The concept is simple. You submit a picture (or more) along with a description and a banner or text link pointing back to wherever you want to direct the surfer. Most, but not all, of the picposts will want you to put a link on your site pointing back to them as a traffic trade of sorts.

Picposts have to be one of the least popular sources of traffic these days. But there is still good enough reasons to spend a little time with them each day. Mainly, the people who surf picposts are generally more ignorant surfers who happen to spend money. Or, I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s possible that they don’t have high speed connections, and they really aren’t able to view anything but pictures. Finally, professional images tend to be of higher quality than videos, especially screen shots, and there are even surfers out there who specifically like looking at high quality images over crappy quality flash videos for example…it doesn’t really matter why they do it, the important thing is that they still do.

I’m not going to provide an exact example of what to do with your project as the possibilities are endless and up to you. It really depends on how much time you want to put into it. Sure, you can be lazy and just submit to picposts that don’t require a reciprocal link back, and send them directly to the program you’re promoting. But there are more effective ways to manipulate this traffic. I’m going to explain the thought process I go through when setting one of these up.

Take a look at some picposts, and pay attention to where the banners lead. Are they going directly to a paysite tour? Are they going to what we call a “landing page?” Etc…

I like to send surfers to a landing page for multiple reasons, you will understand why if you read this all the way through. It takes a little longer to set something like this up, but once it’s done, your able to work this page for as long as you want, or until you run out of content to submit. My landing page is generally just a simple html page. I pick my best converting niche, or paysite/program and build it around that.

Ok, so I know what I’m going to promote, so I create a directory like this:

whateverdomain.com/name-of-niche/

This is where everything’s going to stay to keep organized.

Create an index.html page and save it in this directory. This is where your visitors are going to land when they click your links or banners.

Find a good full page ad, or even a half page ad, and put it directly at the top of your page. The more inexperienced, or the truly interested, will generally click right through this ad. That’s good.

Below the top ad, you want to create a somewhat busy looking page for the people  who actually scroll down. We want to give the impression that they have arrived at a page that is full of content and resources about whatever niche you’re promoting, without actually giving much away at all.

Toplists

Toplists are scripts set up on other websites that allow you to trade traffic with them and others. You create a account on their site, and they give you a special code for you to link back. This code keeps track of how many people visit the toplist from your site. The more your site sends, the higher up the toplist your banner goes, hopefully resulting in more traffic from the toplist to your site. A lot of them require banners of 468×80, and/or 468×60, some even require odd sized banners. You will need to upload these to your server before creating your account. For a project like this, I generally use banners already made for the site I’m promoting by the affiliate programs. But you can always create your own if you really want to stand out. Just avoid using banners that have images that look like thumbnails or media players on them.

Navigate to your favorite search engines and enter the phrase “Your-Niche Toplist”. You should have no problem finding them unless your niche is extremely obscure. Which can easily happen. You basically want to join the ones that look like they have traffic, and don’t appear to mess with the surfer by installing crap or whatever. I generally tend to join about 10-20 toplists if I can find them.

Directly below your full page ad, put text links with your specific link code to the toplists. You can arrange this however you want. I tend to keep it simple and sweet. People who bypass your ad at the top will eventually click these links. The more traffic you get, the higher up the toplists you go.

Rest of the page.

Below your toplist links. You basically need to add a bunch of crap to make it seem that there’s content on the page. This is where you can actually have some fun with all those stupid ad tools your affiliate programs make, that you really can’t use anywhere else. I tend to evenly distribute a mix of ad tools to banners, depending on what’s available. For example, you could have a banner, then a bunch of links to free hosted galleries, then another banner, then a bunch of hosted flash videos, etc… It’s completely up to you. Just keep all of the ads relevant to your niche. You give the impression that you’re giving away free content, while the entire page is nothing but an advertisement for the niche you’re promoting.

After you fill up your page with a bunch of ads and teaser content, add another banner ^_^. Then it’s time to place the recips to your picposts that you’re going to be submitting to.

There really isn’t that many functioning picposts out there as there used to be. This part won’t be that difficult. The amount of places you’re going to be submitting to, depends on the niche you’re promoting. As with the list of no recip adult directories I’ve added to this site, I may eventually make a list of active picposts for everyone to have easier access. To find them, do a search for “niche picpost” or even better… “Webmasters: Click here to add your link and image!” This is a footprint that is in most picpost scripts. Some picposts show the date the images have been posted. Keep an eye out for ones that had their last images listed back in 2003-2005. These are all broken, but for some reason, someone is still paying the hosting bill.

