Quick Loading Pages Plus Saving Bandwidth

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Have you noticed how many of the sites out there are trying to make themselves look better than they actually are by using heavy graphics and media files? The fact of the matter is this, most surfers who visit your we pages are viewing them on a screen that is between 15 and 19 inches wide, can only see 216 colors and, are on a connection of 33.6 kb per second (If they are lucky).

What Does All This Mean?

What does this mean to you as a webmaster? Simple, try this test.

Connect to the internet on a 33.6 connection, type in your url and, hold your breath. Does the page load before you need to start gasping for air? If so then you are designing your sites correctly, if not, your pages are far to big in file size.

I’m pretty sure that some of you can hold your breath for a long period of time so, here is a basic rule of web design. Your pages should, be no larger in file size than 50k in fact, I would even go so far as to say try getting your pages under 30k in size.

How Can I Get It Under 50K? 30K?

First, all your graphic images should be as small as possible. Try to get them smaller than 4k. Going up to 6k is reasonable. When designing a graphic for the web site keep in mind the number of colors being used.

I know, from designing banners myself, it was hard for me to go from millions of color to only 216. Yes, 216 is the number of colors you have on a web safe color pallet.

Use solid colors when designing your image. PhotoShop has made the gradient such a popular tool. It looks good to fade things in and out. I always see a background border made up of this gradient. I always right click on that image to see the size. The 8k-12k is not worth the space. The problem with the gradient is it uses many colors and dithering. Both take up big time K. The more color you have in an image the bigger it’s going to be.

Use design more, graphics less. For a web page to be successful it needs to download quickly and look good.

Here is the dilemma download quick or look good? Instead of designing graphics and taking pictures and turning them into jpgs to make your web page look good, try using color schemes. Use cell colors to make borders. Use the negative space on your web site. What is not there is just as important as what is there.

Remember sometimes less is more. When in doubt think of a typical visitor coming to your web page. Would that extra graphic sell them or keep them coming back again and again. If the answer is yes, by all means keep it. If the answer is “well maybe” or “it just looks good there”, yank it.

Your surfers will appreciate not waiting more then they have to. The web is here to make our life easier not to sit in front of a screen waiting for heavy web pages to download.

Article written by Lee

GEO::IP – What Is It?

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General, Hosting | Response: 0

As more and more webmasters investigate the international market place to expand their online businesses I thought it would be prudent to take a look at one of the more important modules of Apache and, just how this module can help webmasters to monetize their international traffic. What is this module? GEO::IP.

Geo I.p – The Basics.

GEO::IP is an Apache module which is able to recognize countries by specific I.P blocks. GEO::IP in itself is, in effect a database of the current i.p addresses in use on the internet across the globe. When used in conjunction with various scripting languages, Perl, Php, Etc the Apache GEO::IP module can assist online businesses with the following:

Detecting credit card fraud.
Automatically select the geographically closest mirror.
Analyzing your web server logs to determine the countries of your visitors.

What this means to the webmaster is that they can now market their sites to a specific language or, country in addition to either redirecting or, refusing other countries / languages access to their online sites.

GEO::IP Module – Where To Find It.

The GEO::IP module is available from several sources online in either paid or, free forms. The most up-to-date and professional form of the GEO::IP module can be found on the Maxmind website ( http://www.maxmind.com ).

Once you have the GEO::IP module you should either ask your host to, or, install it yourself on your Apache based web server.

Geo I.p – Different Modules.

In addition to the simplistic ‘country i.p’ based detection, there is also another more complex GEO::IP module, this module is often referred to as ‘I.p to Location’ which, in simplistic terms means that you can target specific cities of the world hence, if you want to offer a service to surfers in Miami, you are able to redirect your Miami surfers to a page with content of specific interest to them.

Redirecting Traffic.

Geo i.p is the basis behind most of the international traffic redirection systems available for webmasters to use in order to monetize their global traffic more efficiently, whether those systems are paid, free, subscription based or, otherwise they will ALL use the fundamental basics of the GEO::IP module.

Through the use of the geoip module you will be able to maximize and filter the traffic sources you currently have and, decide on whether you send your surfers to a Pay site, a dialer or, a traffic trade.

Scripting – Putting GEO::IP To Work.

Many programming firms are now looking at the global market place in addition to webmasters as they now have the ability to offer their clients a wider product base from country specific banner displays to multi-lingual tours, programmers can develop new ways to enable webmasters to profit from their traffic unlike ever before. One such company is Geo Scripting ( http://www.geoscripting.com ).

