-
Basic Bookkeeping For Adult Webmasters
Knowing how much you are spending on expenses for your online enterprise each month can be a very powerful tool. Taking out that shoe box at the end of the year and giving it to the Accountant is one way. But a very simple bookkeeping system can provide you with exactly how much you made each month after all expenses. In this article I will provide you with the knowledge to setup a simple system to track your revenues and expenses. Not only will you then know exactly what your Net Income or Loss is each month but at the end of the year you will have a nice neat little package to hand your Accountant. Which will result in lower accounting fees at tax time.
The first thing you need to do is find a way to file all receipts. Your receipts are the backup for all your transactions. Go to your local office supply store and buy an accordion file labeled with monthly slots. Each time you receive a business related receipt, file in correct month. Remember you need to file all your receipts for your numbers to be accurate. When you receive an email receipt for content or hosting print it out and file it. File sponsor cheque stubs, credit card receipts, ISP bill, etc. At the end of each month take out all your receipts and divide into revenue and expenses. Remember you must have a receipt in order to claim the expense. The receipt should show the detail of the purchase, vendor, amounts and date. Ensure that the expenses are needed or used to generate revenue for your business.
Now the next step depends on how much detail you would like.
Revenue-Expenses=Net Income or Loss. For a quick snapshot of the month add up the revenue receipts, staple all receipts together and put the total on the front either adding machine tape or handwritten. Repeat with all your expense receipts. You can put a quick summary of the month in a spreadsheet program. Or for a very small investment you can setup a computerized tracking system. I recommend buying a very inexpensive software such as Quicken. Most major banks, credit cards and even paypal are setup to download transactions to Quicken. You can purchase the Personal Finance version of Quicken for around $70. There are several other inexpensive personal finance software packages that you can purchase that will work as just well. But I personally prefer Quicken. The software you choose will have a list of business accounts already setup. For an adult enterprise you will need to customize the account names. This is very easy and quick to do. Add in accounts for content purchase, hosting, isp, traffic purchase, etc.Once a week you will open up your program download your transactions from your bank account, credit card, paypal etc. If you have an expense that you pay cash for you will need to add that transaction in. I am assuming that all your sponsor cheques are being deposited into a bank account or paypal. If you receive a check and cash it, manually add the transaction in. After you have finished entering your transactions for the week ensure that the receipts that you have balance to what you have entered in the software.
You will be amazed at how simple it is to use a software package such as Quicken to track your revenue and expenses. These software packages come with pre-made report tools. Such as income statement, analysis of expenditures, cash flow projections. You can even setup budget numbers for your business.
If your business consists of a lot of transactions in a month you might want to consider using a bookkeeping/accounting service. There are many online and locally owned businesses that charge a very low rate for doing small business bookkeeping. Remember you don’t need an Accountant to do general bookkeeping. Many small business owners think they need an Accountant to do the monthly bookkeeping. This could result in unnecessary fees. Depending on the size of your enterprise and your passion for numbers sometimes employing a bookkeeper to do the data entry can be a blessing! Most bookkeeping providers will even provide customized reporting based on your needs.
Article written by Lorna
-
Payment Processors – Advice And Information
For many, the first step in launching a successful pay site is to find a billing processor that can adequately and efficiently handle all levels of the membership payment process. The processor must also have the technical savvy to grow with your site.
One such payment processor, iBill, is currently the premier provider of such solutions worldwide. They handle the payments in real time and all of the back-end services that enable you to run your business.
Of course, there are many issues to consider when deciding on a payment processor apart from their commission rates on your sales, including the following:
How do they handle the billing itself? Is it processed in real time? If your customers do not have immediate access to your site, they may decide not to join.
How do they supply your account reports? You may want to know at 3 a.m. the number of members you have and how they are rebilling. iBill allows you to access detailed, real-time reporting 24 hours a day, so you know exactly who is a member of your site and, more importantly, what their username and passwords are. No one wants to find a member has posted a username and password on a trading site. If this occurs, iBill’s real-time reporting tools give you the ability to stop this immediately.
