Nymph

I use toplists for a few of my mainstream projects, I even run a mainstream (very niched) toplist. I have found the thing you want to watch out for are the ones on a free host toplist service. I generally stay clear of those. I prefer to join ones that are on a real hosted domain...they tend to stay active, and a better source of traffic= sales.

I also use webrings, and was quite surprised at the traffic I get from those.

As with everything else in this biz, you have to watch what you get yourself into, and monitor it closely.

StiffyMcSpliff

I love mainstream... I've actually been dropping adult because my mainstream is doing better with less work. I've managed to figure out some nifty tricks that helped push out pages like crazy, so my SE traffic is up like 300%, and thats only with 25% of my new pages indexed.

I find with mainstream, you just have to have something that everyone wants but is hard to find. I haven't had much luck with vidoe games or computer software/hardware, but adsense, my bong and pipe store and amazon are all doing really good, plus I've entered into partnerships with other mainstream sites to team up.

All I can say is Portals are a beautiful thing, especially when they are all RSS driven

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PaperJam :: CMS - E-Commerce - Design Solutions

joemeca

adult sucks ...

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dekaz

I switched to mainstream and it's given me a lot more income with less work. All the adult webmastering experience made it a lot easier to work with websites in general.

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I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me

2xpnet

maybe we can expect thread about ebay bussiness

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banned for being a nickle whore

2xpnet

by far, only adult is giving me some returns.

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banned for being a nickle whore

Atlas

I lost my ass in mainstream.

Ive tried to sell dating personals, public records, music, to classical music, auto parts, arthritis pain relief information, business ezines, tarot cards, dog toys, ebay memberships, etc etc.

I easily lost $2k in all this spinning my wheels directionless.

I got very depressed reading that other people are making $1k a day, or $5k a day and Ive always been in the red and cant earn $1 without paying $2 to make it.
I really want to work but Im just directionless because everything Ive done has lost money so far.

At least in adult Theres a structured set of things you can do to get traffic for free. You know if you build and submit youll get traffic and eventually make a sale, but in mainstream I have no idea what Im supposed to do.
There are no mainstream link lists, no mainstrteam tgps.

Its like someone giving me a book on how to make a lot of money but the book is written in Greek.

PornFactory

I understand you Atlas ... I have the same problem with mainstream so far ... don't want to quit trying but hell yes, I need some tips that really works ...

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StiffyMcSpliff

This is the thread that never ends... it just goes on and on my friend...

Anyhow, I'm in the mood to write, so I'll post a new thread with a tutorial.

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PaperJam :: CMS - E-Commerce - Design Solutions

PornFactory

That's great ... looking forward to read that tutorial ...

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erots

I like mainstream because you can use viral marketing and lots and lots of tricks you can't use in adult. At the same time it is much harder to get traffic. But this is so for everyone so I just have to do some SEO and build backlinks. Generally there is less keyword competition in mainstream and if you have got decent amount of links you start to get good SE traffic too. I'm not saying there are no other ways to get traffic though, but for me I find SE traffic the best. You can always get traffic from forums in your niche and trading with toplists/sites too, yes.

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Promote Sarah Palin's parody & try to make lots of cash exploiting the buzz New episode coming out soon - Obama who doesn't look like President Obama fucking Palin!

Jamdin

I would like to get more into mainstream stuff since my mother is retiring in six months. I've fooled around with Amazon a bit but never had much luck.

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See who I am at AdultWhosWho.com or visit my
adult sites at Pierced Amazons and Webcam Witches

fudpuck

Always. Haha...

http://www.amkh.com
http://www.honestnetworks.com
http://www.sitesled.com
http://www.cabspace.com
http://www.amkbb.com
http://www.photosled.com

Those are all forms of hosting, so it's entirely internet and internet service based. AMKH hosts adult sites as well, but the others focus primarily on recruiting fresh mainstream users. Then we ween a percentage of the free users onto paid services.

Mainstream internet and the adult internet share a lot of fundamentals, especially as far as hosting, content management, and site design goes. But from there, the differences abound. It's so much easier to do ecommerce on a mainstream site, merchant accounts are easy to get, and it's easier to spread the word in most people's daily life. If you have a common service or product, it's convenient to mention it when you're talking to someone at the supermarket, or the mechanic's, or wherever.