GEO::IP – Overview.

All in all the Geo i.p Apache module is going to become more and more prominent in the industry, sponsors are already starting to use country specific redirects on their affiliates traffic base and, individual webmasters are beginning to capitalize on this module through redirecting their own traffic to the sponsors that offer them multi-lingual paysites. When all is said and done, I am all for anything that can better assist webmasters in monetizing their global revenue streams especially as in the last 4 years I have been online it would only seem to be the last 2 months when this untapped source of income has come into the forefront of the adult industry.

Article written by Le

Calling Complete JavaScript’s With One Line Of HTML Code

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

We all know that some JavaScript coding can be excessive and add considerable amounts of additional coding to our pages making them both slower and less search engine friendly however, what if I told you there was a way you could call the EXACT same JavaScript functions you are calling now by using a single line of code and, in the process you would NEVER have to find a specific piece of JavaScript again as you would instantly know where it was saved.

You would probably think the above is in fact very time consuming but, it actually takes no time at all.

The secret is to copy and paste the JavaScript into a plain text file and save that on your server somewhere. However, instead of saving it as a .txt extension save this file as a .js extension and, to make it easier still to find, when you upload this file to your server place it in a directory called /JavaScript/.

That’s pretty much it, easy huh?

Now comes the part of actually getting the JavaScript to work on your web pages, what you need to do instead of using the complete JavaScript coding that you usually would if you wanted to make a pop-up console appear is to use the following coding placed between your <head> and </head> tags:

<script language=”JavaScript” src=”../JavaScript/popup.js”></script>

That will now call the popup.js file or whatever it was you called it from your server and make the JavaScript function work for your surfers with JavaScript enabled in their browser.

As you can see, not only does using this method save you a considerable amount of time but, it will also make your pages more search engine friendly as spiders will not have to work their way through a lot of heavily JavaScript before they get to your SE content.

Adult Exit Traffic

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

How Do You Use It?

I honestly do not think there is a webmaster working in the adult industry to date who has not seen a warning page for a free or avs site with both an enter and an exit link, the enter link goes to the main body of the site in question whilst the exit link goes to some other link, normally disney.com or google.com or some other url where the webmaster in question is quite literally throwing their traffic and money away.

Instead of wasting your exit link traffic to a site that doesn’t make you a cent why not utilize this traffic to feed additional revenue streams, for example, most of the larger adult sponsors now have penis pill programs or dating sites, you could include your affiliate id in the exit link and send your traffic there, after all, the surfer you have on your site isn’t looking for porn so, offer them an alternative which, can still add to your bank balance.

So What Are The Alternatives?

The alternative types of sponsors you should be using on your exit links can vary widely however, the best type of site to send them to would be a sponsor offering products and services such as penis enlargement programs, online pharmacies, history eraser type products or, even a link to a site like amazon.com if the program you use allows for that.

Basically you should try to maximize all the traffic you get to your site whether that be by using exit consoles or links, make sure that for each and every surfer you send to the front page (warning) of your site that if they decide to back out or click on a link to leave that you send them somewhere to give them the option of spending money and ultimately earning you revenue.

Article written by Lee.

Designing Your Site With Link Popularity In Mind

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic, WebDesign | Response: 0

To get good traffic, your website needs to be popular, to be popular, your website needs links, to get links, your website needs to be popular. Annoying isn’t it

Almost everyone agrees that link popularity is critical for your website’s visibility, traffic, and thus successfulness. It is something you need to have. As I pondered the ways of establishing and improving one’s “popularity”, eventually all come back to one central issue, your website must be designed to be popular.

Link popularity is a basically the measure of links pointing to your website and is meant to be a measure of the best websites. Theoretically those websites that have the most links pointing to them must be important and thus worth the visit. Unfortunately, there are a lot of folks out there that have created programs to “boost” your popularity artificially and all they have done is create Spam and muddy the overall picture. The search engines and directories are keeping a close eye on these programs.

Design: When getting a request or thinking about making one for a link exchange with a website, look thoroughly over the website first. The website’s theme or topic and general layout is the first thing to look at. Sites with themes or topics that are related to or compliment yours should be your main link partners. You do this to get targeted traffic.

Just as you evaluated someone’s website, others will be doing the same to yours. Make sure you know what your theme or topic is and that it clearly encompasses the whole website. Stay focused; do not try to cover everything.

