Your online business:
How to and eventually ... the numbers and roadmaps


I actually intend this to be a 2-3 part thread/tutorial on setting up and running your online business since there is no way I can get my summary out there in one post. It will pretty much be from the adult online industry point of view, but most of it can be applied to your mainstream business pretty easily (except some of the plans I lay out). I will add to this thread over the next week or two.

A lot of this thread is just my opinion and what I have found works. Everyone has the right to disagree with my point of view, and only take from this thread what you want .. even if its nothing!

I have only been in this industry since late 2000, though my business has grown each year to the point where last year my business had a combined turnover of over $1.2 million, and I made more than I thought I would have been making 5 years ago. Funnily enough while I have put in some very long hours, it doesn’t seem that bad now that I am where I want to be. In fact I am glad I didn’t just give up when it took me 6 months to make my first sale!

Ok firstly this tutorial isn’t aimed at someone who wants beer money or a few extra bucks to save them having to mow lawns in the sweltering UK heat wave. This tutorial is aimed at those of you who want to make webmastering your full time income and possibly even get rich off it!

This isn’t really a tutorial as much as it’s a checklist with a few examples. I actually decided to post this on the main forum instead of the newbie forum because I feel there are so many on the main forum who are still only playing with the idea of their own adult business, or are just posting … wasting time while they try to figure out where to start. Most of those in the newbie forum have already decided to give it a good go and are busy making sites and learning as much as they can.

Not saying this will be a newbie guide, I also hope to touch on some more advanced areas of your adult business. In fact, a lot of you could probably skip this first section and go straight to the business plan part.


Section 1 : “I want financial freedom so where do I start?”

Firstly I assume you have a computer, you have an internet connection, you have hands with most of your fingers still attached, you have the ability to construct basic websites/pages, and you understand English fairly well, and it helps if you plan to stay alive for the next 5 years. That’s all you really need. Oh some money helps but its not totally essential, though it will speed you up a little.

STEP 1 – Your work space

First step is you need a work space. Your workspace has no toys, no distractions, is not in an area that you are likely to be bugged day and night, and there is no TV in there. You need some desk space, you need somewhere to file papers/checks etc. A filing cabinet is usually overkill since most of use have fairly paperless offices. A scanner and printer does help, and believe it or not some businesses still use a fax .. yes even online businesses!

STEP 2 – Research and planning

Next step is reading and research. You need to decide what you want to try, what you want to make, and you need to read up on what other people suggest and are doing so that you don’t go in blind. Now avoid trying to create the super new concept that no one has ever done before that will make you rich, because chances are that people have though about it, tried it, and it was an utter waste of time. Try to stick to proven methods, and formulate a plan of attack.
Don’t do it in your brain either, write it down or use your PC. Goals and plans written down tend to get acted on more than those vague goals in the back of your head. The best thing you can do at this point is to visit the Netpond newbie board .. start reading and posting … asking questions and the like.

http://www.netpond.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=365&f=9 – New webmaster forum.

Now you have a rough plan, you would be a fool to formulate a detailed business plan because you still don’t really know that much about the industry. Wait till you have spent at least a few months getting to know traffic, getting to know systems, and getting a feel for webmastering. Then you will be able to draw from experience when formulating your precise business plan a little further down the road. That’s the topic of another post, and hopefully I will get permission to reproduce a business plan mission we have in Betabrigade (webmaster learning) which is simply stellar.

STEP 3 - Hosting

You have 3 choices. You either go free hosting, you go budget hosting, or you go solid discount hosting …. you could go premium hosting, but there is little need for that until you have more mission critical sites. Unfortunately most new to the industry make the mistake of going with budget hosting or the cheapest crappy hosting they can find.

Now assuming you are intent on running a business you need to make sure your sites are going to be hosted somewhere with good uptime and good support. The problem with budget hosts is you are basically rolling the dice frequently in the hope your stuff doesn’t go down. You may be lucky and get a good run, but for every few people who have some luck there are those who luck out. Not only that but your sites are probably on the cheapest crappiest BW with the worst connectivity. In the hosting world you get what you pay for, and while saving $30-50 a month may seem attractive, when you actually start getting sales you are probably robbing yourself of 2-3 times that.

When hunting for a host I tend to suggest www.cyberwurx.com (see no ref code!) as a middle of the range, solid discount hosting solution. I also think www.phatservers.com and www.mojohost.com are fairly decent middle of the road companies. There are other good ones, though when shopping take recommendations with a grain of salt. The best thing I can suggest is to search Netpond for things like “hostname down” or “hostname problems” etc and read the threads. If there is even 20% negative feedback or that host always seems to pop up in problem threads then its to be avoided at all costs. The best hosts are actually the ones who are around but you never see any threads started about.

