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Chilihost recommended building a portal site with my new gay domain, and I'd like to research this further. Anyone have links to some good articles on building portal sites? What sort of software would I need? And how, exactly, does a portal site make money? Portal sites aren't independent search engines are they? ... or are they?
Thanks for any help!
Take a look at a portal site I've recently built: JuicyGoo
and that will give you an idea of how it's structured and designed.
It's a very simple, basic design relying solely and entirely on HTML. I've taken it to a "next level", I suppose, by making it a standalone full featured site with it's own content and value independent of the sites it serves as a portal to. This is so that it gets traffic and appeal on its own, gets regular users who visit it often, benefits from word-of-mouth promotion, and doesn't seem to much like a portal.
But you'll notice how in the galleries, reviews, articles, etc. there is ample opportunity for people to be directed to my pay sites.
The pure HTML and heavy text are for the sake of search engine ranking and relevance calculation.
It's not fully done yet and still has to be tweaked a bit as I study its traffic flow and user behavior once on it.
Hope that helps, though! :)
Thanks Brian!
Yes, I do much better at seeing an example to get some understanding of what makes it tick, and I really appreciate your willingness to let me see yours!
Now, I understand this type of site! ... it's very similar in approach to a couple non-porn resource sites I've built... but has lots better ways of pitching sales!
I was afraid a portal site would be that page everyone gets with all those categories listed for shopping, employment, kids clothes or whatever and you enter a search term type thing, and it's built from click link affiliate stuff... that wasn't all too appealing.
Thanks again!
My pleasure. Glad you found it useful!
My intent with JuicyGoo was to definitely make it a unique type of portal site. One at which a user would have very little if any idea that they're being exposed to a marketing tool.
The reviews serve multiple purposes:
- boost search engine ranking for JuicyGoo and the sites the reviews link to
- direct traffic to the sites being linked and "portal-ed" to
- increase conversion of traffic sent (turn it in to higher quality traffic by giving them more of a reason to pay for what's at the link destination)
- give JuicyGoo itself ample content, value, appeal
The key is to make sure that while it's an appealing enough site for the user to visit it and come back often, it doesn't hold them to tight. Which is to say, it doesn't keep them from clicking on links and banners and end up at the pay sites I want them to go to. So I've spent a good deal of time making sure the site is structured and laid out in a way that ensures people end up at my paysites without it seeming to the user like that's what I'm trying to get them to do.
:)
Question on the "reviews" ... I know there are sites that do porn site reviews exclusively, it's what they're about. But doing this in a portal site like yours ... are you doing the review just to boost the search engines, and provide site stickiness or are you also affiliateing with those sites so if they do go check it out, it's carrying your id? Hoovering over your links didn't make it look like they do.
Yeah I'm not using affiliate IDs for those reviews for a couple reasons.
- the sites reviewed are client sites. So they're the sites I'm trying to promote and boost SE ranking for. So I don't want to garble up the URLs for them and I already charged them money to market their sites so won't be signing up as an affiliate of theirs. hehehe
- some of the reviews are for sites or movies that belong to people I like. haha. so I wanted to send them some free traffic. I really enjoyed their site/movie and just felt like sending them traffic on account of that.
Affiliate linking codes would take away from the SEO value, so I'm staying away from them. I'd suspect that I'll soon be promoting some sites as affiliates on JuicyGoo, but for my own clients and certain other sites I'll stick to regular, non affiliate links for SEO and pure traffic generation purposes.
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but for my own clients and certain other sites I'll stick to regular, non affiliate links for SEO and pure traffic generation purposes.
Ah, now that I do understand ... guilty of giving away a lot of free referals for just those same reasons ...:thumbsup:
hehe afterall, it is Christmas time! :)
Hello LdyLnWolf!Quote:
Originally posted by LdyLnWolf1
Anyone have links to some good articles on building portal sites?
I have to ask Lee about the articles. He has written about practically every aspect of the net, it’s to the point that I no longer know what we have on line anymore. And if we don’t he will certainly know where to point you.
There are a lot of different types of programs available. It depends on how detailed you want to be, how technically inclined you are, how much time and money you want to spend.Quote:
What sort of software would I need?