How comprehensive are the payment options? Do you want to use credit cards, or do dialers or check transactions suit you more? The best way to maximize sales is to accept a full array of payment options. The more options you offer your members, the better the chance you’ll keep them rebilling month after month.
How good is customer service? Does your payment processor offer access to live representatives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? If so, you’ll resolve customer issues quickly and effectively, which reflects well on you and encourages loyalty from your members.
How good is the fraud protection? Internet fraud is a constant threat. Your payment processor should have state-of-the-art fraud protection systems to guarantee the integrity of every transaction.
Are there multilingual features for international members? Due to the global reach of the Internet, you must find solutions for foreign customers. Ideally, your payment processor’s website should be multilingual and easy to navigate in several key languages, such as German, Spanish, French, and Japanese.
Choosing the right payment processor is a long, arduous task that, if done right, will result in a long-lasting working relationship. In turn, your members will feel confident in your site and stay with it. We hope this article has given you insight into finding the right billing party for your membership or online store. If you need any further assistance please feel free to contact us directly using the form on our site (URL below).
Article provided by Internet Billing Company
-
Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 2
In the last tutorial we hopefully got the foundations of our surfer trap laid and in this stage, we will start to put this thing together.
Ok the first step of stage two of building your surfer trap is to start linking each of the individual FPA’s to your Multi-Site FPA.
The easiest way that I have found to do this is to give each FPA its own sub directory on your server and have the html page named index for each of the single site FPA’s.
So for instance, if you have the site All Petite on your Multi-Site FPA you would link it to:
mydomain.com/all-petite/
Or whatever you called the sub directory for the All Petite single FPA.
Now, once you have linked these single FPA’s to your Multi-Site FPA we need to start ‘playing’ with them once again.
You should now have copy’s of your single site FPA’s and Multi-Site FPA on both your server and Hard Drive.
Take the copy’s you have on your hard drive and add a small NICHE pop up console to each of the single site FPA’s AND the Multi-Site FPA.
I would suggest making 6 NICHE consoles.
These consoles should be pure text and nothing else.
Each of the links on this small console should link to a different niche of your single site FPA’s I usually go with one link for each of the following niches…
Gay
Mature
Teen
Fetish
Hardcore
AsianPlus, I usually add a link at the bottom of my console which goes to the POTD program.
Once you have these consoles built you should upload them to their OWN sub directory on your server, I would suggest calling this directory ‘consoles’ and calling each of the niche consoles the name of the NICHE they represent.
So, you should now have the following on your HD and on your server:
1 Multi-Site FPA
50 or so Single Site FPA’s (All Linked From The Multi-Site FPA)
6 Small Pop-Up Consoles (Popping Only One On The Multi-Site FPA and The Single Site FPA’s, each different niche Single Site FPA pops a different niche console however.)You now have to check that your surfer trap is working so far.
Article written by Lee.
-
Adult Webmaster Conventions – Remember When?
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.
-
Google – Manipulate Your Listings For More Traffic
Google seems to be the Search Engine that everyone talks about almost on a daily basis however, far from being about search engine optimization and specifically about Google related SEO i wanted to touch on something new that, perhaps you would not have already thought about.
Manipulating Google Traffic.
So your site is already listed in Google but you want to increase the amount of traffic you receive, one way that we as a company have been successfully using for the last 18 months is that of manipulating the display of our clickable links in Google, how are we doing this? Simple, using ASCII character codes in your meta tags.ASCII In Your Meta Tags.
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) it has been proven, when used in your HTML page Meta Tags will actually display not only letters and numbers but, symbols as well, as a webmaster this can give you a great advantage over how much traffic you can pull from your Google listings and, not only Google, a few of the other search engines also read ASCII code when it is found in your Meta Tags.Putting This To Use Practically.