Next, check out the links page or resource area. If they do have one, is it easy to find within the site? Does it seem to be part of the site or just a page off to the side? Are their linking rules available, clear, and easy to follow? Do they accept links from any website or are they choosy? Being part of someone’s well constructed links program, no mater what size, can be a very beneficial thing indeed.

Again, the same goes for your website. You want to let other webmasters know that you want to exchange links and which type of website you will accept requests from. Make it easy for others to link with you.

The last set of questions to ask yourself about any website is:

Is it easy to navigate
Does it have too many graphics (slow loading)
Is it pleasant to the eye
Does the information seem to be organized in a logical fashion

What has been covered so far deals with what the visitors see; if visiting the website is a pleasant experience then people will stay and look and possibly come back. The final area to cover is what the search engines see.

The underside (the source code) of the website is just as critical when designing or linking with a website. The search engines are the ones that read this and if it is not done properly then the website can not succeed. Below are a few things you need to consider in your source code and any potential site that has asked to be linked by you.

Does the website contain frames
Does it use the headers, titles, meta-tags, and alt tags properly
Do the keyword location(s) and density seem appropriate and “optimized”

The latter two issues mentioned above are critical, for they are the backbone to traffic production.

Content: The information you have is just as important as how you set it up on your website. The more popular websites or the ones with good link popularity are those that have valuable information or resource(s) for its audience after all, they fill a niche! People will visit, stay, return, and recommend a website if it has the content they want or need.

“Content is king.” A well-designed and organized website might look good but if it does not deliver anything of value, it will not be successful. Whatever subject matter you have on your site, make sure you have something of interest and importance to add to the subject, if you do and you promote it well, you and your site will be successful. In this context, it (content) does not just refer to images, why not add some stories or interesting links to news articles to improve your sites ‘popularity’.

In addition to information, resources like mailing lists, surveys, polls, classified ads, forums, etc. are all things if used appropriately can add value and fresh content to your website which, in turn will assist you in interacting with your sites visitors.

In conclusion: Take the time to design and optimize your website properly for the search engines. Make sure you have something of value or importance to add to whatever area your website is in. Provide resources and other tools, which your visitors could use and will make them come back. Be proactive and interact with your visitors. Websites that are dynamic and active are the best ones. All of this might take a little more time to get your website up and running, but it will be worth it.

For yours or any website to be popular, it needs the links and to get the links, it needs to show the other webmasters that it is worthy of a link. It seems everyone today has a website, but not everyone has put together a website that adds value to the Internet community. Take a critical look at your website and any website you might link to and ask yourself…………….

Would you bookmark it?

Article written by Lee

Mirroring Adult Sites – Stage Two

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Promotion, Tutorials | Response: 0

Ok, in stage 1 of this tutorial we learnt the basic ‘setup’ for our multisite generation now we have to start putting the rest of our puzzle together.

At this stage in the tutorial we should now have a 50 pic free site, all of the images are in the appropriate folder on our HD along with the HTML in their own folder. If you have not already done so, you need to ensure that when you add/added the links to your individual HTML pages that you call the images like this:

/FreeSite/Images/pic1.jpg

The Thumbnails like this:

/FreeSite/Images/Thumbs/thumb1.jpg

The gallery links like this:

/FreeSite/Galleries/gallery1.html

And the FPA from the warning page like this:

/FreeSite/FPA/fpa.html

Why are we calling the links like this and not like, http://www.mydomain.com/FreeSite/Galleries/gallery1.html I hear you ask, well the answer is simple, in order to use this site TEMPLATE over and over again, we need to ensure that there is a standard way of calling the links, this way, once we decide duplicate this site on a different domain, all we do is upload the folder to our server with a different set of images and we have another set of sites built.

Ok, we now have our free site but, we have some empty folders that need filling up, here is how we are going to achieve that.

What we now have to do is re-open the Gallery Pages, DO NOT change the image calls or the thumbnail calls however, what you will need to do is select 15 TGP’s that you would like to submit to, download the recip buttons for these TGP’s and save them in the /FreeSite/Images/Recips/ folder.

Now we have the gallery pages open we need to modify them like this..

