Questions about setting up a free site?

[kaustic]

Hello all....

Well I have now a buncha domains I was told to purchase, and I know that we arent going to use some of them... so as a semi-marketing idea I thought of temporarily running some free sites on the domains until we have gathered all of our content for our paysite.... now I want to make this a surfer friendly website, where the links will not lead to any popups, or spyware, however, I will still incorporate ad's into the site....

anyway, my question was.... how should I go about setting this site up... what are some good programs? I was taking a look at Ounique here checking out their content, and it seems to be affordable enough where I can spend some cash here and there on some cheap content, and there periodically have links that go offsite to affiliates or other websites?

However, I want to make it a little more interactive to the users.... similar to www.ratemycameltoe.com where you can "rate" the image that you are viewing, and comment on them accordingly.... I think this sort of thing draws more return visitors, which is crucial....?

So, I know this thread is going to blow up as soon as I hit submit because there are a ton of these programs I have mentioned on here.... but I really want the honest truth on this one....

Plus, it will only be for about 6 months, because once the paysite goes up, these domains will just point to the new site domain...... so all of those people that were used to the website that was occupying the domain will be reffered to my new site, and they will at least browse the tour.... I mean... they expected porn! ;-)

holla!

[Mister X]

There are so many different programs that it's impossible to give you any pointers on that without knowing what your traffic is going to be aiming for. But here's some things to think about.

First off match the free site to the paysite you will be opening. Ratemycameltoe.com won't do much good for you if you open a site that features midget fucking.

Second, if you are going to go to the trouble of getting traffic and building a following for a site then FORGET redirecting to your paysite. Never, ever throw away traffic. Always keep your domains. If you have a few thousand unique hits a day then keep them! If you redirected you would get that few thousand hits the first couple days and then zero. Search engine traffic is gone because redirected domains get removed from listings. Except for the very few signups you would get (surfers HATE redirection) that traffic would be gone forever. But if you leave the site in place and just advertise the paysite prominently you can get a guaranteed flow of traffic basically forever. The only time it really makes sense to redirect a domain is when you have different spelling variations so that you don't lose any type in traffic.

Third, go easy on buying content and stuff. You have to watch expenses to make sure you don't actually lose money on a free site.

Fourth, interactive "rate me" sites might be a dangerous type of thing to start right at the moment. If you are accepting other people's photographs and hosting them on your site 2257 compliance goes right out the window. It's not the same as running a tgp site because tgps usually only provide links to other sites. They don't provide content. Plus there are concerns about copyright issues and even ch**d Po*n violations.

And if you actually do start some sort of interactive site then buying content won't help you much. I don't know of anyplace where you can buy 1 picture each of 100 girls. :D

[monaro]

If you are looking at Ounique to purchase content, you are on the right track.

Quote MisterX:
"FORGET redirecting to your paysite. Never, ever throw away traffic."
kaustic: Infact everything that MisterX has to share with you, please treat it like gospel.


okay the cats out of the bag. MisterX, over the past many months I had search and read and wrote notes on everything that you give us for open learning. Thank you.

Have a great day.

[Mister X]

:blush:

[kaustic]

Mister X

As always your information and suggestions are greatly appreciated.... this isn't the first time I take your advice, and it won't be the last. I understand what you mean about the redirect traffic, and I guess it would make more sense to just keep the free tgp's up and advertise for the paysite on it.... So how do these TGP things work? I setup a site and people will be uploading their "tour" content or something?? I'm totally new to the concept of TGP.... I've always been a paysite guy, and I had to ask a buddy how the free sites work because I had no clue.

I also understand what you mean about the midget fucking ;-) I just wanted the free site to have a broad spectrum of pictures to look at you know.... and then let them sort thru it.... but I guess i really could gear it towards what the paysite will be, that way the recurring traffic will already be targeted to my market....

Thanks for the advice.... now what are some of these good TGP sites.... how much do they cost to setup? And is it really free? Like people will post pictures for no $ onto my site? That boggles my mind..... well I guess it doesn't if the pictures are linked to their site.... but how do I ensure they wont be bombarded by popups, spyware, etc?

Thanks everyone.... and Monaro I always treat what Mister X says as gospel ;-)

Thanks again people

[thruma]

Originally posted by kaustic
Mister X

As always your information and suggestions are greatly appreciated.... this isn't the first time I take your advice, and it won't be the last. I understand what you mean about the redirect traffic, and I guess it would make more sense to just keep the free tgp's up and advertise for the paysite on it.... So how do these TGP things work? I setup a site and people will be uploading their "tour" content or something?? I'm totally new to the concept of TGP.... I've always been a paysite guy, and I had to ask a buddy how the free sites work because I had no clue.

