Guaranteed Designs Free Paysite Tips

2009 is here, the economy has been rough to say the least and the proliferation of “tube” sites has had as dramatic a negative impact on paysite sales as the advent of TGP/MGP sites ever did.  If I take a look across the board of sites I own as well as clients reporting into me with numbers, sales are down (or growth curves for those who are in building stages) as much as 33%.  The sectors hit least hard by this lie in three groups:

1) Cam sites.

2) Dating/social networking sites.

3) VOD sites.

Why? With the first and second cases I think it’s mostly a matter of it being something you can’t really get for free en masse and so it’s still a viable sell.  With the third case, VOD type sites, I think the answer is a bit more complicated…

First is obvious issue of the economic factor whereby people on a tight budget much prefer to pay a fixed one time fee for exactly the scene they want and nothing more.  The less obvious issue is that, as the Internet has matured, the average experience of the visitor to sites is much higher than it used to be.   Just a few years ago we always saw sales spike after Christmas largely because of the influx of newbies with new Holiday gift computers and net accounts.  The day of the newbie is past.

So what to do about this?  Starting your own cam or dating site and having it be any good is quite the undertaking.  Not a bad deal if you can do it, but not on the top of my low effort for high return list by any means.  What I’m looking to do in the next month or two is this:

1) Offer on exit from my paysites the ability for the visitor to download (or just stream) scenes or sets individually for a one time fee.  It’s an entire secondary sales pitch to the prospective client that wasn’t there before.  Using a bit of software like http://www.phantomcart.com/  allows you to do this quite easily and still track it for affiliates using NATS or many of the major billers.

2) Offer some of my older/archive content for free with the access being controlled by simply entering an email address and then from within that “members” area, upselling to cam sites, dating sites, VOD and my own VOD versions of my sites.  This model has been recently worked on by a friend of mine to great success and now I’ve had a couple others telling me positive stories as well.   It makes me some nervous to offer say a buck an email not knowing yet for sure what the average return will be per “member” but that avg. can be figured out with internal test traffic first.

The times change and if we try to use the same business models from 2000 in them, then we’re not going to be around long.  I hope these ideas end up being the solution for this next period of time.  We’ll certainly see by the time it thaws out in NY here.

As always, I wish you good luck and good profit!  I hope these ideas are useful to you.

In just about any other industry but ours, millions of dollars are spent on the simple idea of branding. Is it really warranted or is it just a collective ego thing for each company? I’m sure it’s some of both and to varying degrees depending on the product/industry but let’s look at the effect it has on our own.

I think most webmasters will agree that the vast majority of programs/sites don’t spend much time on the thought of creating a true brand. Sure the domain name gets some thought and maybe a little time spent on a logo but some nice graphics and a slick name hardly qualify as a true brand. A brand is what happens when the mere mention of the name or a glimpse at the logo brings with it the weight of perceptions and suppositions. The company that has successfully created a brand doesn’t have to sell you on the quality of the brand and the idea behind it so much because it has taken on a life of its own and has a perceived value established.

In adult this means consumers will chat it up to their friends (I wonder how many sales Bang Bus got from word of mouth!) and webmasters will trust they are promoting a product of a certain level and not worry about wasting their traffic. A few companies that come to mind that have created a real brand have also done very well for themselves. Are they doing well because they created a brand or is the brand a result of success? FTV, Naughty America, Lightspeed etc…  In the case of Naughty America they went to a lot of trouble to make a very recognizable logo and video bumper as well.

In my view, the answer to my question is that part of why they did so well is that they built a brand.  They built trust in webmasters because of care for quality and they were perceived by the consumer to be more than just run of the mill porn.  it’s far too easy in this business to just churn mediocre stuff out, but the people who care enough to create a brand perception also care enough to provide good product and people respond to that.  They respond to the brand right off the bat because it’s an indicator of the quality to come.  Over time that brand will bring you more and more of the coveted “type in” traffic as well.

