Building the Ultimate Paysite

[Bec]

I'd like to hear from folks who have been running paysites awhile, as well as those just getting their feet wet with paysites.

1. List the ultimate ideal paysite structure in what you feel is necessary for both ease of management of your content, tracking your traffic, payment options, and best optimazation of your traffic.

This can and should include various personnel to do things for you, programs and scripts that should be utilized, perhaps even a schedule of what and when things are checked, adjusted, updated and so on. You can either be using these things, or would do if money was no object.

Include things you feel are necessary to maintain a steady flow of traffic, ie: purchased traffic, freesites, tgp submissions, etc.

2. Descibe a huge oopps or two, a bad decision about a program or some other aspect of the workings of the paysite, or any other pitfall, or a waste of time and energy you'd advise against doing or using when you first got started.

[Dawgy]

heh...

[Lee]

Well first and foremost be aware that running a paysite is a lot of work.

From the initial design stages right the way through to content aquisition and deployment and then you have affiliate promotion (if that is what you are planning) and also support for both affiliates (if applicable) and your member base.

So far as point (1) i would say you need to have at least a basic understanding of how scripts and in particular, how .php can not only make running a paysite easier but also how it can dramatically reduce the amount of time spent on such a project.

Content management, billing scripts, affiliate stats, all of this needs to be taken into account so far as how each item will work for your individual needs and, potential future needs on both an individual and multiple site basis.

Just because you are wanting to run 1 paysite now, that doesnt mean that in 3-6 years you wont have 100 of them. Getting the most compatible, customizble scripting early on can often save you thousands in additional costs a year or two down the line.

So far as traffic flow, the easiest way to ensure you have a steady flow of traffic is to generate it yourself through the usual methods, TGP'ing, Free Sites, AEN Sites, Link Lists and Search Engines. In fact i would highly recommend that you test your sites on your own traffic base PRIOR to allowing any affiliates to promote it.

As for any errors / mistakes, there are plenty of them however, these will all be on an individual basis to the paysite itself and ultimately, the paysite owner for example, while i may see launching hosted galleries as an additional expense that is relatively worthless, others may argue that FHG's are needed to run a successful paysite / affiliate program.

Ultimately however, the best advice i could give you is to make sure you look at some current working models, see how you can improve upon them and then research some more.

Of course you'll already get a heap of advice from your friends here when you need any help :thumbsup:

Regards,

Lee

[Chris Alan]

:yeah:

[Bec]

Well, I was hoping everyone would contribute some aspect of the paysite procedure so that we could eventually come up with a good working model of the creation process, but I guess I wasn't very clear about that. We often talk about all the pieces parts of what happens, but having it all in one thread where we hashed over the pros and cons of different programs and procedures would be kewl I think.

[gaystoryman]

Okay, well one thing I always found annoying was the way paysites had the navigation. Generally it was all over the place or no real central place for the members to go to in order to view other features of the site.

When I had my own, I put up a central lounge type place plus used a discreet small logo up in the top left corner. That logo linked to a 'site map' just for the member's area so they could check out all that was available.

Surprisingly I found a fair number after the first blush would use it to check out other features or stories instead of just going to the same section.

Also they used the newsletter option and even now since I've closed the paysite, they still remain subscribed to that feature... gotten me a few extra book sales as a result..

so... good solid stable navigation to all of the members area is important as well as a way for them to opt in to a simple newsletter...

just my thoughts.

Ian

[romeoboi]

Hey-
I personally have not ran a paysite, but I've always toyed with the idea but based on my situation as a student, I have niether the time or money, but just the ideas

However, as an affiliate I always look for programs that offer cascading billing. For some reason a lot of gay paysites don't use this and instead just offer credit card proccessing, and then maybe some dialer or phone access options at the bottom.

Sometimes I will act as a surfer and buy a trial through a non affiliate link of a website I am promoting to see if it is actually something I would buy.... therefore if I think the site sucks, I wont waste my time promoting something that either won't convert or will leave my traffic unhappy. About a quarter of the time one of their credit card proccessors will decline a card which I know to be perfectly good and working or there will be a technical error with their primary proccessor...

However, with cascading billing the information is sent to the next proccessor....

so without cascading, you don't get the sale. with cascading you do. so you can see from a paysite and an affiliate's point of view, cascading is really good.

the cascading scripts ive looked at are in the low 4 figures, but I would think if you are running an affiliate program with a few sites it would be worth it. Check out mansion productions if you are interested. I hear they have pretty good cascading, affiliate, and content management scripts.

... but thats just my cheap two cents

[Bec]

Ok, so far we have to be sure we build in a good navigation system, including a site map, so that goes with what we discuss when either designing the site ourselves or hiring a designer, as well as any content management program we want to put into place - that the template works with our navigation the way we want it to, an opt in email newsletter, and cascading billing system.

What else should we be looking at here for our ultimate paysite?