There’s no doubt that adult webmasters on the whole are a hard-working bunch of people. We are pretty good at making use of lots of scripts and other tools to help us be productive. But while we play the role of laborer very effectively, we aren’t nearly as good at being bosses. Most of us are action driven: we work long and hard, learning as much as we can about the practical aspects of our business. We are happy if we earn more this month than last and when that doesn’t happen, we work a bit harder, hope for better days, and if all else fails, there is always the latest bandwagon to try out.

Think about it. Who is usually paid more: the CEO or the worker on the production line? Who earns more for their business? Now ask yourself if it really makes sense to spend all your time on the production line.

To be successful, you must be results driven. You should not spend a moment on anything without knowing why you are doing it, what you expect from it, and how long it will take you to produce the desired results. You need goals. In this context “I want to be rich” is not a goal: a 5% earnings increase over the next month is a goal.

Here’s a challenge. Finish work a couple of hours early today and try this:

• Write the names of the next 12 months as headlines across a wide sheet of paper.
• Ignore the two best and two worst months of the last 6 months, average your income for the 2 months which remain and write that number under each month. Total the 12 months.
• Now put some thought into adjusting those figures, to account for any seasonal variations you perceive in this business. You might possibly show increases in October and November, decreases in January, February, June, July and August. Juggle the numbers until they reflect your experience, but the total for the year should be the same as in the first line.
• More thought next, combined with a healthy dose of realism and a good measure of ambition. Knowing everything you do about the market, its competitiveness and opportunities, and about yourself, your skills and drive, how challenged you are currently, adjust the monthly numbers further to reflect what you feel is an attainable growth rate through the next year.
• Take a hard look at the numbers you have produced. A 5% month-on-month increase may seem very modest but it represents more than 70% over the year. If you honestly believe you can achieve that (or even more), go for it. But be realistic, because the next job is to figure out how to achieve the targets you have just set.

The first reason for having specific targets related to specific timelines is so that you do not sit down on the 1st of the month and beaver away for the next 4 weeks, hoping for the best. What are you going to do to ensure you meet your targets?

The answer depends on your situation. Maybe you need to monitor your sponsors more carefully and find some new ones. Maybe some of your promotions are weak and need tightening up or replacing. Maybe you need more traffic. New sites. There are lots of possibilities. The point is that in an increasingly competitive market you must drive your results, not expect them to happen simply because you put in a lot of hours.

Once you have targets and you have figured out how to achieve them, it should be easy to produce a to-do list. At least for the upcoming month, better two, note down the broad steps you will have to take to see your plans through. Then, working a week or two in advance in more detail, fit that work into your daily schedule.

Where are we so far?

• We have financial targets set for each month of the next year.
• We have broad plans for the whole year as to how to reach those targets.
• We have a lot of the practical details worked out for the next month or two.
• We have specific tasks to complete during this week and next, and we have fitted those tasks into our daily schedules.

All that sounds easy enough. The snag is that if you take this seriously and you are already working your ass off, it is probably difficult, maybe impossible to commit yourself to more work. If you have come to that conclusion, this exercise is already paying off, because in real life you can only get a pint into a pint glass. Instead of working without a plan, introducing new things often more in hope than expectation and – perhaps without realizing it – letting proven revenue producers slip, this exercise is forcing you to think. What shall I have to spend less time on to free up the time for these new tasks? What will that cost me? Since I shall have to increase the targets for the new projects to make up for such losses, are those targets still reasonable?

If you took up this challenge and got this far, the final benefit is that you will be able to review each day, each week, each month, and see whether you accomplished everything and if the money is pouring in as you hoped. If yes, pat yourself on the back. If not, what are you going to do about it? Either way, now you are the boss, actually in charge of your business. Get it right and you will be paid the big bucks :)

For a few years it was incredibly easy to make money, so maybe it is inevitable that adult online attracts many people who are running away from failure than people who are striding purposefully towards success. Such people are lazy, disorganized, undisciplined: many even managed to fail when it was almost impossible not to make money from porn. I guess they are the people most likely to ask for ideas, but what they are really hoping for are neat solutions they can apply with no thought or effort, yet will drop a pot of gold into their laps. Preferably overnight. Small surprise that legions of would-be webmasters are gone and forgotten.