The risks some more experienced webmasters take to save even $100-200 a month are just amazing. A nice solid 100-200 gig account with a discount host should do you fine.

STEP 4 – Getting started

Whatever it is you have decided to do, you need to devote a week to doing it. I usually suggest some tgp submits and a freesite every day, but when starting out that could take a whole day or even longer while you are working out what to do. So make a few galleries and submit a few galleries, make a few freesites, maybe even try to create a blog. Generally start doing what you planned to do. This will get you set for the first real step forward in your webmaster career.

Trying to do up a detailed business plan when you are first starting out is just stupid. You have to figure out which way is north before you can plan a route.

Now we are at where most people who have been in the industry 3-6 months are at. Though I have seen some who just seem to rocket ahead and are at this stage within weeks … everyone learns at their own pace.

 

Section 2 – “Ok I’ve been doing this for 3 months and I know everything! What next?”

After learning, feeling your way, experimenting, and just goofing around with different things there comes a point where you are ready to start your business. You have a small pool of experience to draw on and you generally know how things work, so you are ready to draw up your business plan!

I was going to do up my own business plan template, but why reinvent the wheel. In Betabrigade TheShiftyEyedBastard has drawn up a project for a business plan which is solid and probably better than anything I could have done. He gave me permission to repeat it in this thread, so next time you see him buy him a beer and let him sleep with your wife. This is a fairly brief plan, but will get you on the right track, and help you identify what may be holding you back …


Step 1 : Business plan

Everyone should have one, whether you are in this for beer money or in it for the long haul. It is your road map, how you create goals, and how you measure how you are doing at working towards those goals.

Okay, now this can be as complex, or as simple as you want. You can just answer the questions that I put up, or seek out your own to add to it.

What are the goals of your business? (eg trying to build up traffic to sell, create a large site that you can sell ads on, build a search engine network, keep plugin freesites and galleries, etc...)

What do you need to do to reach these goals?

How much is it going to cost you to reach these goals?

Where are you now?

Where do you want to be in 3-6 months?

Where do you want to be in 6mos-2 years?

Where do you want to be in 5 years? 10 years? (however far you want to set goals)

Are you going to need employees to reach these goals, and if so, how soon, and how many?

What, if any help do you need to reach these goals? (what you feel you need to learn)

What are you currently doing that seems to be working for you?

What are you currently doing that seems to not be working for you?

What are the things in your life that are holding you back that you could change to increase your time/dedication towards this business?


It is very important to set goals and have a plan for your business, or else you will just be flying blind and bouncing around from one thing to another. I did a whole lot of that during my first months in the business, and I don't want you guys falling into the same trap. When you build something, I don't care what it is, but make sure it has a purpose. If it doesn't perform a specific function for you, what is the point?

Go to some of these websites and see what a business plan can entail.
http://www.sba.gov/starting_busines...ning/basic.html
http://www.bplans.com/dp/
http://www.soyouwanna.com/site/syws...n/bizplan2.html

Do a google search for more, or for plan sampless, if you need additional reference material.

Remember as well, plans are not set in stone, feel free to look back every few months to revise as you learn new aspects of the business, and what works best for you, and your individual goals.

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STEP 2 – Your routine

Now you have some experience, and some knowledge behind you. You should also be able to go about doing things just that little bit quicker. The business plan should take into account the time you have available and your daily routine or work hours. This is probably one of the hardest things to stick to, especially if you work from home where temptation is just a few steps away.

Anyhow I am assuming that you plan to work full time.

Full time in this industry tends to be between 50-70 hours a week.

My suggestion is a daily work routine that starts at 8:30am, finishes at 5:30pm with a 30 min lunch break Monday-Friday. On Saturday I suggest a half day, probably the morning is best say from 9am-1pm. Then take the rest of the time off. Sunday should be 1-2 hours max. If you don’t take a day off you simply won’t be able to keep to the routine.

You need to construct a work schedule and STICK TO IT.

- Don’t drink or party the night before work

- Don’t stay up all night playing games or whatever. Have a bedtime

- Knock off work when you should, or at least 30 mins after you were supposed to. Don’t work into the evening and night.

- Only have a designated time for board posting and ICQ. Its ok to leave ICQ on with an away message incase something important does crop up, but you leave the answering of all non important messages till a certain time in the day. Same with emails.

- Try to have some activities away from the computer when you aren’t working. Go see a movie with friends, go out and have a blast on Saturday night, spend some time with your family, go for a daytrip on Sunday. Leaving your desk gives you perspective, and getting some sun and fresh air will help your health.

