VNWR's New Webmasters Quick Start Guide
Getting Started: The Tools You Will Need
In the beginning.....OK, so it's not THAT dramatic, but creating your first site is
quite an adventure. You need to think about how you will set it up, what your main theme
or niche will be and how much - or how little - content you want to provide to your
surfers.
A popular quote is that most webmasters create their "first site for ego, next site
for $$$". This is SO true. When making your first site it's all about graphics,
layout, quality of pics and making it look "pretty". Once you become a seasoned
webmaster it will all be about optimizing your "site pattern" and "flow" for getting the
surfer to click on your sponsors and make you some money! So go ahead...feel free to make
that first "pretty" site. It's a white elephant you'll never forget.
Here's what you need to get started:
1 - Decide if you will use a free host or purchase your own domain & hosting
space.
If you go with free hosting then you get your domain name supplied and your hosting paid
for however like all things in life nothing is really free, the price for free hosting is
normally the loss of a few banner spots on your pages, but this is a great no cost startup
and it won't cost you anything to "learn the ropes".
If you go for your own hosting you get all your banner spots but you will have startup
costs, you will need to get a domain name and for that you go to our Hosting section of the resources.
Pick one of the hosts there and normally on thier front page you will find a small fill in area
where you can search to see if the domains that interest you are avaliable. This is free from the hosting services
as they want your business and hope that once you find what you want you will register it thru them and use thier hosting services as well.
You have to find a host to
put your new domain and site on. Costs involved with Hosting is normally a startup fee
that varies ($25-150+), your basic monthly plan fee (depending on how many gigs/domains
you will host) and potential additional bandwidth charges - which normally run at about $2.50
to $5.00 a gigabyte of transfer. Be careful if you get a lot of hits too fast. This could
cost you quite a lot of money if your traffic isn't converting well.
2 - Decide what type of site you wish to create (hardcore, fetish, softcore, gay etc).
Depending on what type of site you want to have will dictate the number of sponsors you
have available to promote on your sites. Hardcore generally has the most variety of
sponsors and fetish or niche probably the least amount. In saying that though, there is a
good variety of sponsors for most categories and most of them will provide some sort of
free content you could use on your site. The other thing to remember is how much
competition you have. Again hardcore probably has more sites to compete with...or exchange
links with. Decisions, decisions! :)
3 - Choose sponsors that will reflect and compliment the theme of your site.
CANNOT stress how important this aspect is. If you're going to run a foot fetish site
DON'T put transexual banners on it. If you build a teen site don't put Mature women
banners on it....TARGET your sponsors to your site. In fact one of the Best ways to build is to choose your sponsor site and build your site to promote it.
4 - Select banners that will sell the surfer on the sponsors you have chosen to display.
Banners...ever seen a really good commercial on TV that made you want to go out and buy
the product? That's what your banners are. Make sure you choose good targeted banners,
make sure you don't have the SAME banner in every banner spot. Most sponsors have a great
selection of good banners - use them ALL. And add descriptive text around them when ever allowed. Hype up what is on the banner and that sponsors tour.
5 - Make your choice on the popular question: "content or NO content?".
If you have a content site then work out how many pics you want. You can have thousands of
pics, but do you know how to work your traffic? With that much content you don't give much
of a reason for your surfers to join a paysite. To start learning we suggest 10 to 20
pics. A no content site is basically a front door to your sponsors with full page ads or surfer traps
replacing the content part of your site. This method relies a lot more on Search Engine
traffic as most places will not link to a site with no content and thus you have a problem
getting traffic unless you know how to use the engines.
Once you have made all these decisions (the VNWR Webmaster Resources sections can help
provide you with some help in these areas!) then you are ready to begin. Do you know how
to create a web page? Do you know how to do HTML coding? These are important things to
consider.
If you know a little bit about code and or think you can teach yourself, try these popular
beginner's links for some background and examples of basic HTML.
* Tutorials By Newbie For Newbies
* How To Create A Web Page
* Guide to Learning HTML
* HTML for
Complete Idiots
* HTML Tutorial for Beginners
* HTML Goodie's
If you know nothing about HTML code and have no wish to learn it, your in the wrong business.
Know the code your business is based on. View source and see how everything is done.
It takes less than 10 simple commands to create a web ready webpage.
Most software packages are NOT friendly to the demands of the adult webmaster.
They most often think you are dumb and try to make corrections to the code,
which can include the very linking urls used to send traffic to your sponsors.
This has resulted in webmasters losing money repeatedly by using off the shelf website building software.
I can not recommend anything past a basic text editor as the best thing to use when making your sites and webpages.
I use NotePad that comes with windows for my sites and webpages. It is much easier to do clean profitable code by hand than by software.
Try it out. Takes about two days to learn the basics of HTML that you will be using 98% of the time. The rest is just fluff that you will easily pick up along the way.
If you need additional help with things like javascript, .htaccess or CGIs then check
out the VNWR Webmaster Resource pages. There are many different free and nearly free
services available that will create and even remotely host these applications for you.