I usually put the recips towards the bottom of my landing page, then use the landing page as a tool for submitting the pics. Click the recip, it takes you to the picpost, go to the submit page, and of course submit the info.

Put some more ads, links to your other sites, then copy and paste those links to the toplists you signed up for. This is basically a last chance effort to get a click from people who have scrolled all the way to the bottom. Now you’re good to go.

I’ve never spent a lot of time on a project like this. I crank it out as quickly as possible. When I do this, the landing page is generally…ugly. But feel free to make it as attractive as possible. It’s your page, you can pretty much do what you want. You can even add popups, pounders, exit consoles, etc… Just be sure that you’re not breaking the rules of the picposts, or toplists you’re working with.

Once you have your page setup, you really don’t have to spend much time on this at all. It’s then just a matter of submitting some pictures every day. I generally find myself doing this with my morning cup of coffee and I’m done. Once you get the hang of it, you start to think about even more ways to exploit the traffic. It’s also easy enough where just because one niche doesn’t work, something else just might, and cloning the process is super easy.

Once you find a niche that does work well, it’s easy to automate the process with something like imacros. Fireform also helps out a lot with this. You can also help perpetuate this traffic by doing a search for the picpost script that most people use… The Shaven Ferrett Picpost Script. The developer stopped supporting it years ago, but it’s still available if you just search around a bit. And it’s free. If you end up installing it, let me know and I’ll add yours to my submission process…and the picpost list once I get around to making it…

If there’s something I’ve missed, leave a comment and I’ll try to clear it up.

Feel free to contact me if you own or know of a resource not on the list and I’ll add it.

This summer, I noticed a dramatic decrease in clicks and sales to some of the programs I’m currently sending a majority of my traffic to. I naturally attributed it to this shitty economy, and the time of year. Actually, I do pretty well during the summer despite rumors of a so called “Summer Slowdown”. So, my gut is telling me something’s wrong.

A friend sent a link to a pretty cool site where you can find an extensive list of new and interesting programs to promote, broken down by niche, and various other factors called signbucksdaily.com.

I lost this bookmark, and did a search for it which returned a page i thought looked interesting that I was previously unaware of. Their Blacklist page.

Scanning over it, I notice about six programs on here that I am signed up with. I think it’s weird that four of these programs on their blacklist are four of my best converting programs, with the best ratios, but oddly, receiving the least amount of clicks.

This doesn’t make sense considering how much traffic they should be receiving. I decided to investigate further.

I log into the program that has the best ratios out of all of them, then I check traffic stats for the best converting site. Ok, the ratio for this specific site is an amazing 1:65 on MGP traffic. This sale was made from the very first gallery I submitted for this site. What’s weird is, I notice that I have submitted a total of five galleries promoting this site, and stats are only showing clicks for the first gallery. There have been a total of zero total clicks for the other four galleries. This makes absolutely no sense considering that all five galleries have been submitted to the same exact place.

I contact their support on ICQ telling them that I think there’s a problem. This person proceeds to tell me to email their support, so I do. A bit later, I hear back from support, and this person tells me it looks like some of my links are using the “Default” Nats linking code, and asks me what page generated these links for me. I tell him where I got the links…from the inside of your Webmaster’s Area.

I then login again to check things out, and all of a sudden, all of my links codes are magically fixed. Problem is, these galleries are already out there floating around, with incorrect affiliate codes. And I have to manually check each one to see what’s correct, and what’s broken.

I then email support again asking them to reimburse me for lost sales generated by this code. It’s a code not tied to my account, but it’s still a code. It should still be tracking sales…I haven’t heard back from them yet…what a surprise.

As I am manually going through everything, I start seeing something that all these sites have in common. They all are using the default Nats code that will look something like this:

http://secure.whateversite.com/track/MDowOjI/

The problem lies with the” “/MDowOjI/”

This is the default Nats link code, extension, sub-directory, whatever you want to call it. Thing is, the actual link code that should be in its place, looks very similar to that. So at first glance, you naturally assume that it is correct.

Now I decide to take a look at another program on the SBD blacklist that I am now questioning. And god dammit, can you guess what I found?! That’s correct, the auto-generated  link codes in this program’s free hosted gallery system are also using the same /MDowOjI/ default Nats code. Holy shit! What a surprise!

