Welcome to
The DFN Weekly

Making Money was the Worst Thing that Happened to Me

by Lenny

If you keep up with the board at VNWR, or you happen to be a sponsor I have the joy of irritating the hell out of via ICQ, then you know me. For those of you who don't fall into those 2 categories I'll make a brief introduction.

My name is Lenny, (both my real name and handle) and I started webmastering just a bit over a year ago. (mid Sept Y2K)

I was a porn surfer. I actually discovered "free" porn on the internet from an ex-girlfriend who told me about green guy's site, she liked to go there because "he's so funny and cute". She never really surfed any of the sites, she just went to see what he wrote for that day and checked out the useless site of the day. So if you ever wondered how he gets 130k hits and your new listing only got 3k hits, there ya have it.

Prior to discovering free porn, I was a member of amateurpages.com. Every time I tried to find free porn through a search engine I somehow always involuntarily ended up either there or at teen steam, so I figured those were my only 2 options. Anyway, I knew some html from my vast experience building a personal web page on geocities using the yahoo page builder (Hey, I said, porn sites can't be much harder than this!). So I went and bought a domain name and a $5 per month hosting plan and I was on my way.

After several failed submissions to the major link lists, I clicked on a link in Tommy's resource section that led me to Voltar's newbie board. After reading for a while I finally worked up the nerve to post a hello and introduce myself and see if anyone could help me get my site listed somewhere.

I was very warmly welcomed by almost everyone on the board. I was absolutely amazed at the number of "Hello Lenny's" posted on the board that day. Unfortunately my site didn't feel the same warmth that I did.

Of course I took it personally, and thought, "Who do these people think they are?". After I calmed down, I realized these people "are" people who are getting their sites listed. I took the advice I was given, resubmitted, and what do you know... it got listed!!

The first million was practically already in the bank. Yeah, sure.

Ok, so now I was getting listed and not getting any sales. Then I saw an announcement on the board that Headless would be on the radio that night doing site reviews. I logged into the chat room and told Headless I had a site I wanted him to look at. He gave me a number to call and said we would do it live on the radio. I called and he walked me through the site page by page, telling me what he would change, and what he would leave the same. That 10-minute conversation was worth a week of reading the boards.

He went on to review a gallery for a girl named Blondie. I was chatting with Blondie in the chat room and she told me that this gallery made $150 on a 3 day listing at The Hun. In my infinite webmaster wisdom I said, "Oh yeah, ummmm, who's The Hun?" Her gallery was promoting Pink4Free, this was before the 4Free programs were promoted to death. I thought, "I can do that!"

So off I went to sign up for Pink4Free and build a gallery for The Hun. One week later The Hun listed the gallery, and I made over $600 in 75 cent Pink4Free sign ups!! (Of course my $5 a month web host called me on the phone wanting to know what the hell was going on, but that's another story). In the meantime, the free site I built using the advice Headless gave me got 8 signups!!

Here I was a whole 3 weeks in this business and I had made over $1000. Great right? WRONG. I was the king of the world. I was going to own the whole stinking adult internet, and my personal feces was not odorous! ;)

Hell, all I had to do was submit to The Hun every 3 days and that was worth $1200 a week. And heck, if I was feeling ambitious I'd build another one of those 8 signup free sites for some beer money.

So I stopped doing Voltar's newbie projects, I didn't submit anything to the SE's, I didn't do any of the tedious or boring (albeit important) stuff that webmasters do everyday. I figured I had it made.

Then for some odd reason The Hun didn't like the next 20 or so galleries I sent him (c'mon, I know I'm not the only one that's happened to) and that free site template that made me 8 signups the first time made me 0 the second time, and 0 the third time, and, well, you get the idea. Unfortunately for me, I was lucky, not good.

Continued on the Back Page..