A good method of putting this to use would be utilizing in your Meta Tags as follows.<title>Site Name <ascii code here> page title</title>
<meta name=”Description” content=”normal page description”>
<meta name=”Keywords” content=”normal keywords”>This will display a search engine listing that not only has your site name on it as well as a description but, in the position where the ASCII code will appear you will also have an attention grabbing symbol enuring that your site stands out from all the others listed on the same search engine results page as yours.
ASCII Meta Tags – An Overview.
Hopefully you have seen how adapting your current HTML page Meta Tags by placing an ASCII character code within them can benefit you for gleeming further search engine traffic to your sites and, with this new found knowledge you may well place both your sites traffic and your bottom line profits ahead of other webmasters.Article written by Lee
-
Using JavaScript To Auto Scroll Text
Using JavaScript To Auto Scroll Text.
There may come a time when you would like to have some text on a page that is simply just to big to fit on a single page. Of course, you could always create a new document for this text but, what if you could make the text actually scroll through the surfers browser?The following JavaScript will do just that.
Place the following section of JavaScript coding between your <head> and </head> tags:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript”>
<!–function scrollit() {
for (I=1; I<=1200; I++) window.scroll(1,I);
}// –>
</SCRIPT>Along with the following JavaScript coding someone in the Body of your page:
<FORM>
<INPUT type=button value=”scroll” onClick=”scrollit()”>
</FORM>Have a play around with the numbers in the first section of the JavaScript to speed up and slow down the rate of scrolling until you find a speed that is easy on the eye.
Article written by Lee
-
Mixing Business With Pleasure
Regardless of your status in the world of web mastering there will come a time when you will want to attend one of the numerous webmaster seminars. However, what should you do to plan for the day you attend your first seminar, are there some things you should aim for and things you shouldn’t? Well in this article we will take a look at planning your conventions.
Before attending the convention of your choice there are a few things that you should prepare these are.
Exercise.
get out for half an hour each day at least two weeks before the day of your journey to the convention. You will be surprised at how much time you will spend walking around the convention floor and, by getting some basic exercise in before hand you wont feel the strain of being on your feet for hours at a time instead of being sat in front of your computer.
Contacts.
Make a list of people that you want to see and arrange with them in advance a time to meet up and have a chat. Most people who attend these conventions are busy for the entire course of the show. You may not get a chance to pop by their booth and talk tot hem if someone has already beaten you by booking a time to chat with the person you want to meet. It is also a good idea to trade hotel and cell phone information before leaving for the show, this way, if anything happens to make you miss a possible appointment you can call or leave a message informing them you will either be late or canceling.
Seminars / Parties.
Take a look at the events and seminars happening at the convention before you go, plan which ones you will want to attend make a list and take it with you. This will save you countless hours of wandering around aimlessly hoping to make all of the seminars and get to as many parties as you can in three days.
Booths.
Look at who is exhibiting at the convention, find out their booth number and make a note of it. List any specific details you may want to speak to the booth owners about. You can guarantee if you go unprepared you will miss out that important question or selling opportunity you wanted to make.
Baggage.
When packing your suitcase for the convention make sure you leave plenty of room for convention give a ways, You will be surprised at what you will be given for free at these shows, t-shirts, toys, books, flyers, you name it, you will be offered it.
So, you have done the pre check, what do you do when you actually arrive at the convention?
Food.
Eat at every opportunity you get. Most people will end up not eating for the entire length of the convention. perhaps even arrange to meet up with someone you want to talk to in a restaurant and grab a bite to eat whilst talking business.
Business Cards.
Take them and lots of them. Everyone and anyone will ask you for your contact details, if you have a bunch of business cards with you at all times, you can just hand them out. Make sure you include your full contact details, your name, nickname, email, icq and, aim contact details. The more ways you give someone to reach you, the more chance you have of them actually attempting to get in touch with you.
Clothing.