So, I’ve discovered that two out of six (actually one out of six now, but…) of the sites on this blacklist are doing exactly what SBD is calling them out on. And apparently, it’s a known issue because I am not the first person to discover this. And because they know it’s happening, isn’t it convenient for them that they only fix the bug if you point it out to them? I have tried contacting the second site, but have not heard back from them either.

The reason why I’m writing this, and calling it deceptive, is because there’s a little trick being played on affiliates here. When you log into your account, and go to your FHG list, the first few galleries for each site has your correct linking codes in them. When you dig a little deeper into later galleries in the list, you discover that your link codes magically change to the default Nats “/MDowOjI/” link code, which doesn’t count clicks or give you credit for any sales you generate.

I wonder how many affiliates this is happening to? How many of us log into our accounts, and quickly do a massive dump of all of the galleries in these lists, with out checking each and every link code, on each and every gallery? How many sales are being lost to this?

To consider this a technical glitch is just plain bullshit. Keep an eye out for /MDowOjI/

Also, please share your experiences about anything similar so we all know who to look out for.

Raw
The sponsor pays you each time a surfer clicks on a link to the sponsor’s site. If the same surfer clicks on a link twice, you’ll get paid twice.

Unique
Sponsor pays each time a “unique” surfer clicks on a link to the sponsor. Unique is defined as a surfer that hasn’t been to the sponsor’s site from you or anyone else for a specified period of time. If the same surfer clicks on a link twice, you’ll get paid once.

Blind Links
You use whatever misleading text or links you can to get the surfer to click on the link to the sponsor. This isn’t allowed by all sponsors and you should pay attention to Sponsor’s terms and conditions.

Per Impression
You get paid according to how many times the sponsors advertisement gets seen on your page.

Per Sign Up
You’re paid when the surfer signs up. It’s a one time payment. This is mostly used these days and I would recommend you start with this type of sponsorship.

Partnership
The sponsor pays you a percentage of what the surfer pays whenever they pay for membership/access to the site. It pays each and every time the surfer renews their membership.

Email
Pays per verified email address. A surfer enters their email address and the sponsor sends a confirming email. When the surfer responds to the email from the surfer, you get paid.

Commission
You earn a percentage based on how much a surfer spends at a sponsor site. This is typically a sextoys store.

You’ve learned some HTML, you’ve acquired a few applications to get you started, and you’re anxious to launch your first site… So what’s first? Well I don’t know that you have any *one* thing that is first as much as doing many things simultaneously. So let’s consider a checklist — not in any particular order:

Domain Registration

Register your own domain and start your empire. Domains can be registered for as little as $8.00 up to $35.00. Some registrars will allow you to “park” your domain there if you don’t have a host. Some park for free. Be sure to research your domain choices before registering one. Use this Free Domain Search Engine to help you find just the right one!

Hosting

If you’ve bought a domain, you’ll need a host. Not sure how much it will cost? Visit here for a great tutorial on estimating bandwidth. Then use this Bandwidth Cost Calculator to help you figure the cost. Be sure to read up on hosts to get the best deal. Or maybe you don’t have a domain and you’d rather use a free host. Free hosts are okay for beginners because you can sort of practice on a free host. But remember on a free host, you will be sharing your traffic with your host.

Site Building Process

Start building your site. Get a concept in your mind. Let’s say you’re building a freesite, then you should sketch out what you want the site to look like. You might sketch out the navigation plan. Generally a free site might consist of about 5 pages. An index page, 3 gallery pages, and one recip links page. Each gallery page should have no more than 10 images for a total of 30 images on the entire site. More than that and you are really giving away too much free stuff.

Keywords

Consider the keywords you want to add to your site. Be familiar with Search Engine guidelines, you don’t want to do something that is considered spamming the search engine. Use this Search Term Suggestion Tool to generate keywords. There are many other keyword generators, take advantage of them!!

Targeting Traffic

Since this is a free site, you will not be submitting your site to TGP lists. Think about it.. where would you submit? To search engines, link lists, and maybe trade recip links with other free sites. Be sure to put a link on each of your sites to the other sites. Increase your own link popularity !! If your freesite is “Mature Mommas” then you prolly don’t want to list your site on a Teen Link List. Be logical!! But you can diversify a little.. Mature Momma fans might also like to buy some new sextoys!! So you might to channel some of your incoming traffic to a sextoys store site.

