What does it take to be lucrative in the freesite game nowadays?

[anteyes]

Originally Posted by Bill

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.

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.

[Bill]

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.

[anteyes]

Originally Posted by Bill

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

[Bill]

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.

[anteyes]

Originally Posted by Bill

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.