Take the top text link that you created and replace that with a 3 cell table. In this table for the first gallery, you need to call the first 3 recip links for the TGP’s you want to submit to and link them to the appropriate recip url for each of the TGP’s again, calling the recip images like this, /FreeSite/Recips/recip1.gif. Also, you will need to modify the text link at the bottom of your gallery pages, I would suggest creating an 8 cell table, containing 8 niche text links, four of which should go to your Single-Site FPA’s (as created for the surfer trap) and the remaining 4 text links should go directly to your sponsors site tour page.

Now save this newly created page as tgp1.html in the /FreeSite/TGP/ folder. Do the above again for the remaining 4 gallery pages but calling a different set of recip links each time. each time you modify a gallery page save it in the /FreeSite/TGP/ folder so gallery2.html would be renamed to tgp2.html, Gallery 3 would be called tgp3.html and so on.

What you should now have is a single 50 pic free site with 5 galleries of 10 pics, all pics going to the larger image on a HTML page and, 5 TGP galleries.

This is as far as we go with the tutorial today however, in the next stage we will continue to fill in the rest of the puzzle pieces.

Article written by Lee

Adult Webmaster Conventions

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

Networking Overload

Marketing Campaigns – Testing Your Variables

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

Irrespective of the medium, an online advertising campaign needs to be tested and optimized constantly in order to provide you with the optimum results. This is where advertising testing can play an important role in your marketing strategy. Despite the advantages to testing your online marketing campaigns, relatively few companies actually go out of their way to see what what works, what doesn’t and, more importantly, why.

Steps To Testing Your Ad Campaign.

1) Set expectations as to how you envisage your campaign to perform. This in itself will guide you’re optimization methods. An example of this is, if you expect your ad medium to get a 15% click thru rate or a, 10% conversion rate, you have justification in making adjustments to your campaign if the creative you are using does not perform to your level of expectation.

2) Don’t get tied into a campaign, If you are going to be purchasing an advertising campaign on a resource site, ensure you have an ‘out clause’. This out clause will enable you to terminate the campaign as long as it has run for a set amount of time, usually, many resources will be happy to give you an out clause especially, if after testing your marketing materials, the results you were hoping for have still not shown themselves.

3) Consider the variables in your ad campaign, usually, webmasters only think of the one variable in their advertising campaign – Price. However, there are many more variables to be looked at for example, if you are doing a mail drop, the subject line of the email, format and, copy text of the email body itself, all of these things can have a drastic effect on any given advertising campaign, at any given time and often, these can, and most probably will, fluctuate from site to site where you are purchasing ad space.

4) Stats tracking, tracking your campaign makes it easier to test and review how your advertising medium is working for you, many sites offer live stats for your ad campaigns however, some still do not, where this isn’t a problem in itself as, most companies you choose to advertise with will be more than happy to provide you with statistics as and when you need them after all, you are paying for their services and support.

5) Pull the plug on campaigns that are not performing, however, ensure you have changed your creative several times before doing so, often, you will find a simple change such as a new creative can drastically increase your marketing efforts. Also, do not just pull advertising as you feel like it, if your campaign has only been active for a week, don’t expect hundred / thousands of hits instantly, often it takes webmasters a while to realize there are new ad mediums running on the sites they visit so often.

Online Advertising – Review.

By constantly assessing and testing your advertising campaigns you can pull some interesting figures which can help you long term however, don’t rush into pulling campaigns that you have only just started. Give it a few days, change your copy text and creatives and, if that doesn’t work talk to the company, they will be able to offer you advice and help on improving your sales from your advertising medium after all, they want to keep your business.

Article written by Lee

Adult Webmaster Conventions – Remember When?

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

Most webmasters who have been working in the adult industry for a year or two have attended an adult webmaster convention of some sort and, those of us who had the privilege of attending our first webmaster show three to four years ago will know one thing that many others don’t, there used to be a time when you could attend a webmaster show for example, the one held at Disney World (how many of you remember that?) when apart from being relaxing, you would also get a lot of business done alas, times have changed.

Fighting, Drug Taking, Getting Drunk, Rape Accusations, Theft and Criminal damage would be the headline in the national press should one of these reporters attend today’s webmaster convention, instead of a relaxing atmosphere in which you can get business done you find a slew of webmasters who, well, lets be honest here, are only attending these shows for one reason, to get drunk (for free) and to have a laugh.

Of late there seems to have been an influx of people (notice I used the word people and not ‘adult webmasters’) joining the adult industry who would appear to think that our business model is one of all night partying, sordid sex sessions and drug taking, whilst, I will be the first to admit this has gone on in the past it would certainly seem that the last 2-3 years has seen more than its fair share of the negative events happening at these conventions.