The two areas are just different kind of endeavors. Mainstream works best if you incorporate it into the real mainstream...daily life...work and play. Adult is for a different audience..but the mainstream industry overlaps that same audience every day in a 1000 ways. Because it's not just an industry...it's every industry other than adult. And you need to approach it as such.

Susanna

Mainstream has been very interesting so far. Started in about January of this year. Some highlights:

I heard an interview of a guy who was buying houses on ebay and turning them around quick. He didnt even see the place he bought, he only did some telephoning to be sure there were no outstanding taxes on the house before buying for outrageous prices like 4000.00 dollars. Then he would put the house backon ebay with a 10,000 reserve and spruce up the ebay advert and easily make that price in 24 hours. He never put his own name on the documents, he would tell the seller the next buyers name.

People in mainstream are doing inventive stuff like this. If you want a road map on how to make money stick in adult. If you LOVE the wild west atmosphere where you will (one day) come upon an idea that will make you 100k over night...stick with mainstream.

One of the big things in mainstream right now is the concept of affiliates. List building is still important but the people making big money are putting an army of affiliates together. They are "teaching" about how to run affiliate programs and how to treat affiliates, find affiliates etc. All the stuff that adult has been doing for years.

Also I am seeing hints of adult webmasters not being totally ostricized anymore. I cannot remember now who it was but someone who runs an adult affiliate program was invited to a seminar to speak to mainstream participants about affiliate programs. This seminar was Feb or Mar this year. I still would not outwardly say I do adult but its like anything, if someone put two and two together its not something you lie about.

Paysite tours with imagery = Sales letters with words. The value of the sales letter is something I am learning about. I seriously hate sales letters (those long two tone pages with mostly text) and never read them when I come on them but I am one of those that reads the headlines and looks for the bottom line. I am but one kind of surfer. Some read every detail and depending on the price of the product (spend more then 1k or for some more then 1 hundred and you really read the fine print).

So a sales letter is marketing at its finest. It too can be tweaked and played with. Often times people send a certain kind of traffic to a sales letter, send other traffic to a site with all the same info in site format and treat the traffic different at both.

They use squeeze pages to collect emails for future mailing and profit.

They use popups for attention grabbers to get people on their mailing lists straight away or to get them to read a one liner message meant to inspire just like the main headline does. The popups right now are very nice post it notes or very fancy imagery. In adult we pop another page, this is not embraced in mainstream.

From what I see the people making big money are making their own products with many different distribution/traffic gathering strategies. Your own product can be as simple as a set of ebooks. Some of them are given away free but have your link to bigger and better ebooks. Then you have your more expensive product, often an ebook or a membership site to feed the viral traffic too. They map out their products and traffic sources to be sure that they have not missed any opportunity.

Its easier to use viral sources of traffic. Things like yahoo groups and link trading and affilate finding go pretty smooth.

It really is a wild west.

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Susanna

Susanna

The products being made in the last year or two support the direction adult is going in. Examples are places like http://www.marketerschoice.com/app/?pr=6&id=85356 (referral link) http://www.marketerschoice.com (regular link).

This place is like our third party processors...they include a shopping cart, newsletter list building, auto responder, two tier affiliate program and multiple product support. They have a sophisticated system and its not just a shopping cart. You can put the sales page on your own site, you can make it seem that they dont leave your site etc. The pro monthly fee to use everything is 79.00 which includes up to 29000 database size. Right now there are few options but the few there seem quite good.

The other product that impressed me is the viral ebook affiliate url changing software. Basically used in your affiliate back end and it allows the affiliate to download the viral ebooks with their own affiliate link in them.

If you are a coder, or idea person, mainstream is like heaven!

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Susanna

freeklaus

[quote=_LB_] Also there is a level of professionalism in mainstream I find refreshing. QUOTE]

that is something We have also found. Mainstream lacks all the daydreamers and wanna be's that makes up a large portion of adult.

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Make Money or excuses - You choose

freeklaus

that is actually illegal in many areas, so You do have to be careful.

in the adult world except for the obvious, the buying and selling of products and services was normally overlooked no one cared if anyone got ripped of. but in mainstream there are rules and laws that are enforced. like buying and reselling without proper licenses and such......

the one thing about mainstream that we have found is that you do not need 2000 visitors to make a sale. We have a blog that gets 25 visitors a day and had 9 sales in 12 days. I think it is because it is easier to target and the freeloader crowd is missing in mainstream.

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Make Money or excuses - You choose

ScreaM

then remove that button from your sig.

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