Guaranteed Designs Free Paysite Tips

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!