I also understand what you mean about the midget fucking ;-) I just wanted the free site to have a broad spectrum of pictures to look at you know.... and then let them sort thru it.... but I guess i really could gear it towards what the paysite will be, that way the recurring traffic will already be targeted to my market....

Thanks for the advice.... now what are some of these good TGP sites.... how much do they cost to setup? And is it really free? Like people will post pictures for no $ onto my site? That boggles my mind..... well I guess it doesn't if the pictures are linked to their site.... but how do I ensure they wont be bombarded by popups, spyware, etc?

Thanks everyone.... and Monaro I always treat what Mister X says as gospel ;-)

Thanks again people

There are two types of TGPs that I know of.
Real TGPs and fake ones.

Real TGPs:
thehun.com
shemp.com


The real one would be something you setup with TGP software and this software allows people to submit galleries to you.
Once they have submitted to you the same software allows you to review the galleries and and basically do one of three things
1. accept it
2. reject it
3. blacklist them

Go to one of the sites and look for a link called "webmaster" or "submit" and click on it and read the rules and guidelines to understand how they work.

heres a good tgp thread and some sage advise from the shemp http://www.xnations.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8902&highlight=shemp


The second type would be a fake one.
This one looks like a real tgp but instead of accepting galleries you just put all your own in there and also get rotating galleries from your sponsor so they change everyday.

real = lots of work
fake = less work

some of the TGP gurus can let us know which is more profitable.
I'd also love it if some of them could add anything this that I left out :)

[kaustic]

Wow!

Thanks a bunch Thruma your knowledge is much appreciated... I'm checking out the other thread now.... and thanks for the examples... I will look them over as welll.... Where can I find the TGP management software? Is it open source? Or I got dish out some cash? ;-)

Thanks again

[Bigjohn]

There are several different TGP software packages. We use autogallery from jmbsoft at jmbsoft.com

The have a couple of different options for you ranging in price from $55 to $85 dollars. It's not a bank breaker and their products are very nice!

[Mister X]

TGP software can be had for free or close to it or you can spend a couple thousand on it. It all depends on what you want it to do.

As a general rule tgps are a big pain in the ass to run and to get going to where you have decent traffic. You need to actually check each and every gallery that is submitted to you for cheaters who redirect and use malicious code, etc. Some of that can be automated by the tgp submission software checking the code of the page when it is submitted. Then there is the problem of guys that change the page after it gets accepted so a tgp script that spiders listed galleries at intervals and compares what is there to what was submitted is useful.

Even with a really topline script you still need to manually check the galleries that make it through the checking. There are many guys out there that submit galleries with a random description to random categories. They use dozens of domain names and dozens of subdomains and hundreds of email addresses. Some even use proxy servers so you can't blacklist their ip. When a surfer checks a few teen galleries and gets pornstar pics from the 70's and 40 year old russian chicks he goes looking somewhere else.

Then there is the problem of actually getting people to submit galleries to you so that you have something to check. You can register with one of the sites that have auto-submission sytems and get them that way but often the benefits are less than the drawbacks from a drastically increased amount of cheater galleries to weed out. If you don't do that then you have to work to get the attention of the guys that submit good galleries and make them decide it is worthwhile to submit to you. It's kind of a catch-22 situation. The more surfer traffic you have the more good submitters will want to submit to your site. But to get good traffic you need good galleries, hehe.

One thing that almost all tgps do now is to list their own galleries. Either ones that you build yourself or hosted galleries from whatever sponsors you like. When you do that it's nice to have a tgp script that will rotate these galleries for you so that it isn't always the same ones showing up.

There are ways to get around the problem of getting and checking submissions. You can basically cut and paste links from someone else's tgp. It's better if you do it with their permission because most tgps use traffic trading scripts that mean you would have to strip out the extra code from the urls before using them. The tgps that let you use their gallery lists will provide you with clean html to cut and paste. I think a couple even let you use javascript to call the lsit from their site and you don't even have to cut/paste. Richardsrealm.com is the only tgp I can recall at the moment that has a gallery sharing program. In return for the use of the gallery list you either have to provide a link to them or you have to let some of your traffic be skimmed off for their purposes.