What makes people approach work, often life in general, in ways which guarantee failure or at best modest success? What makes people shy away from trying anything outside their experience and instead, put up a near impenetrable barrier to their own progress? Ego must bear a lot of the blame. That fragile part of our minds which is terrified of failure. Ego isn’t an energetic force which drives successful people, it is the inertia which produces failures. Successful people handle failure, they have to because it’s inevitable. Ego is also a liar because it tells us that not trying isn’t failure, when it is the biggest failure of all.

If you are sitting down every day, plugging away as usual and getting by on a trickle of checks, maybe even doing better than that, but still far from doing as well as you would like, stop and ask yourself why. Chances are that you are not dumb and even if you are lazy, that’s only a defense mechanism to prevent you from testing yourself. Figure out how to get past the block in your head which is stopping you from being successful.

Make change part of your routine

Some of the once biggest names in online porn have already disappeared or become largely irrelevant. In the past couple of years, several operations have closed or been swallowed by others and during the next few years we shall see a lot more high-profile casualties. We put this process down to the growing pains of a maturing industry and we don’t often think about why these specific operations failed to make it.

Some will not have failed in the usual sense. They may have fulfilled their owners’ ambitions or the owners might have had offers which were too good to refuse. But many more simply fall victim to a failure to change with the times. This is a very fast-changing business and if you do not change with it, you will be left behind.

This applies to everyone, big or small. Although in many respects it can be better to be primarily focused on one area, depending entirely on one aspect of the industry is dangerous. Spare part of your time to develop something in an area you think may be on the rise. And at least once a month and preferably more often, ask yourself what new wrinkles you have introduced to your main activity. If the answer is none, the reality – whether it is immediately obvious or not – is that your business has slipped backwards while some of your competitors have been moving forwards. Let that go on for too long and there is only one possible consequence.

Develop your skills

The more competitive an industry becomes, the harder it is to be successful in it. Standards rise. A design which would have worked 5 years ago, today will interest no-one. In 2000, Joe Blow could build a 100K TGP from scratch inside 6 months, but now even experienced traffic traders have to work. It isn’t enough to keep doing the same things day after day and rely solely on increasing experience to get you through.

In particular, make an effort to study topics such as general business principles, marketing and site usability. These are not just abstract principles and unless you have truly remarkable instincts, you will get a host of ideas for practical improvements to your sites and the way you work. You may be intimidated by these subjects or convinced they will be boring, but such knowledge is increasingly important and a vital part of becoming the professional you need to be to compete.

Take a close look at what you do. Are you so thinly spread that you are unable to do much more than scratch the surface of the areas you work in and the tools with which you work. That may not be a major issue if you can (and want to) hire people to do things for you, but otherwise it likely means that all your sites are increasingly showing their age. Maybe it is time to rationalize your operation, focus on its most productive areas, thus freeing up the time to be able to learn the skills needed to develop those areas further.

The main thing is to think! Don’t just climb back on the treadmill every morning and hope for the best. Failure isn’t the worst that can happen. If you don’t grab your life and your work by the throat and become successful, you could be looking at upwards of 30 years of tedious labor. I seriously doubt that is all you wish for yourself.

Basic Considerations

• Since most webmasters have broadband connections, we tend to forget that even in the US, almost 50% of domestic internet users are still on dial-up. Text-based TGP’s in particular attract visitors who have slower connections so you must be careful not to undermine this appeal and thus before using any graphic, ask yourself whether it is adding value for the surfer or to the site. For example, cartoons can add a lot of site-appeal, but more mundane header graphics, if used at all, should be kept to within 10k-20k. If that sounds too restrictive, take a look at Shemp’s 6K logo or at Fucked11 which uses no logo at all (he actually displays keywords rather than a domain/site name).
• Although surfers only visit a few galleries, they need to see lots of links. You should show at least 300 links on your main page and add archives to reinforce the impression they create, as well as for adding the depth which search engines like to see.
• TGP surfers always want to know they are seeing something new, so place today’s date in a prominent position.
• Do not let your design be influenced by the big, long-established sites. The momentum they picked up in less competitive times lets them get away with design flaws that would cripple start-up sites.