Take for example the recent Hollywood Internext Expo show, one incident that comes to mind was the fool who decided it would be a good idea to smash the mezzanine canopy above the hotel lobby, to my knowledge the culprit was never found however, I am sure there are those out there who knows who it was and well, lets be honest, they quite possibly you could be reading this article.

So what happened? How did these shows change so drastically? Quite simply I think it was the sudden onslaught of press coverage about how the adult industry makes so much money for everyone and, whilst there is a lot of money to be made in the industry, it takes a lot of work to achieve making the reported figures by the press.

To many people are entering the adult industry thinking that the ‘norm’ is that of what you can find on your average day of visiting GFY and whist, this is perhaps true for the circle of webmasters who do frequent boards such as GFY for the vast majority of hard working webmasters in the industry, the behavior of those webmasters couldn’t be further from the truth.

So where is all the business being done at the shows? It would appear that event after event the open invite list of parties are being cut down to be taken over by more intimate and sociable private parties in fact, as a company we our ourselves holding several smaller invite only parties for those people that we actually want to do business with on both a personal and a professional level.

So what does the future have in hold for the adult industry events, in all honesty I do not know however, one thing is for certain, if things continue on their current route, things are going to become a whole lot worse before they get any better.

Article written by Lee.

The Lost Traffic Source – Picture Posts

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Pic Posts | Response: 0

Back in the day, pic posts were all the rage, taking less time for webmasters to build for and, less time maintaining however, in recent times we seldom hear of these traffic sources as more and more webmasters turn to the TGP’s in an effort to get traffic ‘quantity’ over ‘quality’ my personal feelings are that the pic posts of the past will soon start to make a comeback.

The Basics.

So, we know the history behind the Pic Post but what about the dynamics? How exactly do they work? That’s easy, you take an image, give it a HTML page and add the recip to the PP (Pic Post) you are submitting the page / image too along with a banner leading to your site. At this time, it would be prudent to add that, if you will be submitting to PP’s on a regular basis, you might also like to add the url to your main domain on the image in the lower right or left hand corner.

One other thing to take into consideration when using PP’s is that softcore is often better. With the readily available hardcore content on TGP’s the chances are, that the surfer has decided to visit the PP because there is not as much widely available hardcore content.

Cost Balance.

In addition to the relatively minimal amount of work required to create pages for the PP’s there are several other factors that make them much better then TGP’s and Free Sites the main one is that bandwidth usage is relatively low for a start, not to mention the fact that you can knock out hundreds / thousands of PP pages a day compared to the tens / hundreds of TGP and Free Sites.

Also, when looking at cost, the one factor people often forget is the submission time and, unlike the TGP model of traffic the vast majority of PP’s will actually encourage or, in some instances, prefer automated submissions, this means that you can target hundreds of PP’s in less time than it takes to submit a TGP or Free Site.

Marketing Basics.

Of course, as with any type of site that we build as webmasters, the main reason that surfers will visit our sponsors is the marketing ‘spin’ we give them, this is where the use of Alt Tags and Text can become extremely useful, bearing in mind, the surfer can already see the ‘larger picture’ on your PP page by utilizing Alt Tags and other SEO methods you can actually entice the surfer to click through to your sponsor and, get some very good rankings in the search engines at the same time.

Housekeeping.

Now you have started to use Picture Posts, as with any form of traffic you need to ensure you keep ‘accurate’ records of who is and who isn’t accepting your pages along with details stats on the amount of traffic each PP sends you and, you ultimately send off to your sponsors site.

Adjust everything you can. trial and error plays a MAJOR part in using PP’s just because you use softcore images one day and get 1000 hits to the page you created, that doesn’t mean that by using hardcore images the next day you will receive more or, less traffic, also being niche specific, unlike with the TGP game can have its disadvantages, use images that appear at first glance, to be ‘generalized’ then, over time adjust your advertising methods to reflect the niche of surfer you are targeting.

In addition to keeping records of the pages you create for the picture posts, you should also be sure to keep a record of where else you have used them, just because you are using them for the PP’s specifically, this doesn’t mean that you can not interlink these pages together and get some traffic of your own to them, does it?

Hopefully this article has given you some more insight into the world of the Picture Post and, if you try an experiment with this little known source of quality traffic, I feel certain you will be pleasantly surprised with the results you see.

Article written by Lee