A Year In The Life of TDW: A Cautionary Tale

[Carrie]

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?

[ynuahayt]

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.

[Preacher]

Originally Posted by ynuahayt

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.
...
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!
...
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.

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.

[ponygirl]

this is a very interesting thread, thanks Preacher

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

[Preacher]

Originally Posted by ponygirl

this is a very interesting thread, thanks Preacher ...
...So I'm just going to do what feels good to me (like always hehe ) and see where it goes.

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.

[ponygirl]

Originally Posted by Preacher

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Preacher

Isn't she just the sweetest thing.

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

[Preacher]

Originally Posted by Carrie

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?

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.