- I strongly suggest playing some form of sport, or doing exercise at least 1-2 times a week. While that’s not nearly enough it will help keep some level of fitness which directly translates into better performance and presence of mind at work.

- Dress for work. Don’t wear your PJ’s all day. Its amazing what effect your clothes have on your perception of yourself. I am not suggesting you wear a suit and tie at your desk, but wear something that at least makes you feel like you could be at work.

- A tidy desk is a tidy mind. Clean the clutter up at the end of the day so you don’t sit down to a filthy desk the next morning.


I actually did another thread on this a while ago which may be worth a read/re-read. The Lazy part probably doesn’t apply to everyone, but I some of the points down the bottom of the post are probably worth a read … http://www.netpond.com/showthread.php?t=84170


Step 3 – Do it.

Well … not really sure what else I can say. Just do the work. If you aren’t seeing ANY results after 1 month time to go back to the start. Possibly your biz plan wasn’t sound, and maybe you are just going about things the wrong way.

If you do see results .. even small results then you will want to re-evaluate after 3-6 months.


Next : I will lay down some sample business plans and strategies .. full strategies with stages, outlining when and how to grow, and what signs to look for. I will also touch on employees, some office procedure and other things to hopefully make your life a little easier and save you making the same mistakes I have.

 

 

Section 3 – Lets get into some more depth!

Ok so far many basics are laid out. Let nothing fool you … this business is all about numbers and if you know your numbers your choice of direction will be obvious. The hard part is getting a large enough pool of numbers and stats to work with, because without it you are effectively flying blind.

I will link to a ‘small’ thread I wrote in the newbie forum on stats. This should explain how different sponsors count clicks : http://www.netpond.com/showthread.php?t=89562

Also an extract from a recent thread explaining how I rotate sponsors based on their earnings per unique visitor (not sponsor ratio which I find to be very misleading).


Rotating Sponsors & Stats to look for
============================

Sounds easy, but its a matter of maths and stats.

Personally I judge my sites and sponsor stats by $/unique impression. That means how many $ I made per unique visitor to my site x pages they visited. Its a no brainer to work the maths out for galleries etc, but for larger sites it can require a calculator.

I am looking for 0.2 - 0.3 cents per impression or one signup per 10,000 impressions. This can be heavily niche/site type dependant and on more niche like portal sites i am probably looking for over 1c per impression, and on some high volume low quality traffic types I might be giddy with 1 signup per 50k uniques and .05c per impression. So generally its only a guide, and you need to work out what is average and to be expected for you.

Work out the $ per impression for your site, break that down page by page, and then work out each sponsor's cost per impression for each page. In cases where you have more than one advert for the one sponsor on that page take into account the quality of that advert(position, size etc). I use a simplistic system, but I tend to divide all results by 2 in cases where I have one main sponsor on the page and several secondary ones. In some cases I will even divide ratios it by 3-4 which means that I expect that advertiser to do 3-4 times better when considering $/impression because of the larger banners and better advertising effort put into that sponsor.

Work out a system that works best for you, but when considering $/impression its silly to think that a 120x60 banner at the bottom of the page will pull the same clicks and $ as a 600x100 banner at the top of the page. You have to take into account the quality of adverts, and with experience this can be done just looking at the page and viewing the numbers in context. Sometimes a little system works best. This is the subject of another huge tutorial maybe someone else will do ... who knows.

So we have decided that sponsor A has to be rotated out because they are making .0000000003 cents per unique, and sponsor C & D are over .5c per unique. Easy

Why do we measure $/unique impression ???? Easy ... most sponsors dont count a lot of clicks, some only count 2nd page clicks, some join page clicks, some count 80% of clicks, .... hell i swear some only report clicks made on even hours, full moon nights, where the humidity is 30-40%, and the click comes from a url with the letters 'A', 'Z, and 'P' in it. who knows??!

... so the only two things you can rely on are your own server stats and how much money you made. Those are two reliable figures and not subject to others interpretation of a 'valid click'.

Things to look out for when rotating sponsors out using the $/impression value model..

1. A sponsor may have a low $/impression stat, but may be a secondary sponsor with a very low CTR (Click through rate). I consider a reasonable ctr to be around 2% for an average advert in an average location. Now if you have an advert with a low CTR .. lets say .5% CTR, yet your ratio for that sponsor is quite good ... lets say 1:500 on first page clicks and your $/click ratio is high, then you might want to see if you can improve the advert or give the sponsor a higher profile on the page.

2. If a sponsor has an average or high $/impression stat, but has a huge ctr of something like >8% ... though the ratio of clicks to signups is quite bad (say 1:3000+), and the $/click to sponsor ratio isn't that awesome ... say .5c/click, then it might be worth giving a high profile to another sponsor to see if you can preserve the ctr and increase the ratio or $ earnt per click.