Marketing

Marketing is the fun part and it’s so crucial! If you have 8 different sponsors on your site, your surfers are not going to believe you when you say “This is the very best blah blah blah” nineteen different times for nineteen different sites. Your slogans need to be credible. Don’t slap up too many banner ads, text links have been shown to be just as effective and take less time to download. Visit your sponsors and study their tours. See what they are using to sell the site. What words do they use? What features?

1. Use fewer files and directories

• Every file is a separate call to the server.
• Instead of using many small images you might consider using an imagemap.
• Decrease the number of directory structure levels.

2. Limit your spacing

• While we know that spaces in your code, as a rule, should not effect the layout, it does effect how it’s parsed. Decrease or eliminate the spaces between your lines of code.

3. Use relative addressing instead of absolute addressing.

• Instead of using href=http://www.mydomain.com/images/pic1.jpg, use href=”../images/pic1.jpg”
• To really speed things up use the <base> tag in the <head> like this: <base href=http://www.mydomain.com> then use relative addressing in the rest of the page.

4. Use HTML to control spacing when possible

• Instead of using a spacer.gif to manipulate space, try using &nbsp; for horizontal spacing and the <br> and <p> tags for vertical spacing.

5. Eliminate repetitive tags

• This is something you’ll often find in pages created with point and click web applications (WYSIWYG HTML editors) for example:<font face=”arial”>Hello World</font> <font face=”arial”>Welcome to my web page.</font>

  In this example the first </font> and the second <font face=”arial”> could be eliminated.

6. Eliminate attributes with default values

• For example, you don’t need to use these:
  <body text=”black”>
  <div align=”left”>
  <font size=”3″ color=”silver” face=”times”>

7. Use short file names and directories

• Instead of href=”../imagefiles/companylogos/advertisements.html try href=”../imgs/logos/ads.html

8. Use Cascading Style Sheets

• Use CSS to position your content. It requires less code and you have more accurate control over layout.

9. Beware of WYSIWYG code trash

• Many web authoring apps add their own proprietary code. FrontPage is notorious for this. Beware!!
• Clean up your META tag. You don’t need the following info in your METAs:
  <META NAME=”generator” content=”Microsoft FrontPage 4.0″>
  <META NAME=”ProgId” CONTENT=”FrontPage.Editor.Document”>

10. Table Savvy

• Avoid nesting tables. Rather than creating complex table layouts, use the attributes rowspan and colspan to control content layout.
• If you can, fill empty table data cells with &nbsp; This weighs less than a spacer.gif.
• Tables take time. Even if you need to use a table for some of your content, the entire page doesn’t have to be in a table.

Do you have any other suggestions? Add them to the comments below! Ok, the holidays are over… Let’s get back to work.

• HTML Tricks – This site has lots of HTML help and resources for you. Learn the tricks!!

• HTML: An Interactive Tutorial – Step by step HTML tutorials for beginners.

• HTML Forums – Forums where you can share knowledge with other webmasters.

• HTML Goodies – A well established website, HTML Goodies presents this topic in a very simple, easy to understand format.

• HTML Shrinker – A real problem with download time is “bloated” code. This site will help you clean your code to facilitate a quick download!

• W3Schools – This site is one of the best IMHO! Learn HTML and then practice your skills right on the site. An excellent place to learn.

• World Wide Web Consortium’s HTML Home Page – This organization sets the standards for HTML use on the World Wide Web. They are THE source. What they say, goes. So if you have an HTML question, you can find the answer here!

Now a word of caution. This is work. This is not to be taken lightly. You will not be building a single website. You will be building a hundred or hundreds of websites and webpages. You will need to be disciplined and organized in your time and your investment.

This is not a “get rich quick” business. The adult entertainment business
*is* business.

While it was possible years ago to slap a simple page together, publish it on the net, and get great traffic with great sales within a few months, it is no longer that way. It is not the case for any internet based business. The economy, the competition, the sheer number of sites on the net makes your job, as a webmaster, a continual challenge.

You must be willing to commit to long hours of coding, managing your traffic, managing your sponsors, and an endless list of other various tasks. But in the end, if you truly put forth the effort, it will pay off… just like any other business. This is a career. This is a job. It is up to you to make it successful. It is your future, in your hands, we will provide you with the knowledge, the kickstart, …. but you are the one that will make it all happen.