Layout & Design

• Most visitors will be used to reading from left to right, top to bottom, so their eyes will naturally attempt to follow that pattern. Your designs need to take advantage of that and avoid disturbing it. Boxes and lines can be useful design tools, but if not handled correctly can also present a barrier to the eyes’ natural movement.

  A light border is okay for	a navigation bar with links	the surfer wants to see	clearly visible nearby
  Link to gallery Link to gallery Link to gallery

  but it doesn’t work as we (usually) want if the emphasis is reversed.

  A heavier border and bold text	traps the surfer’s eyes	and that can work for us	or against us
  Link to gallery Link to gallery Link to gallery

• Always remember that the surfer is there for free porn, not to visit our sponsors nor our trade links, so we have to work at pulling his eyes where we want them to go. Separating the two types of link is only likely to work if we ensure that the links we want the surfer to click are the strongest. At the same time, we must not hide the links he is looking for, so a careful balance is necessary.
• One of the easiest layouts to work with natural eye movement is with gallery links in 1, 2 or 3 column-wide blocks, broken up by a small number of large links to trades or sponsors. Unless he quits the page, the surfer has to look at what we want him to see.

  One of the easiest layouts to One of the easiest layouts to One of the easiest layouts to One of the easiest layouts to	work with natural eye movement work with natural eye movement work with natural eye movement work with natural eye movement
  Simple Vertical Blocks With Breaks

• If the page needs color which cannot be provided some other way, a very pale background can be put behind the links, but variations in font, size and color may provide enough interest by themselves.
• Columnar designs, when we place trade/sponsor links alongside gallery links are more tricky. The surfer will spot the column of freebies and ignore anything which is left or right.

  We must force his eyes We must force his eyes We must force his eyes

  towards what we want towards what we want towards what we want

  our trades & sponsors

  We must force his eyes We must force his eyes We must force his eyes

  towards what we want towards what we want towards what we want

  our trades & sponsors

• If space permits, we can use a 3-column design, for example placing trade and sponsor links in a column between columns holding the navigation and gallery links. The aim is to force the surfer’s eyes to pass over the links which are important to us.

  Our Categories amateur teen

  More Free Porn trade one trade two

  Galleries For Date gallery link gallery link gallery link

• 800×600 pixel resolution no longer dominates and monitors are getting bigger. But that is still the most common resolution and monitors larger than 19 inches are in the minority. If your layout skills are up to it, a liquid design is best, one which fills a screen of any size, combined with font-sizes which adapt to users’ settings and can be changed to suit their tastes. If you cannot do liquid designs, I recommend you design for 780px usable width. And if you cannot design at 800×600 on a 17-inch or 19-inch monitor, use a tool like Browser Sizer to check your designs. It is also important to check designs at least in Explorer and in Firefox (which largely behaves like Netscape and Opera) to ensure your site does not look like crap to a significant percentage of your visitors.
• Text TGP’s can use both “busy” designs or ones which leave a lot more white space. The busy style tends to create more interest and is easier to see as attractive, but they are also harder to accomplish effectively, because without care and skill, everything becomes cramped and runs together. Although Moms Hardcore Porn uses white space more obviously, with anything from 20px to 40px+ horizontal space between blocks, Sun Porno cleverly uses a combination of white space and graphic plus font highlighting to keep the site clean and working as it should.