So take the time to think out a brand.  Make a visual brand that leaves a quick impression instead of trying to make something too graphically slick, make it graphically recognizable (Pepsi, Nike, Target… graphical masterpieces???) and then build a consistent product that keeps in line with the perception the brand puts forth.

It may seem like basic advice but what % of people are following it?

For this tip I’m going to share with you some of the links and software that I have in my little bag o’ tricks. Over the years I’ve found lots of neat tools to make my jobs easier and hopefully my projects more profitable. Maybe you can make good use of them too.

• Google Calendar ( http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlecalendar/tour.html): Since this new tool came out, I’ve put it to use in several ways. One great way that is directly related to paysite operation is using it to deliver things like webcam appearance schedules for solo girls. Another use is for managing project deadlines with a crew. It’s a robust and easy to use tool. For the solo girl site thing there’s another little application that you can use to present the schedules at: http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/eventscalendar.shtml
• Flash Chat (http://www.tufat.com/s_flash_chat_chatroom.htm): This is a great cheap chat client, also good for use with solo girl sites. If you’re running a live webcam show and need the chat room aspect to go with it, this thing let’s you have a moderator and banned words and all kinds of advanced features for only 5 bucks! It’s also a nice tool for running live customer support.
• Joomla (http://www.joomla.com/): There are a few real nice content management systems available specific to our industry but if you want to check out something that is extremely robust and completely free I suggest you have a look at this. I’ve messed with it on some non-adult client projects and was very impressed but haven’t yet seen anyone put it into action in adult. I don’t see where it wouldn’t work just as well though.
• Favicons (http://www.htmlkit.com/services/favicon/): Do you like those little icons that pop up next to a url in a browser and on your bookmark list? Make one for your site with this neat little online tool.
• Color Scrollbars (http://www.layoutland.net/generators/scrollbar.htm): If you want to customize the scrollbar the browser displays (IE only) on a webpage then you can use this online tool to generate the code. I like to do this mostly when I’m embedding i-frames.
• Abstract Fonts (http://www.abstractfonts.com/): You can never have enough fonts and the weird, abstract ones can be great for logos.
• Hex Color Finder (http://www.softsea.com/review/Hex-Color-Finder.html): So you need to match a color in an image into a piece of HTML. The long way to do it is to save or screen capture the image, load it into Photoshop, use the eyedropper on the section you need and then use the color manager to see the hex value. Heck that even takes long to type. Or you could just download that tool and grab it right off the browser.
• Photoshop Shapes & Brushes (http://www.freephotoshop.com/html/free_shapes.html): One of the hugest time savers in Photoshop is to have a large array of cool brushes and shapes you can draw from rather than having to create everything from scratch. Take a look at these and put ‘em to good use.
• Webpage/CSS Inspector (http://www.getfirebug.com/): This one is for Firefox users only. They say the greatest form of flattery is imitation and I’m sure most of what many of us have learned about design and coding has come from looking at others work and source code. This little FF plugin will help you pull apart pages you love (and their respective style sheets) faster than anything else I’ve seen. Viewing source code is always easy too but this allows you to pull things apart in selection areas and get to the underlying files that you can’t always get to in the source.
• Board Tracker (http://www.boardtracker.com/): Stay connected to what’s going on with thousands of boards. They have a ton listed listed for adult specifically. I like the feature where you can set it up to email you whenever a post with certain keywords appears. If you do a lot of B to B this is a must!

Well that’s it for this tip. I hope you find all this usefull and I wish ya’ll Happy Holidays.

