Free Sites

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Originally Posted by glowlite

You're certainly right about many of the link lists maxpower. I couldn't agree with you more. That's why LL's are a small segment of my traffic sources. And why none of us should put all of our eggs in one basket. IMHO

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See I really still like FS, and still list them to this day in fact most of my sales come from FS (maybe why I bitch about this stuff) But they are killing us, now with all these rules and even to the point now they have hurt the FS model in most webmasters eyes. Did not used to be this way, FS where the shit a few years ago and had huge amount of profitable traffic to go around, but things have changed now. Its open to interpretation what started this mess, was it the LL that got to greedy? Or is their something really wrong with the FS model and they can not generate much interest so they came up with all these BS rules to try to wooo back viewers. Either way this is not good for webmasters that make FS and the LL that post them. Yes maybe some of these LL are making more money now, but they have all but cut most of us out of the process, but this will not last for them.

If I was you guys I would come up with a profitable FS model, that is fare to both you and the LL and is worth creating then only list these site in the directories that will accept them fuck the rest of these LL guys. Not make all my sites work with all/most of these link nazi rules, I make sites to express myself and pay the rent.

Damn. I take a few days off to do christmas stuff and look what I come back to.

Michael, I don't lurk. I just started posting here, because I'm trying to get into the gay market and frankly don't have a clue as to where I should start. I don't put much stock in post counts; if you can tell from my post count how long I've been in the biz then please share your secret with me, I could make good use of that. :)

I'm sorry you felt I was "bashing" you. I was just making a curious observation. Now that you've explained that 90% of your submissions are galleries, it makes a lot more sense.

You got a lot of good advice here, so I'll just add that looking at the rules for purely gay LLs has really stunned me. I've been making free sites for years and have gotten quite used to anything over 20 pics or so to be "too much free porn". I can understand why the "big" gay LLs are so big... they want 50-60 pics per free site. (ACK!) To me, that's not a free site, that's a nice AVS site. As such, I've been having a hard time trying to decide whether I want to even bother with LLs at all, or just go with the "general" LLs that have gay categories and the lower-traffic gay LLs that have more reasonable pic requirements.

Marc, thanks for taking up for me, I'm sorry I didn't check back in sooner to back you up. Been trying to get the Christmas shopping and decorating done.

I do not want anyone to misunderstand some of my posts, we all owe so much to the better LL’s some of those people are around here from time to time like, gaydemon, hunkhunters and JUB, but with 5-8 good LL still around it makes some people nervous seeing the market close like this. :scared:

Michael,

We learned overtime to only built what a freesite link program likes.

E.g.:
Built 1-2 for greenguy. Submit to him and see if accepted. If accepted
then built more.

Simply make a list with 10-20 sites you can submit to (check their traffic levels) and focus on those.
Once you have that down to a science make a new list and grow to 30-40 sites.

We learned it's not just about the 'rules'. Some like it green, some like it black. End of day you only care of the traffic you receive from them so simply built what they like, what you like isn't relevant. You're in this business because you like the dollars.

Next is a simple money formula. If you submit to linksite #1 how many signups you receive from that FS within a month?
If you receive 5 the first month it's safe to assume you will receive a minimum of 7 during the year, creating a value of approx. $200 for your one FS.
Submit with different sponsors and look at the numbers.

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How do you track the numbers each FS generates on a given layout / design?

Some programs allow 'sub tracking'.

If programs don't allow we simply setup multiple accounts:
program abc (gg)
my address

gg stands for greenguy.

If a program doesn't allow either option we move to a program that does allow ;-)

Sounds like a lot of work but once you've figured out a top 10 you will see that you start to group some together. No point in having a seperate tracking for a FS doing one signup/mo. In that case we simply track outbound traffic through a simple php counting script before we redirect to sponsor.

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Carrie and MarcJacob,

My apologies for my blast. You really did hit me on a bad day. I had just finished spending a month and half redesigning three AVS hubs to accommodate some new rules. A month and a half of cutting and pasting, I was nearly insane by the end of it, ask my friends. And my poor husband, he just hid in the living room and kept his head down. "Yes, Honey, you can have curried yak for dinner, let my fly it in from Tibet. Anything you want my love." And during this project, I wasn't making a lot of money as I had to set all other projects aside to get this done. It was a bummer.

So Carrie and marcjacob, you guys got the projectile vomit of all that built up frustration. Sorry.

Michael