Fonts

• Fonts can impact on text-TGP productivity more than just about anything else. Once your TGP is online, test different font sizes and styles. Small lettering for gallery links will rarely maximise productivity but even a 1 or 2 pixel increase can produce good results.
• If you are going to use font sizes below 12px for large blocks of text, you should almost certainly use Verdana, because it was designed for readability at small sizes. Of the fonts which are installed by default on most PC’s, Arial is the easiest-to-use alternative, followed by ‘Trebuchet MS’ and Tahoma (hard to tell from Verdana except at bigger sizes). Georgia is an easier to read and less old-fashioned option in place of Times, but perhaps too formal for say teen or amateur sites. These two categories can get away with ‘Comic Sans MS’, but it is a very pale, jagged font at small sizes and it can be a good idea to make the text bold). The more decorative fonts can be tiring if used throughout, so it is often a good idea to stick with Verdana or Arial for the main text, using the others for headlines. Impact is useful for big headlines, but becomes hard to read under about 22px.
• In the absence of graphics, make fonts work for you. You should not normally use more than 2 different faces and 3-4 sizes on a single page, but you can use bold and color to good effect. Be very careful with italics, because most fonts go jagged when set to italic. Never underline anything except links.
• letter-spacing: 1px; using appropriate positive or negative values can be effective. line-height: 300%; again with values to suit is an easy way to create or reduce white space. font-variant: small-caps; and text-transform: capitalize; are also useful styles.

Color

• Readability affects whether or not a surfer is comfortable on your site(s) and good contrast is an important part of that. Remember too that without the visual impact of thumbnails, strong colors can much more easily dominate your content. The text-book answer would be black on white, with one or two other colors for highlights, but that can require more design skills than a more complex layout. Using an overall background pattern the way that Sticky Hole does is one solution. Shemp’s use of two shades of a similar color is another and you can also use variations on the image below, with/without the gradient and/or borders:
  
  Tiled backgrounds need not involve large graphics and gradients can be reduced to a 1px or 2px strip (with the borders applied by CSS), so there are plenty of options which do not break any of the other “rules”.
• If you are going to use color at all, use it to maximum advantage. Choose colors which will suggest your niche to the surfer and since the pages will not have lots of thumbnails to brighten them up, you could try strong, contrasting colors from within the appropriate palette. Take care to avoid dull color variations for headlines and bright backgrounds.

Top Lists

• In terms of effective top list placement for full-on trading sites, this is hard to beat. But if low-traffic sites fill the whole first screen with trade and/or sponsor links, they will kill themselves. A much better way for such sites are as Fucked 11 or Sun Porno do it, with just a few links up top (perhaps alongside the logo) so that the surfer can seem them, but also what he came for: the gallery links. There are a couple of gotchas lurking in here. If the aim of your site is income rather than impressive trade stats, you almost certainly want to think twice about giving your most valuable real estate to trades. Even if aggressive trading is your aim, take another look at Mature Nights. He has sixty-five trades in that list, so even if it is clicked a lot, the clicks will not be focused on just one or two trades. I recommend at least 20 links for a table placed as prominently as this and the more the better.
• One thing you can carry over from thumb-TGP practise is placed trade links between blocks:

  Trade Link trade description

  Trade Link trade description

  Trade Link trade description

• You must have a top list on your main page these days, if only because other traders expect one, but for sites not aimed primarily at generating traffic, any list longer than 20 sites should appear on a separate page to ensure that maximum advantage goes to your better trades. And regardless of what kind of lists you show and where you place them, always finish your pages off with a single, big bold link to your trade script, promising “More Free Porn” or whatever. Not many surfers will reach the bottom of the page and those who do are more likely to click when a link is obvious and there is no choice to make. This could be how you use a keyword-loaded “h3″ link as mentioned in the next section.