It’s a simple enough question and I’ve seen it come up on a couple boards and with a couple consulting clients recently so I guess it’s time to talk about it here. =]

I think the best way to approach answering the question is to make a simple pros/cons list. I’ll start with the cons because I always like to end on a positive note. So here goes:

Cons:

1. Cost. This con is enough to stop most people from considering it. There are several affiliate management softwares out there and prices are competitive to one another. Usually you’ll pay some fee to get it installed and then some fee for monthly usage based on how many members your site(s) has. The scaling of the cost is never going to be prohibitive though so the cost issue is only really a concern for startup sized programs.
2. Complexity. Affiliate management software handles tons of details and hence takes some getting used to. You’ll have to learn to work with template engines and adjust some of your HTML so it has tracking codes and all that. There is a learning curve involved that some people just don’t want to deal with. Of course there are guys like me out there who will service these needs but then you have to figure in a bit more in the cost column.
3. Server load. Using software on your box to manage so many functions for you is going to put increased load on the server. You have to make sure you have the “beef” to handle it especially when you get busier. It’s more a concern for larger membership bases but it’s worth mentioning.
4. Trust. Some affiliates just don’t trust anything but third party solutions like what CCBill offers. I find it best to combine affiliate software with a third part solution so you can offer either but that takes some doing to make it all report in one place and not be an accounting mess so you have to be ready for some significant setting up to do that. [We have this at http://www.sterlingcash.com/ccbill.html].

Pros:

1. Cascading billing. Most of these softwares started just to help webmasters solve the issue of good clients getting denied by one biller or another. The ability to send a denied transaction to another biller increases sales and better yet, the ability to choose which biller gets first crack at any given time is even better. Those of us who have been around a long time have gotten shot in the foot by having all our members with one biller and having that biller go tits up. Changing around your billers can alleviate the “all eggs in one basket” issue. It also can mitigate days where one biller is scrubbing too heavily.
2. Tons of data. While the billing companies do offer lots of data, the formatting of that data often makes it difficult for you to cull useful information quickly. With a program like NATS, your first report page has a snap shot of your sales and conversions to each site, top lists and bottom lists of resellers, new affiliate signups and much more. You just can’t beat that kind of reporting.
3. Ad tool delivery. Getting link codes and ad tools to your affiliates in a fashion that gives them everything they want and doesn’t take you hours out of every day is priceless. There are probably even a dozen tools and formats for tools your affiliates might want and never bug you for that you don’t even realize would help you get more traffic and sales, then when you see all the things your affiliate management software has entries for you end up filling it up and getting more out there that you wouldn’t have thought of before.
4. Customization. The thinks you can change in your program at the touch of a mouse button are astounding. Changing payout structures, setting up specific payouts for specific campaigns and resellers, setting up different price options for just one campaign or reseller without having to make a new join page, offering rewards programs, etc… This list goes on and on and on. It should be a like 20 pros if you’re comparing lists here. =]

I realize too that some people would be thinking that having a single third party solution is better for getting payments out (they let the biller deal with it) but I didn’t see this as a pro or con because you can just take a data dump from affiliate software and send it off to a company like paychex.com to make payments. It is one extra step but the abilities you gain by being able to payout from multiple billers make this issue a even on both sides to me.

So there you go I made an evenly balanced list numbers-wise anyway but in my own opinion it’s just not a contest. The only significant factors on the cons all boil down to finances and the amount of money it takes to do the affiliate management software is not prohibitive to anyone who is doing even just a few joins per day. Certainly there are some decent sized programs out there not using any software but you’ll see they’ve done a lot of customizing and extending of what the biller offers on their own to meet the needs of what you can just buy off the shelf nowadays. If you are going to be serious about the paysite game then I strongly recommend affiliate management software is in your plans.

The softwares I know of are:

Nats: http://nats.toomuchmedia.com/

MPA3: http://www.mpa3.com/

Executive Stats: http://www.executivestats.com/

I’ve done some work at different times on any of the three and they all have strong and weak points but will do all the basics you need. I’m far more experienced with NATS however and am very pleased with all it offers and how often they add to it’s functionality.

Until next month… happy porning!

[ed. This comment was posted on Netpond by Player Rob and I thought it beared repeating here.]

