and fuckin bumpy road indeed |banghead|

Well that's got to be one of the most interesting posts I've ever read, particularly as I'm about to start a LL.
Thank you Preacher.
You've got a quality site there and I'm quite sure your figures will get better and better. :)

Thanks for the kind words everyone.

Funny you should pop in here japamor, because it should be noted that japamor was my first submitter account ever created and put up one of the first user submitted free-sites on my list and has been submitting ever since. |thumb

Let me know when you need some trades for your new project.

Thanks for sharing Preacher. Have you noticed how many bookmarkers you get each month? Does the number and % seem to be going up?

I LOVE the new template for the category pages. Very nice, very professional looking, very clean. Nice work.

In 1 year youve managed to get some pretty good traffic, I know this because you send my free sites a nice amount. I think this will be the breakout year for This Depraved World. I hope so anyways.

Cheers and Good Luck
WB

Not sure why I typed TDP instead of TDW. My apologies.
|crazy|

It seems that the most difficult thing is to get everything balanced to keep all parties happy. Pleasing & teasing surfers, keeping your submitters happy, and of course growing and making money.
Finding a way to grow big enough to be self-sustaining.

I've looked at so many link lists for clues but haven't found any obvious secret for success, although it wouldn't be much of a secret if it was obvious, would it? Duh.
The organised structure of some LLs versus the of clever chaos of others. Pretty & polished versus downright ugly. It's fascinating trying to see what that magic balance is.

As a submitter to TDW I will say that you treat freesite builders the right way! I had no idea how important respect and reputation would be when I started, and at some point down the line I like to think that somebody will give you a huge boost just because you helped them so much along the way.
It's also nice that you are really proud of TDW and are determined to make it more successful. I'm really looking forward to any chunks of information about your next year of LL ownership, and I hope the coming years bring you much bigger rewards for your efforts!
:)

Thanks guys.

You know, I don't actually. My understanding is that the 'add to favorites' is just an estimation so I haven't actually paid attention to that figure. The 'direct address / bookmarks' as an inbound link has always hovered between 50-60%, so take from that what you will.

But you bring up a good point, as Greenie has said before search engines come and go but bookmarkers remember your site. That was also inspiration for my ease of navigation concept, as emphasized in the new category template.

I can't believe I haven't mentioned this yet, but what I have learned on this site and the contacts I have made here have been invaluable. Not just with linklists, but with all of my adult ventures. |thumb

looks like owning LL is not so good nowdays

Well, if you don't have an established traffic source or a ton of connections with people who do (and are willing to link to you), it's very difficult to create a new one from scratch. It takes an agonizingly long time to produce your own traffic from nothing. Any fool can build and submit a free site and have thousands of hits to it the first day. It doesn't work that way with link lists. It's a desperate and lonely road we travel. We're the monks of the industry. |loony|

I can vouche for this. |waves|

|haha

You a funny funny man WB :D

Ooommmmmmmm... |bow| Ooommmmmmmm... |bow|

Shit, man, and I thought being a LL owner was gonna be tough! |loony|

|thumb

Very good thread and the honesty is great..:)

Though many have hinted at what it takes, if people can pick them out.

ronnie

I said it to you at the radio show chat, Preacher, this is a great thread, and nice work on it not costing you a lot more. I thought for sure you'd show a couple or few thousand dollar loss before I scrolled down.

On one hand, some people will be discouraged that they wouldn't be able to generate much revenue the first year. But on the other hand, I'm thinking that at a (first year) annual out of pocket cost of about $300/each, they're a nice long-term investment.*

|thumb

*Yeah, I'm not counting the blood, sweat and tears put into them either. But I figure that's just what you have to do to remain sane (well, passably sane in public anyway).

P.S. I'm thinking of looking into a design for a "Monks of the Industry" t-shirt. |goodidea

I'd love to get in on that! I'll gladly wear one for free for you. |thumb

Are u thinking about selling?

|pokefun| Okay! I just printed this out and taped it over my monitor. . . The man has an uncanny ability to tap right into my "filthy dirty" soul.