As a general rule it takes more than 6 months to get any kind of good traffic going through a tgp. You might want to consider an alternate form of free site.

Their are link lists which are similar to a tgp but instead of posting links to galleries they post links to other sites. Such as tgps, pay sites, etc.

There are also free sites that are made up of a number of galleries that rotate on a daily or weekly basis. These ones are easy to set up because you can use all your own stuff. Either with your own content or with galleries made up of sponsor content. In fact many sponsor programs will let you d/l a prebuilt gallery in a zip file. You have the option of using all kinds of galleries or only a certain niche. The nich principle also applies to the tgp and linklist free sites.

Depending on where you live and where your server is located this type of site can be more risky because it isn't really possible to restrict users of a free site to adults in any way that is currently proven to conform with US laws. Their are one or 2 "electronic signature" methods out there but to my knowledge they have not been tested in court and so are unproven. It is generally accepted that a site that has a small amount of free preview content after a warning page (paysite) is generally less likely to run into legal trouble than a large site with a lot of free content.

Another type of free site is a review site. It is exactly what you might think. A list of reviews of other sites. Jane's List is that kind of free site. This type of site can provide more interactivity for surfers. You can use a portal system where the members are allowed to submit their own reviews. There are several free/cheap portal systems out there. It also has the advantage of not providing a large amount of free content. Usually a few free samples at most and they can be restricted to softer stuff.

So there are a ton of different ideas for free sites. Since I'm not planning on writing a book I'll leave it at that.

Good Luck

[thruma]

Originally posted by kaustic
Wow!

Thanks a bunch Thruma your knowledge is much appreciated... I'm checking out the other thread now.... and thanks for the examples... I will look them over as welll.... Where can I find the TGP management software? Is it open source? Or I got dish out some cash? ;-)

Thanks again

I've heard really good things from people who use the one bigjohn suggests from JBM.
I've never used it myself so I can't give a personal opinion.

[thruma]

I like what mister X has said here as well. very good advice to follow.
Make sure you really have the time to put into a TGP.

Mister X a question for you.
What do you think of fake TGPs with rotating sponsor galleries? Do they work?

[kaustic]

Mister X

Thank you very very very much for making everything chrystal clear for me. Its greatl appreciated. From the knowledge I gathered in this thread I honestly don't think I have enough time to run a TGP site. Seems, like I would be doing all of this work for a few months, and by the time I have the traffic I like.... I've wasted a lot of my money, and a lot of my time, and I will then have to focus on the real paysite anyway.... so I appreciate you pointing out how much time a project like this would take. Should I set the domains I currently have with a bunch of meta keywords based on the content that will be on the site? OR is that just useless?

Either way, I appreciate everyones input, this has been a very informative thread.

[Mister X]

Originally posted by thruma
I like what mister X has said here as well. very good advice to follow.
Make sure you really have the time to put into a TGP.

Mister X a question for you.
What do you think of fake TGPs with rotating sponsor galleries? Do they work? Sure they work. As long as you don't expect to be the next Shemp. And you have to have a big enough database that the surfer isn't going to get much duplication. And maybe try to stay away from the biggest programs who have too much exposure. One advantage to the fake tgp is that all the out traffic goes to your stuff so you can minimize the banner ads and shit and make a real clean design that surfers will like. Ad a videostore and maybe a payperview and you have most of the bases covered.

[Mister X]

Originally posted by kaustic
Mister X

Thank you very very very much for making everything chrystal clear for me. Its greatl appreciated. From the knowledge I gathered in this thread I honestly don't think I have enough time to run a TGP site. Seems, like I would be doing all of this work for a few months, and by the time I have the traffic I like.... I've wasted a lot of my money, and a lot of my time, and I will then have to focus on the real paysite anyway.... so I appreciate you pointing out how much time a project like this would take. Should I set the domains I currently have with a bunch of meta keywords based on the content that will be on the site? OR is that just useless?

Either way, I appreciate everyones input, this has been a very informative thread. Meta keywords are basically obsolete. MUCH more weight is given to text on the page. To make sure that you get some use out of the domains you have to have some content on them for sure. Make sure to use the alt tags on any images and have lots of text. And it's best to have several pages with conmtent that can be indexed.

If you do a little searching on Google for the search terms that will be relevant to your paysite you can see what pages are getting ranked the highest and get some ideas that way.

[kaustic]

Good points Mister X....

Thanks buddy