PozScott,

I'm a bit nervous about your budget and what you're planning on spending. If I've learned one thing after being in this business for 5 years, it's that the money is easy to spend and hard to make back. I agree that you need content, and obviously a good site design. However, I would strongly recommend against spending $2000/month on plug-ins if you're just getting started. It would be easy to get burned out and be out of business in 3-6 months. Let's look at some paysite math:

If you had good traffic, not 404 or the type you can buy 50k-100k at a time, you'd be looking at maybe 1:300 in conversions. Let's assume you sold every membership for $30 and didn't offer a trial. $30 - 25% (15% for 3rd party fees, 10% for reserve) = $22.50. That means you're going to need to make 100 sales per month to come close to breaking even with your recurring content cost, let alone hosting, incidentals and traffic acquisition costs. 100 sales means at least 30,000 visitors. I can almost guarantee you that you're not going to make 100 sales with that traffic volume.

I always see everywhere around the boards peoples touting 1:100, 1:200, etc but that's not a reality for most. Many of the people that report those types of figures are being shaved, if not on their sales, then on the actual amount of traffic that the sponsor is counting. For example, You might send 1000 visitors to a sponsor to make a sale but perhaps they only report 200. If you made a sale, you would think you had a good conversion ratio. My point? It's really easy to undertake this endeavor and have unrealistic expectations.

Making a paysite is easy, all one needs to do is buy some content and pay a designer. Filling it up with content is easy as long as you keep your pocket open. I'm just advising that you be cautious, on every front.

The reality is that there is no magic bullet for buying traffic, you will most likely lose or break even with any traffic purchase.

Here is my advice:

1) Finish your site design, get some banners, have a few gallery designs made for it.
2) Shop for some content specials for videos and pictures, we can help you do that here. In my honest opinion, you'll be able to survive the learning curve longer if you are able to get some content at an exceptional price. Perhaps you could put together 20-30-40-50k photos and a couple dozen hours of video in an outright buy for a few grand.
3) Add free content to your members areas! This includes free live webcams with an upsell and whatever else you can get your hands on. Use your own judgement and don't use anything that you find too "irritating" with upsells or deceptive links. Otherwise, there is a ton of free content out there that you can get and make the best of it.
4) Build your TGPs, start submitting to other peoples TGPs just as soon as you can process signups. Long term your success is going to be a derivative of your own personal ability to generate traffic. Traffic is king.

Remember this: the value in our business is in traffic generation, everything else is a commodity that can be purchased, easily.

I'm sure others will have some opinions on what I've wrote, perhaps they have enhancements or disagree... both are OK. My only goal is to not see someone else spend 10-20k and blow out of the business. Be patient, persistent... keep your day job until you nail down the formula that works for this and achieve income replacement. The money is always easy to spend, very hard to make back.

I have to go out to get some grub.. I'll post most later. Don't hesitate to give me a call if you want to chat, on my dime, I'm happy to help even if you never become a client.

Cheers,

Brad