Good stuff Preacher |thumb

Thanks for all the info, even if it did discourage me from starting up a linklist! I just don't have the time nor the effort available to suffer losses for a year before I start seeing some profit.

Preacher just curious, about how many different sponsors are you running on TDW, and have you considered lessening the amount to send more traffic to each individual sponsors and therefore avoid the "scattered $15s" syndrome?

My link list is 1 year and 2 months old and with that being said I think I've had some fairly better results than you Preacher in my first year as a link list owner - and I'm not trying to be the cool GFY-type o' kid on the block here - just sharing my experience.

Please note the "I think" above - I can't give you a nice income/expenses type of thing here since my server costs is for hosting many domains and I can't track all the sales my link list has made over the last year.

But I know for sure that my link list has made more than $1000 in its first year. That's just from looking at my ARS/PimpRoll stats - what's special about those sponsors? They offer $1 trials! I've setup my link list in the same way that GreenGuy is running Link-O-Rama's category pages. Free/$1 offers on top, then paysites and then free sites. And with not too much traffic I've been getting ratios in the 1:200 range to a lot of those $1 trial sites.

I just took a look at your new category page and I see you use tabs for easy browsing of free sites and paysites - isn't that making it a bit too easy for the surfer though? I know I'm not on a quest to give away free porn and neither is 95% of the other people in adult - we're here for the money and the money only!

Things I want to improve on:

- Like you I need to be more aggressive about getting hardlinks to get anywhere in the search engines.

- Get more submitters. There has gotta be other countries than Russia that has discovered the free site ;)

That was my experience - anyone has any questions or anything please post or hit me up.

And sorry if this was a bit of a hi-jack but since I couldn't make such a nice and detailed description that Preacher has provided I thought it was more appropriate here.

Just another warning for LL owners - never run PPC campaigns on your LL domain |banghead| .. grrr.. week or so ago I re-launched some of mine - I've run them in past and would have never though it would cause such problems...
After months of trading linking my mydailyfreeporn.com was getting 5k+ (and growing every day) google hits daily, and guess what... next day... bah.. no google hits at all (not counting those from PPC campaign)
Not sure its the reason but I suppose so - I havent done any changes since few months and one day all search results are gone - when I do site check I see my pages are still indexed... I also get some .de .fr and so on google hits but no .com at all.
I've moved my adds to another domain and contacted customer support... hope they will help in some way..

Yes, I believe this was an issue in the beginning. After browsing some other linklists I for some reason or another decided that I should have 10 paysites/niche sponsor links per page. I liked pretty tours like those on Pimproll so I avoided most CCBill sites -- at the beginning. I now call this the shotgun approach becuase I have many pellets of sales scattered all about.

I believe it was GrandmaScrotum who put up a post about having too many choices scares off potential purchasers, and so on my second linklist I only display two sponsor links at a time. (example: Depraved Pornsites-Hardcore. It seems to be doing Ok for me, so I did a very similiar thing with the new design of my templates on TDW.

Yes I have a paysites tab page, but at the top, are two sponsor screencaps which are but graphical listings of one of the 5 or 6 sponsors that I am putting the most effort into converting for. I threw in a couple CCBill's also.

I don't expect the paid tabs to receive the most traffic, but I figure those that do click will be highly targetted for a sale.

Sorry for not breaking up the quotes better, but I am in a hurry and I have to run out for a bit.

1) Yes, I do look back and see some mistakes I made at the beginning, but I figure anyone running their first linklist with no existing traffic pumps will make similiar mistakes. If you cleared $1k or more on your first linklist that is great, and I'd love some recommendations.

2) I think I kinda answered this in the above post and like I said, I am very short on time right now. Just to elaborate quickly, I'd rather have happy submitters seeing more click-throughs to their sites and an increase in bookmarkers then an immediate profit, but that's just my philosophy and we'll see if it works.