I agree with you on that article especially the trust and cascading billing side hence why our affiliate software signs up the affiliate to both Epoch and CCBill, cacades and the affiliate gets paid by the 3rd parties.

One point you should have put in there is about cashflow when making the payments yourself. Initially on the first payments out to affilates the company will have to pay the affiliates from their own pockets and will be short on cash due to reserves being taken and payment not received from the biller, unless using own merchant account.

This month’s tip discusses one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of selling your website(s)…  The video trailers.  I can’t tell you how many times people have come to me, scratching their heads, wondering why their very good tour is not converting so well only to find out when I look at the video trailer that they spent almost no time putting a great one together.  If a picture is worth a thousand words then your video is work 100,000.  So what makes up a trailer that helps sales then?

1. Don’t give away too much.  I’ve seen some awful edits where it’s basically just 30 seconds from a scene with a front and back stuck on it.  If you show too much contiguous action or just too much in general then your potential horny client is going to finish the job to the trailer and not join.
2. Edit them MTV Cribs style.  Think ADD culture and edit the things to show just enough of each hot bit to make in impression on the brain but not to get them going with too much action.  If you have a BJ site for instance, show the 2 seconds of the girl getting from the tip to the short and curlies then cut quick to the next fast bit.
3. Smaller size is okay, but not less quality.  Don’t sacrifice bit rate to save file size, instead go for a smaller video aspect.  A fudgy looking video will send people packing but a smaller one can just have something near it that says “actual video size is 2x larger…” or something to that effect.  If you’re not afraid of using up some bandwidth then just give them the high quality they see in the members area.
4. Don’t be afraid to mix in text between cuts to deliver your message.  Everyone does a front and back but very few do neat little things in the midst of it to drive your pitch home.  It works well.

That’s pretty much it.  Nothing too complex about it.  You just need to spend a good amount of time and effort to put together the best trailer that teases with the best snippets from your scenes and hottest models.  Become the master of boner inducing trailers (that don’t give enough to play with said boner) and you will see sales jump some.

Going by the mantra, “Every little thing adds up!” I have a few little tricks to consider that will help bring your margins up pretty nicely especially when all combined. I don’t think any of these are some big great secret but plenty of people aren’t doing a good percentage of them and they are missing out on some healthy extra profit if they are not.

• Mail your old members with special offers. Many customers who joined your site(s) and quit just whacked out all the content they could see and went looking for something else. They are already proven to like your content though and reminding them you are still out there and even offering them a discounted monthly price if they come back will yield pretty good results. Two or three times a year it’s a great idea to email all your ex-members with a special offer.
• Have a discount offer pop up as an exit from a join page. If they went to join and saw a price that was too much, sometimes you can get that join for a lower price. You can also use your trial as a secondary option if you are iffy about the whole trial thing and put it here on an exit.
• Use “upsells” and monitor them closely. Live chats, stores, whatever you can put in your members area as a premium service is fine. Obviously you don’t want to have so much presented that your members feel like they paid only to get a menu of premium services but featuring some real good high quality stuff here and there is going to add to your revenue stream.
• Use exits when you can. Exit consoles still work (especially if you use some of the slick code that bypasses many of the blockers or a more mello one like my DHTML popup on this page). You will have to make options for affiliates to opt out for their traffic perhaps but enough people will agree to it (especially for a higher payout) and you can generate some decent income from your exits especially if you really pay attention and monitor them.
• Try special offers to trial members. This really goes with the first tip but the idea here is if you do something like run a limited trial and the customer doesn’t take the full price option, you can mail them later or setup your biller to make an offer at a reduced price if they don’t want to convert from the trial. This kind of thing can be what makes you able to offer PPS on trials. Your affiliates get their big $ on the little trial option and you can get your margin to a level where you can afford those PPS $ because you bring back some non-takers from the trial on your own. It’s a win-win.
• When all else fails and you just aren’t getting a dime out of a visitor or ex member, find a way to get them to some free site(s) you run. Whether it be in a mail or a final exit opportunity… get them over to some site you can use to build up significant traffic and then you have money from ad sales and a tool to use to trade for more traffic. It works really well if you can get ex members to it because you have a base of traffic willing to pay for porn and that makes you a good affiliate to other programs.
• Play the language game. If you aren’t going to do any translated version of your site(s), at least look at geo-targeting the traffic that isn’t in your language and finding a useful place to send it to.

