A Year In The Life of TDW: A Cautionary Tale

[Preacher]

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.