If you are reading this diary with thoughts about being an adult porn pusher yourself, then I'm sure you have already read a mass of helpful articles on the subject. If you have been browsing adult webmaster forums (as you should have been), you will have found a great deal of info about how to start up. This post isn't any grand design from me on how to become an adult webmaster, it's just about some discoveries I have made along the way.
The first discovery, which I have written about several times before, is make yourself known and then you will get all the help and advice you (think) you need. But be very careful who you trust.
The second is, beware of free stuff that appears to be extremely helpful. And this is what this post (and the one or two which follow) is all about.
Don't rely on 'free hosting' for your sites, tgps or blogs. They come at a high price. The first being that they will carry an advert for the host provider and this can be very large and eye catching. The second is, if you are using free hosting to make free sites and tgps (in particular) you will be unable to promote them on the major directories/tgp lists and you need directory/list submissions to promote your sites and galleries - at first anyway (and for tgps, for ever, as you will constantly be making new ones). Once your site has been established a few months (assuming you have tweaked it to make it search engine friendly and worth looking at) you will get search engine hits and some of these will convert, but this takes time. You need those directories to set the 'spiders' off.
Use free hosting by all means, but mainly to practice on, and once you are ready to begin for real, buy yourself one or two domain names and some hosting (you can get it really cheap - again, if you browse adult webmaster forums, you will find links to hosts who allow adult content in many of the commentator's signatures). But while you are with that free host, work out just what looks good, what kind of thumbnails look best and how to arrange them (and don't forget you need to host these, and the bigger pictures they link to, on the same server, not one belonging to your sponsor - unless they are providing the hosting of course, but then you are into a whole different ball game). You can use free hosting to practice your html, using java script, embedding videos, or whatever, but again, make sure you have the right to use them, or you will be out on your ear before you have even begun in this game!
On the subject of hosting provided by sponsors, this is free and often very good. Some will even set you up a blog and hosting with a cgbin, but they will only give you these last two if you have your own domain name. Nevertheless, those which offer only ftp access still provide a great deal of storage for you to host your free sites and galleries. And you will be allowed to submit these to many of the directories (especially if you use your own domain name).
The main condition with these, however, is something which should be obvious, but it seems isn't always so. That is, you can only promote or link to sites and products the sponsor provides - no one or nothing else. You cannot link to your other sites/blogs if they contain content not provided by your sponsor (which is quite a downer, especially if that particular site or blog gets loads of hits. Then you will be very tempted to link those hits on to other sites or blogs in your little 'porn kingdon'. Don't. If you do, you are at high risk of losing your sponosored hosting). Directories obviously link to other sites and this is a grey area, but most sponsors appear to allow these links, as it is in their interests to do so, but be very careful in only linking to those directories which actually list your sites.
I use free sponsor hosting myself for a couple of my blogs and galleries and it works very well. The main reason being that these particular sponsors provide a lot of content and have a number of niches and sites for me to promote. If, however, the sponsor is a small one, with a small number of porn sites, you may be a little hard pressed to find new and novel content for your surfers. That's when the promotion work becomes harder. It may work out very well, especially if you are promoting a particular sought-after niche, but I personally would only use this type of sponsor to host tgps and free sites, because a blog, which of course requires frequent updating, may run out of new content quite quickly. That, however, is just my opinion and time may well prove me wrong.
There's loads more info you can find about the best way to use free hosting and the problems you may face with this by browsing adult webmaster forums, and written by folk who have much more experience than me. Here's a couple to be getting on with: Netpond, and Green Guy and Jim . You will find links to more help and other forums on these sites.
This has just been a talk about one of my own 'discoveries' about using free hosting. I'll talk about free blog hosts in the next entry.
Copyright Zani 2007
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