3) Not a hi-jack at all. This thread isn't supposed to be about 'my site' it's to be open and honest and give out the kind of information I would have loved to have a year or so ago. :)

this is a very interesting thread, thanks Preacher |thumb

I am in the middle of a major redesign myself, (which is why I haven't been around the last couple of days) and have been surfing around to other LLs to get some ideas. The only thing I really see is that everyone is different lol.

I have had the LL up for about a year now, and to be honest, I haven't really kept track of the particulars, mostly concentrating on freesites and whatnot. I just notice the traffic going up, so now I'm ready to bring the LL to the next level - spending some time with it, buying some traffic & doing more trades once the redesign is done.

So I'm just going to do what feels good to me (like always hehe ;)) and see where it goes.

anyway, my point was - let's keep this thread going, it's great to see comments from others & toss around the ideas :)

Isn't she just the sweetest thing. |love| - Wow that's a really gay smilie.

Anyway I thought of a few more things I should bring to the discussion.

1) A recomendation for new linklists, be careful what you spend your time on. For example, PHPAdsnew is a great advertising tool and when I first set it up I spent literally days filling it up with every banner from every site I liked of every sponsor I had. Again, this ties in with that shotgun approach.

Use PHPAdsnew, but use it wisely. Limit the banners to a handful that you really want to send traffic to and ignore the rest of the paysites you could link to regardless of how pretty or effective their banners look. You can always add more banners down the line.

2) In a similiar vain, start out with a limited selection of categories that you believe you can get filled up. I have several that don't really move but I'll give a perfect example because I can pick on myself. :)

I began with a Hardcore Category which I intended to be more like Greenie's Rough Sex cat and a Straight Sex cat which I intended to be more couple porn, like a vivid set etc. No one really ever submitted to the Straight Sex category. I threw in some sites that seemed to fill that niche, but the traffic just isn't there.

Lucky for me, there are no trades on that page so during this template update I will be merging that category with the hardcore cat.

3) I'm not doubting ynuahayt's success at all, so this is by no means an implication of that. However, I believe his success is the exception to the rule because I can think of at least three linklists that began last summer that have now gone under. I can think of another 1 which just wants to be sold and it's barely staying alive. And I can think of several older lists that have closed down submissions or just aren't reviewing anymore. IMO, if it were as easy as adding $1 pay trials to the top of a site I wouldn't think this many linklists would be failing.

Sorry, no idea how I missed this earlier, but everything is for sale. The price I would let go of TDW would be nowhere near reasonable though.

In other words, unless your an eccentric millionaire with a passion for purchasing linklists for an extravagant amount of money, then the answer is probably no. :D

thanks for this tidbit too. I just set it up but the cron thingie isn't working right & have to get that fixed. Now that I read this tho, it's a bit lower on my list of to do right now lol.

awww you're so sweet |blowkiss|

Oh by the way Preacher, you've got a pm coming your way ;)

let 'em think about THAT for awhile LOL :P

thanks preacher for a good post, it is very helpful to me, since i want to start my own link list, this post helps to understand what to expect from a link list at first year of it existence...thanks for very interesting post..:)

Thanks for your answers/input Preacher!

I understand you viewpoint in regards to the tabs thing - but the way I look at it the harsh truth of starting a Link List to day is that most submitters either seem to submit to the top 30 link lists or they use the shotgun approach with submitting to 200 hundred where my LL gets included.

Therefore I'm having a hard time going the route of stroking my submitters dick (we're in adult ;)) because frankly I'm not sure they'll stick around because I can send 10 hits more their way.

When I look at things now it seems a bit crazy to be spending like half an hour every day on reviews + time on adding sponsors/keeping up with your links and then bam - $1k after one year of that. I know we're building for the future but right now my payment/hour looks pretty bad :).

My advice to people thinking about starting a link list: Do not start a standard Link List with just free sites - rather make some kind of hybrid site that has more pages and more ways for you to get traffic.