Search Engine Optimization

• You cannot do much to control the text within your gallery links, but that is not a reason to avoid the basics. Pick 3-5 strong keywords and use them in a “title” tag of 6-8 words total. Repeat the 2-3 keywords you most care about in an “h1″ tag as close to the top of your page as possible. If you use a graphic logo

  an “h1″ tag in a small, bold font can go at the very top of your page without messing up the design

  . Otherwise you could skip a logo altogether

  And Use An “h1″ In Its Place

• Next, get an “h2″ high up on the page. The most logical place which gives you the chance to include any keywords from your title which did not make the “h1″ (else additional keywords) is

  As A Header For Today’s Galleries

• Don’t use “h” tags without thought. Although they are an easy way to highlight text on a page, because the search engines take them seriously, used carelessly they can end up diluting your keyword relevancy. You are also expected to use headlines in descending order, but the SE’s will treat each subsequent headline as less important and a good one is needed for the bottom of the page. So I recommend that once you have the “h1″ and “h2″ in place, don’t use headline tags again until the bottom of the page. Here you get your keywords into 

  An “h3″ Tag Perhaps As Part Of The Copyright Notice

   but anyway as close to the bottom of the page as possible.
• Description and keyword metas, alt (except possibly for linked images) and title tags are reputedly not used by any but the smaller search engines. However that is not a reason to leave them out. Google will use the description tag for display if it gets too far into your site without finding text it can use. 15 comma-separated keywords is about right and the description should be in readable, properly punctuated english, about 20 words long.

Monetizing Your Sites

• It is a while since run-of-the-mill banners have worked well and they may bring us into conflict with 2257 anyway (if that is a concern). But plain text links, unless the text is very striking, do not work a great deal better. The trick with both is to come up with something original and striking: you may find it easier to use the same type of name+description link that I suggested above for trade links, or take yet another look at Sun Porno for ideas about how to build text-rich promos.
• For both effectiveness with surfers and with search engines, I recommend you build (short) descriptive text into your trade (except full-size tables) and sponsor links, even when they appear vertically down the side of your page. And remember, the very first screen (particularly the top and right side) is the most valuable real estate on your site. Links at the sides on lower screens are of minimal value. So if they get in the way of a clean design, let them go.
• Otherwise, the best way to increase your income from a TGP is by using sponsor-provided content with your own gallery designs (sponsor-provided hosting too if you need to sidestep 2257 issues). Submitting your designs to other TGP’s is a good way to get lots of eyes on them so that you can judge the results and tweak as necessary. Once you have the designs right, they will prove a lot more effective than using FHG’s.

Tips

• If you do not already know enough CSS to do away with tables completely, try to learn. Pages will be smaller and load faster without them, search engines will appreciate the higher text-to-code ratio.
• If you do have to use tables, to speed up load times, give your bigger (gallery links) tables a class and then use this CSS:

  .yourtableclass {
  	table-layout: fixed;
  }
  

  BUT TAKE CARE when you use this, you MUST give the tables and the td’s a width. It doesn’t matter if those widths are expressed in pixels or %ages, but this tip only works if you tell the browser what the horizontal dimensions of the table are. Used properly, this makes even huge tables begin loading instantly, instead of that wait-for-it then everything appears at once thing.
• Under no circumstances make your page a single table. If you need to wrap everything, for example to create a block of white on a bright or patterned background, do that with one or more “divs”. Use tables only when you must.
• Work hard at selling by using your imagination on links and descriptions. But do not rely on link volume to make sales: it is more likely to work against you unless cleverly worked into the design. A dozen imaginative, well-placed links will usually earn more than endless columns of names. And don’t undo the that “big-site” impression by breaking your gallery links into too-short blocks. Always leave at least 30-50 rows in a gallery block. If you can get your promos right and placed at the top of your page, you can even have all your galleries in a single block.
• If you are converting a site, remember that all your existing visitors are expecting a thumb-preview site. Your traffic and productivity are going to take a dive and many of your trades will become useless. Even when you expect this, the actuality is going to be hard to take and once you have designs up with which you feel comfortable, DO NOT PANIC. Before you start trying to tweak the designs, you will need to find trades with other text sites and give the search engines a little time to register your changes. Until you have surfers flowing through who are expecting text-based sites, you cannot hope to judge whether your designs are working or not. You might want to soften the blow by initially opening your text page on its own URL and using mod_rewrite to divert your new trades there (you can explain to them why) until you are totally happy with your design and have enough text trades to compensate for the drop in traffic from your older trades.