Wear comfortable, clothing and shoes. Think casual but, also think business, shorts and t-shirt may be good for comfort but, it doesn’t portray a good business image and, that’s the sole reason you are attending the convention, to do business.
Parties.
If you get offered an invite to a party, take it, plans change so quickly at the conventions, your friends may suddenly feel tired and you have nothing left to do, attend a party, then you have another opportunity to network some more.
Behavior.
Although the conventions are a fun atmosphere, don’t forget that they are in the first instance a place to do business, treat it as such, you may miss out on the ideal business opportunities if you are acting like a drunk ass hole. This will reflect badly on you long term.
You have taken in all the events you can handle, you have made your way back home what next? how exactly do you put this information and your new found contacts to use?
Business Cards.
Go through all the business cards you have been given and send your new found contacts a quick email thanking them for their time. This will be a good way for you to give them another reminder of what you spoke to them about and, I have personally gotten more business from the shows using this follow up method than if I had just waited for them to contact me.
Notes.
If you made any notes at the show, take a few minutes to re-write them, keep them safe in a notepad, you never know when one of these bits of information may come in handy.
Well, that’s pretty much it for the basics of the adult conventions, obviously there is more to it than this but, if you are attending your first convention you will have a bit of insight into the work involved.
Article written by Lee
-
Favicon.ico – What Does It Do?
Favicon.ico is the name of the graphic Internet Explorer 5+ uses in the address bar and when someone views their favorite bookmarks. There should be one beside the address of this page now if you are using IE5+. If you want to see favicon.ico in action among your favorites bookmark our site now by right clicking and selecting ‘Add to favorites’.
Internet Explorer looks for this file in the same directory as the HTML page currently being displayed, if it cant find favicon.ico it will then display the default Internet Explorer icon in the address bar. As for viewing of favorites, IE will check its temporary folder to see if favicon.ico is there again, if it is not located it will display the default white background with a blue ‘e’ icon.
For a webmaster there are three main advantages to using the favicon.ico ‘trick’.
The first, is that it helps to brand your site with a nice little icon that is easy to recognize.
The second, is that it makes your website more professional.
The third, is that your entry will stand out in surfers bookmarks over the others. This is especially good as, if you can get a surfer back to your site then you have another chance at making a sale.
Many internet users have a multitude of site bookmarks so, you need to use favicon.ico to give you an edge. I highly recommend using it and, now I’m going to tell you how.
First, you will need to create an icon file which is exactly 16 x 16 pixels. If the icon is larger or smaller IE5+ will just ignore it. As for the colors in it, 16 is standard. You can use more colors if you want but, the more colors you use, the larger the .ico file becomes and, the longer it takes to load.
You now know the standards the favicon.ico file has to be, now to actually create this file you can take one of two routes.
The first is to convert and existing 16 x 16 BMP or GIF graphic with 16-32 colors into an .ico file using converter software making sure to save it as favicon.ico.
You know the standards the favicon.ico file has to be, now to actually create favicon.ico . The easiest way of creating a favicon.ico file is to convert an existing 16 X 16 BMP or GIF graphic with 16 – 32 colors into a .ico file using converter software making sure to save it as favicon.ico.
Once you have created your favicon.ico file all you need to do is to upload it to any directory on your server that contains html pages. This way, when IE5+ searches for favicon.ico it will be bale to find it regardless of which page you are on.
That’s nearly all the areas of favicon.ico covers apart from, what if you want different icons for different parts of your website? Can this be done? The answer is yes it can. All you have to do is place the following HTML code between the <head> and </head> tags of your web page.
<LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”differenticon.ico”> (SHORTCUT ICON should be kept in uppercase).
Now when someone adds a web page with that code to their favorites, IE5+ will not look for favicon.ico but will look for differenticon.ico and if it’s there it will display it, if not the default icon will be displayed.
Using favicon.ico or the SHORTCUT ICON code is nice way to add a unique touch to your site, and of course will result in more repeat visitors than if you were not using it – which is always good for any webmaster.