These next few ideas apply specifically to people who have exclusive content.

• Offer your stuff on DVD.  There is a whole host of people out there who will buy DVD versions of your content.
• If you have your own solo girls, look to offer custom videos (as directed by the person buying it).  Some guys will pay quite a nice sum for a video that caters to their specific fetish (smoking and cussing him out for example…).
• If you have solo girls look to get them into a magazine or two.  It’s some good publicity and leads to some type-in work not to mention some of the girls really like the ego boost from doing it.
• Use some of your older content as product in trade for traffic or even consider selling it once you have enough archived that it’s not going to effect your member base.  I know the usual thought is to protect it all at all costs but let’s face it, people will steal and trade the stuff and if you’ve been out there long enough your older content will be around.  You might as well use that same older content in trades and selling it (or offering a plug-in maybe?) and monetize it further.

Well there’s a bunch of ideas for this month.  There’s plenty more and I’m sure we’ll hear about ‘em on the boards.  Until then… I wish great sales on everyone.

No I’m not Dave Letterman with a list of cards and the cool glass breaking noise when I toss them over my desk. But this month I do have for ya’ll the top 10 things that screw up a perfectly good tour:

1. Horrible picture selections: Nothing will send your surfers packing faster than crappy choices on which pictures you use. This goes for the cutout pictures of the girl(s) in the graphics and even more so for the sample type shots in a “reality” style tour. This is the one area you want to spend the extra time on, hand selecting the hottest shots. And for porn’s sake, if it’s a niche site, show off the dang niche! What’s with big breast sites that have 80% face and ass shots?
2. Horrible picture quality: Kinda goes with #1 but it is a separate issue. Don’t pic degraded movie screen caps or low rez pics. Big and crisp is the order of the day.
3. Non-contrasted join links: Make sure your join links pop off the page in some way. A contrasting color or animation to them.
4. The Vegas effect: Decide where you want to draw the viewer’s attention and focus on that. There is a horrible tendency in our industry to overdo everything and thing the page needs to look like a street in Vegas, full of flashing everything and 40 different items tugging for your attention all at the same time. You have to reel your surfer in and direct the attention flow to the main message, the content that gives him a boner and then to the join where he can get his happy ending.
5. A brand is good but…: Don’t forget, you’re still selling a tool for masturbation most of the time. Don’t get caught up in your brand or your neato site idea to the distraction of the main selling point.
6. Overcome objections: The join page needs to address several objections users commonly have. See my tip at here for complete info on that.
7. Speed kills!: A slow delivery time on your tour will not bode well for conversions. Your hosting must be fast as hell (keep your FHGs on a different server dude!) and you have to play the balancing act between crisp graphics and quick load times. Use a tool like this one to check you site speed.
8. Some folks read: Keep your main sales points to simple bulleted type sound bytes. Most people won’t read that much text so you want to keep the important stuff in more of a list format that can be scanned quickly. For the folks who will read everything you have to say, they are the type of people who don’t like marketing hype bull shit so speak in plain terms and try not to sound too commercial. Every site makes 10 million promises about how it’s the best and it’s a nice way to set off the bull shit radar. Just talk up the site like you’d sell it to a friend in a conversation.
9. If a picture is worth a thousand words…: A video is worth a million.  DO NOT skimp on your video trailers.  In today’s market your video trailer can have the biggest impact on your site of just about anything.  The editing style should be crisp, showing just enough to tease but not enough to whack off to (so many people put up WAYYY to much on their trailer).  Think MTV Cribs style editing and you’ll get the idea.
10. When all else fails: Shameless plug time… you can always hire a guy like me to just go over your tour and write up a review for it so you have a list of points to edit and work on. =]

That’s it for this month.  Happy converting!