We have a few sites, including GWW, that we use Focal Media’s (http://www.focalmedia.net/) Power Seek program. The site works on templates, the data is stored in MySQL and it is relatively easy to install. They also have a program called Turbo Seek, which is almost identical, but stores the information/data in small flat txt files.
We’ve also have used Gossamer Threads, Links SQL program http://www.gossamer-threads.com/scripts/index.htm It is, also, template driven, relatively easy to install and they have both an SQL version and a flat file data version called Links 2.0.
Now, these are examples of many portal programs available. These just happen to be the products we prefer using.
Which type of program to choose is determined on what kind of portal you want to create.
- Some people just create a link directory (webmasters submit their site, you accept or decline and then add it to your directory);
- Others create a link directory with search capability (same as above but they site has a search function);
- And others create a directory and search engine (take submissions like the above AND use a program crawl the web for sites to include).
There are different layers to choose from. We do all three types.
And I think these are the three most general ideas of a portal site.
Well for us there are few ways we make money from plain and simple to more complex.Quote:
And how, exactly, does a portal site make money?
- We have regular advertising (banners, buttons, consoles, etc);
- Premium text links (which are pre paid premium links that appear at the top of extra category OR links with sponsor codes).
These are the simplest ways to generate revenue.
Another is Pay Per Click data inclusion - This is where is can get complicated LOL
These are listings that we import from our PPC partner. When a surfer does a search on my site, their search words are sent to a program that pulls data from the PPC partner database and adds it to the results. Then if a surfer clicks those links we make a set amount per click. Now I wouldn’t do anything like this to start off, and I say this from experience. Once the site traffic was high enough I added this option and it made money.
They can be. But I think I answered this question above ;)Quote:
Portal sites aren't independent search engines are they? ... or are they?
I hope I didn’t confuse matters for you LOL My rambling posts sometimes generate more questions than answer HAHAHAHAHAHA
And of course if you do have more questions, ask away. We all like to help out here, as you see ;)
My best regards,
Gary-Alan
Thanks Gary for taking the time for such an indepth reply! As to whether or not I'm confused ... yea, well ... I won't be after I check out the resources you provided and start figuring out what all those things do! (hopefully) LOL
You guys have been great! I sincerely appreciate the kindness this board has shown! You're a fun bunch!
Oh, and by all means ... you can call me Bec ... the LdyLnWolf1 gets to be a pain to type.
Your welcome, Bec.Quote:
Originally posted by LdyLnWolf1
Thanks Gary for taking the time for such an indepth reply! As to whether or not I'm confused ... yea, well ... I won't be after I check out the resources you provided and start figuring out what all those things do! (hopefully) LOL
You guys have been great! I sincerely appreciate the kindness this board has shown! You're a fun bunch!
Oh, and by all means ... you can call me Bec ... the LdyLnWolf1 gets to be a pain to type.
I'm happy to hear we're a help in some way. I will spare you my "The reason I started this site in 1998..." speech ;) But that's what we're here for - to help, to work and to have some fun :thumbsup:
What I love about this place is we all have something to bring to the table. Whether we know it or not ;) (hey Xstr8guy even brought the winkie LMAOPIP)
Keep us post on your progress and if you have any questions, you know we're here for ya.
My best,
GA
Just found time to look over both of those programs ... pretty powerful stuff! I see now that they incorporate a lot of things I thought were individual programs.
Realistically speaking, just how much Bandwidth would a Portal Site be looking at ... yes, I know that varies depending on how popular it gets, but say I do submit galleries to other top tgp sites, possibly add a chat forum, include the link list feature, and maybe (still not sure on this) a tgp feature ...along with the actual things the search portal does ... am I in hock or need to build my own server?
(I can build computers -- so a server is probably my next evolutionary step ... LOL)
Bec, you should also take a look at other big and famous portal sites like www.ninemsn.com.au to get more ideas. The whole thing with portals is that they combine multiple mini-sites into one large site that is themed, and that they are updated rather often.
There are a number of places that offer free newsfeeds that you can incorporate into your site. You can also pop up some galleries, reviews, links to pay sites, links to AVS sites, a top list, etc. Just think of a theme and incorporate everything that would go with that theme to make it interesting.
For bandwidth, you should not go through that much since for the most part your site will be text and small images.
Brian had a really good point too, the whole reason to build the portal is to keep surfers coming back, so offering them lots of rich content that is updated frequently is important.
Cheers,
Luke