We are all aware that this is important stuff, but at most we usually think only about whether our join links stand out enough. There are many more factors to consider and you could be costing yourself a lot of money if you ignore them. Study after study shows that surfers quickly become “trained” by the layouts they encounter most often. That reality, together with common perceptions of how the internet should be utilized, means that if you offer something different, visitors to your site will not be at ease. That is not what you want, when you are trying to sell them something.

Where is it?

Surfers expect to see certain features on the sites they visit and they expect them to be in specific locations. If you offer these features but place them “wrongly” you might be dismayed just how few people see them at all and downgrade your site accordingly. Surfers have very short attention spans: they can afford to have, because they have thousands to choose from and they will often go visit another site, rather than figure out how yours works.

• Links to other areas of your site are expected to be in the upper left of the screen.
• Off-site links are expected to be on upper right of the screen or on the left, below the internal links.
• “Home” links are expected: one at the top left of the screen and another bottom center.
• Advertising banners are expected to be at the top of the browser window.
• If you offer a search facility, it is expected to be in the top center of the screen.
• If visitors may log in or register on your site, they should be able to do so from the upper left corner of the screen.
• If you are selling merchandise and using a shopping cart, its links should be at the top right.
• FAQ, help and contact links are also expected to be top right of the screen.

So the first rule when designing a site is to cater for rather than confound these expectations. However, some sites may have the chance to turn them to extra advantage because, when our well-trained surfer loads a new page, he or she instantly scans the first screen, paying particular attention to the locations which appear in the list above. So let’s say that your site doesn’t use a shopping cart: don’t simply leave the spot one would usually occupy empty or fill it with a non-productive graphic, put a small promotion, link or button, there. It will be seen.

Surfers’ expectation of a promo at the top of the screen should be of interest, particularly for the many who have become near paranoid about not exposing surfers to a sales pitch too soon. Certainly visitors should be able to see immediately that your site offers what they came for, but you can do that by telling them via text and/or graphics in a (shallow) header. Nor is it going to hurt – on a TGP for example – if at least a hint of the content is visible at the bottom of the first screen. But, never abandon the prime selling space on the page: confirmed freeloaders will not show you any appreciation and those who are looking to spend money may not bother looking down the page.

The moving finger writes…

(Note: never use obscure headlines) Some blogs and tours have in common their reliance on text and once again it is important to cater for the surfer who is far more likely to scan text than actually read it. Keep your text concise and on-topic, using short paragraphs with each covering a single salient point. Summarise that point in a few words if you can and highlight that text. Otherwise highlight key words. Less important is how you write, although it is best to aim for apparent objectivity rather than a hardcore sales pitch.

• Use bulleted lists whenever possible and be generous with your line spacing.
• Links with brief but informative descriptions are preferred to plain links or those with long descriptions.
• Surfers prefer short summaries of articles to jumping straight into the full article.
• Too much scrolling bugs surfers, so keep full articles on their own page(s) and don’t go overboard with the number of summaries displayed on one page. Blog owners take note!

Surfers’ dislike of scrolling may not seem entirely rational, but it is one of the main reasons that much of the content on many sites is rarely actually seen. In particular they hate horizontal scrolling and that creates a dilemma in the face of the wide variety of screen resolutions which need to be accomodated. Surfers using 800×600 may now be in a shrinking minority, but it is still a sizeable minority (15%-25%) while at the same time, a 760-pixel wide layout may keep them happy, but it will look puny at the higher resolutions.

Well the good news – at least if you are of an optimistic disposition – is that surfers prefer layouts which fill the screen. According to a number of surveys, full-screen layouts are considered more professional looking and easier to use. If you must go with a fixed layout, you should probably limit yourself to 900 pixels (to accomodate those who do not browse with a single window open) and at all costs, avoid layouts set to the left of the screen because those are actively disliked by many. And if you do impose horizontal scrolling on some, recognize most will not do it and keep important things, like navigation and promotions to the left of your page(s).