A couple posts back I did “The Biggest Mistake” and spoke about people not allocating nearly enough funds for advertising. Well in this post I am going to append all that and add in the other biggest mistake I keep seeing:

Cardinal sin #2 revision F… Doing too many sites at once!

A lot of startups see big programs and want to emulate them and forget that there was a process those programs went through to get there. Trying to launch with 20 sites and have multiple payout programs and every ad material known to man when you launch your program is almost a sure fire way to be nowhere in a year’s time. The programs that succeed do so because they do each piece of their program (each site, each ad material, etc) with focused attention to detail and excellence. Starting with one site and doing it RIGHT will get you so much further than starting with five and doing just what you can to make them sufficient. Do one site with plenty of well done ad materials, frequent updates, your complete attention to all the little things that add up and make the difference… and THEN you go on to the next and give that the same attention and so on.

It’s simple advice but it’s so often overlooked I think. Opportunities to do more are always in your face in this business and it takes some serious self control to stick to your focused product before it’s time to expand.  If you have one site doing 5 sales a day and think that doing two more sites will get you to 15, you are almost sure to have 3 times the work and maybe 8 or 9 sales a day.  If you spent the same time improving your 5 sale per day site, making traffic deals and learning what else you can do to grow, in the same amount of time you are likely to be to those 15 sales per day you were looking for and not be flooded with site updates, ad material needs and all other manner of minutia.  Plus, you’ll learn so much more about your craft perfecting one site that you’ll be able to apply that in your expansion and get more from each new one.

So that’s my advice for the month. Focus and bring excellence to what you do instead of trying to do too much.  As always I wish you the greatest of success!

So you’ve got great content… you have some kickass designs… you’ve been online six months and you’re still doing only a handful of sign-ups a day! What in the heck can you do to make it past the meager stages of a startup and into the types of numbers you hear people talking about?

Well in the early days it was enough to just be online but unfortunately there are still quite a good number of people who operate under that assumption (see last month’s article). But let’s say you get it now and you are ready to make a solid commitment to marketing your program/sites. Which way to go? Buy traffic directly, hire a gallery submitter, build free sites, get an affiliate manager and go crazy promoting your affiliate program, work search engines, all the above (and if so to what degree on each…)?

There is no one right answer here. There is no magic bullet. But I can give you some advice on what to expect and look for under each heading here and hopefully that helps you to formulate a proper plan for you business.