3. Be careful you don't over-advertise a sponsor. Sometimes you can get better results from spreading the advertising around more evenly. Please be careful if using sponsor content or free sponsor hosting. Check first

------------------------------

Now,

Your plan should consist of some immediate work and some development work. Immediate work is your day to day tasks that bring in fairly reliable income, and development work is the stuff you do after your day to day tasks, sort of like long/medium term projects for future profitability.

Right … now that we have some maths gunk out the way lets lay down a few plans that assume you know the basics of the industry and have a basic skill set.

Fast traffic – Fast money Plan

A. 3 TGP Galleries a day - Do 3 galleries a day over different niches, and make sure you have as many free PA’s as you can get. Some of the premium paid PA’s (partner accounts) will speed you up as well.

B. 1 Freesite a day – Create 1 freesite every day rotating between 3 different niches.

C. Link dump submits – drop at least 1 site onto the link dumps daily

D. 1 Fake tgp. Set up a text fake tgp loaded with sponsor hosted galleries. Trade hard links with as many sites as you can and dump your .404 traffic onto this tgp. Load it with free email joins, free sponsor trial sites, cpc sponsors (if you can find any), and free to join dating sites and webcam sites. Best if you can get a script which rotates 2000+ galleries over time.

E. Work on a medium/short term site that will bring in traffic quickly and easily. Though with these kinds of sites typically you have to keep pushing them, and as soon as you stop pushing them they can fall off. The type of site is up to you!


Moderate traffic – Mix of long term and short term

A. 2 Gallery submits daily. Only take on the best PA’s.

B. 1 Freesite a day (as in the previous plan)

C. Create and build a blog every week. Heaps of info in the netpond blog forum : http://www.netpond.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=&f=69 . Half your time will be spent getting posts queued up and getting link trades. A week is enough time to get a blog set up and functioning well. Stop building blogs when the time allotted to building them is being taken up maintaining them.

D. Create a portal every 2 weeks. A total of 3-4 good portal sites is enough to keep you busy while still bringing in some good sales. By portal I mean a multipage site with some content but mostly as a gateway to your sponsors. Do a netpond search on the newbie board for portal project. We have run 2 of them so far.


Long term – the “I want to be rich one day, but am happy to live on crackers and water for 6 months” plan

A. 1 Tgp gallery per day, mostly to feed your projects. You will use a mix of sponsors and your own sites on the galleries.

B. 1 Freesite every day. Focus on 2-3 themes/niches and link them all not only to your sponsor but to a central hub. The hub should be SE optimized and heavily link traded.

C. AT LEAST 1 site designed for the SE’s every week. This site should be multiple pages, have heaps of advertising, look at first glance like a great content rich site but really the main purpose is to get traffic to your sponsors asap. You should be able to manage at least 20 of these sites before you start getting short of time and need to stop building and start maintaining

D. One portal per week. 5-6 portals should be enough. See previous section.

E. *important* - Spend 1-2 hours per day link trading. Try to grow the links on your portal sites & SE sites. Its not important that the sites have huge traffic, but try to make sure you are exchanging hard links (no scripted trade links) with sites that have some traffic. Attempt to grow your existing sites by at least 2-3 link trades per week.

F. Spend 2 hours on one day of the week checking your sites, looking at stats and trends, and weeding out trades that are sending nothing or just milking your site for PR/Traffic.



Now of those 3 plans only the last one is really sustainable for growth. Now following an average pool of data a year old, I would estimate if you followed these plans you should be making at least

Plan A : $1200 a month
Plan B : $900 a month
Plan C : $600 a month

These are very conservative. In reality I expect more, but there are just too many factors to take into account to be anything but cautious with estimates. The short term plan will level out the quickest, I estimate 2-3k a month unless you find ways to push past the general submitter. The 2nd plan will take a little longer to level out, but again will level out after probably a couple of years at 3-5k per month. The last plan will take much longer to level out, but unfortunately it will level out because you only have so much time to devote to building and growing. Though there are no reasons why you cant push past the 8-10k a month barrier after 2-4 years.

The thing is that they all slow down eventually. This is where most of the 2-3 year guys find it hard to push to the next level because you can’t stick to those plans much longer if you want growth. You have to change things, and use that pool of money you saved over the year(s) to push your business into the next income bracket.

Many people go onto taking on employees, starting their affiliate programs, buying wads and wads of traffic, selling webmaster services through employees, the list goes on. Next section of this thread I will start to get into pushing your business beyond the 10k/month barrier.

 

Thanks to _LB_ from Titabucks for this great Tutorial!