Article Written By Le
-
Filtering Adult Traffic For More Sales
When webmasters build sites there seems to be the train of thought that just because they use one of the top converting sponsors site they will make sales regardless of what type of traffic they are sending.
Unfortunately, this is often not true.
One of the first steps that we should take as webmasters when it comes to creating a new site, whether it be a free, avs or a TGP site is to learn the art of targeting our sponsors tour with the content and, more importantly, the traffic we are going to use.
taking it to the simplistic levels, a straight teen sponsors wont convert on a site that gets mostly mature traffic, the niches, although complementary, are so far apart its unrealistic.
That said, lets take a look at some options we can all implement on our sites to better target and filter our traffic to ensure optimum conversions.
One of the simplest ways to target and filter your traffic is to build yourself a hub or a surfer trap. Of course, we also have to take into consideration the type of traffic we are currently receiving to our site and, that we ‘could’ receive in the future.
Just because we receive 10,000 hits to our teen TGP doesn’t mean that ALL of that traffic IS looking for a teen site, this is where our surfer trap or hub site can come into play.
Even if your main focus is the teen niche, you should make sure that the first thing the surfer see’s when visiting any type of site you build is a multi-site FPA (Full Page Ad) where applicable.
This then starts your filtering process. If they know that they can find other niches than teen on your TGP then chances are, they will go to them either because that is what their niche is or, they are curious about that niche.
Another thing we can do as webmasters is to ensure we use the headers and footers of our pages in the proper fashion, offer our surfers a choice of the main niches, Asian, Gay, Ebony, Teen, Ect using only text links and, you will probably find that by lining these text links to your hub or surfer trap that you actually have a diverse range of traffic available to you.
In addition, rather than sending our surfers directly to our sponsors, send them via a filter page whether this is an FPA, or a page full of text links you made yourself detailing the benefits of the sponsor you are going to send them to, again, you will let the surfer know where they are going and, give them a choice as to whether they want to continue to that site or, choose an alternative.
Overall, webmasters who target their surfers by niche can, for the most part have some excellent sales with a variety of sponsors that otherwise they would not be able to see.
Target, Filter, Micro-Niche, however you do it, make sure your traffic is not wasted and, more importantly, make sure your sponsor is able to offer your surfer what you are telling them is inside the site.
Article written by Lee
-
Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 7
Here we go with Stage 7 in this Surfer Trap tutorial.
We should by now have a rather complex looking surfer trap, pop up consoles and blur consoles on all of the pages within it, all of these same pages interlinking each other indefinitely.
So, we are starting to get some traffic to this beauty from our existing sites and the counters we implemented but, how can we get some more traffic for FREE?
What I suggest we do next to this little baby is to add a banner exchange code to EACH of the FPA’s we have and also, onto the larger table console we created.
You should sign up for one banner exchange code for this trap, you might like to search around for a banner exchange that lets you have a decent ratio of impressions.
Once you have signed up for your banner exchange code, you now need to copy this coding into the BOTTOM of all of your FPA HTML pages including the Multi-Site FPA.
Now you have the banner exchange code on your site you are earning credits. Your account may not be activated for a day or so but, what this means is you are earning credits the entire time you are showing banners on your Surfer Trap.
Now we have the banner exchange code on our sites we only have one further step to take in order for this project to be completed.
Making sure it works how it is supposed too along with fine tuning this little beast.
If you have any further questions or comments please post on the forums here and one of us will be able to help you.
Article written by Lee.
Premium Sponsors
Categories
- 2257
- Billing Solutions
- Blogging
- Branding
- Content
- Domain Names
- Employment
- Forms & Contracts
- General
- Hosting
- Link Lists
- Opt-in Mail
- Paid Traffic
- Pic Posts
- Promotion
- Scripts
- Search Engine Optimization
- Sponsors
- TGP
- Traffic
- Tutorials
- Viral Marketing
- WebDesign
- Writing