• Affiliate Program Promotion: The one thing you will see the most of is affiliate programs making as much noise as possible on the boards and at shows. They put up a ton of sites usually and offer every payout known to man. The affiliate game is an art form in and of itself and I could write a whole book on how to do it well, but for purposes of this discussion let me summarize it by saying that the main driving reason behind doing an affiliate program is that you can get a sales force of people out there who already understand traffic and so don’t have to learn it all yourself. My opinion is that if you’re ever going to reach the HUGE numbers that you will have to have an affiliate program at least as part of your plan. You may not wish to do anything but make it a small invite only program for a time but it’s still good to have. In brief this is what I see being the most effective way to go about doing an affiliate marketing program:
• Start small. Don’t try to be the next 40+ sites program with crazy payouts from day one. Unless you had HUGE dollars behind you, you wouldn’t try to compete with Pepsi if you had some new beverage company. You’d get a strong regional following and work your way up. The same applies here. There are tons of guys who would promote a small private program because they know the ad materials aren’t all over the place and they can make good sales of it. You don’t have to make the program totally closed but you don’t go making a huge splash of it until you’ve solidified some beta type relationships for a good time.
• Once you want to go more public with the program, make sure you’ve listened to those beta affiliates on their ad material needs and have plenty in there for affiliates to work with. Nothing will stall faster than a program with only a dozen FHGs and not much else. You need TONS of ad materials for people to work with.
• Make sure you are ready for the onslaught of FHG traffic and have a good large pipe in place on a server dedicated to it. You can run up to 40mbits in a couple months if you market the program well.
• Leave headroom in your payout structure to make special deals. Some big affiliates will want preferential treatment so you need to make sure you can afford to give it to them.
• Margins to be expected are more simple to figure out here because you don’t pay for anything that doesn’t generate a sign-up so the math here is self explanatory.
• Third Party Traffic: Another common avenue is to buy traffic from brokers or directly from other sites. The main thing to understand here is that, even among reputable and seemingly well matched traffic sources, you can usually only expect maybe 2 out of 10 buys to show a profit. So the direct traffic buy game is like casting a net. You have to be prepared to lose money at first while you nail down the buys that will work time and time again for you. You also need to watch your returns carefully and measure them properly for what the extended value is. Not to go hawking my product again here but it’s the best way I know to watch such things (http://www.guaranteeddesigns.com/membersitegenie.html). This is all a numbers game. Buy to try and buy again.
• Get a Gallery Submitter: Either a program for submitting or a person known to have some partner accounts (places that will post his/her links right away because of a trust level being met) is what I’m speaking of here. The return on this type of work can be a bit more dicey to measure so you have to really be diligent about setting up each campaign or worker with unique tracking on their work. Done well, this is a solid strategy and you can use pretty inexpensive labor to get the job done as well as overlap that labor into building blogs and whatnot. This is an avenue I’d recommend looking into early on and to expect incremental returns over a long haul. Just try to monetize that labor as much as possible especially in the early stages.
• Search Engine Placement: The rule of thumb in adult is that if someone is selling you the ability to get your site to the top of major search engines, it’s probably too good to be true. Look, the best converting traffic you can get is from search hits and if someone knows how to say get the top listing for the term “blow job,” then they can make a TON of money even doing that with an affiliate code wrapped in it. So if they are selling that service for some flat price that is affordable then it’s not likely it’s going to work out well for long if at all. If, however, you know something about search engines yourself and can work them, then it’s always a plus. A couple points to be made here in addition:
• Buying spots on search engines can be cost restrictive and I always see very mixed results. Tread carefully here and buy in small doses to test before you go any further.
• Getting SE traffic over time just by way of branding and getting the right text out there on blogs and pages is a sort of hidden long term gain that should be considered. When you are making your FHGs and blogs and whatever other ad tools and pages will be out there, put thought into what term relevance and branding you want to build in search engines many months down the road. It may not seem like much when you have 10 affiliates posting a total of 100 galleries out there but when you have thousands and thousands of FHGs all over the market then what text is in them becomes awfully important.
• Free Sites Network: Building blogs or some other free sites of some type can be very lucrative and offer you the ability to make additional affiliate money yourself and make strategic traffic deals. Send some traffic from your site in return for traffic back to your paysite, in other words.  The thing here is that doing a good free site (or sites) can be a full time job in and of itself.  Sometimes the best strategy early on is to work your way up from good free sites and then into paysites but if you are already invested in the paysite game then my suggestion here is to not approach this angle unless you have extra manpower to do it right.  The return on time investment here is limited if you only do it half-assed.

So what to do with all this info?  A brief summary of my suggestions here is to not overreach and start small with a basically private affiliate program.  Work out the kinks, have fewer sites but do them WELL and build up plenty of ad materials.  The other avenues of traffic generation are to be looked at as supplementary based on your resources (manpower and financial).  The thing that will make all the difference in the end is your ability to network and make those traffic deals (or to hire someone who can).

As always… I wish you all the best of luck and good fortune!