StiffyMcSpliff

Ok, so I keep hearing "I'm not making shit in mainstream" and here I am doing over 75% of my business for the last 6 months in mainstream ventures.

A lot of things you will learn in adult will transfer over in to mainstream, but some things you will need to learn and adapt.

Ok, so lets start with what you need to get a mainstream project started:

#1 - A product

Choosing your product is the #1 key to making a go in mainstream. Over the last 2 years, I've been slowly expanding my product line, but unlike in Adult, I do a lot of research on the markets before I start really putting effort into selling a product. In AWM I could look at a few sites, get the feel for the product and what would work, and start making galleries that afternoon.

With mainstream, I take much more time with my products. If I'm going to advertise a new Graphics Card on a tech site, I need to know if that card is what the gamers are buying. The old saying "Sell what you know" comes in really handy hear. Just realize, their are certain things that people still haven't warmed up to online. Big ticket items are a hard sell, but most people will buy a few gadgets and widgets here and there. Thus a good place to start off is something that is cheap and you know you'd buy without much effort to get your sale.

An example of this would be GenPets... though it turned out to be a farce, I had my credit card out before I clicked on the second page. I wanted one... bad, and its customers like me who make you the money online.


Currently, my personal projects include:

- Smoking supplies
- Books, DVD's and CD's
- Google Adsense

As well, I'm adding in 3 new sponsors in various markets to start building more of a base (I'm working on a group project, more on that later).

So for this tut, I'm going to use my Smoking Supplies for an example. I use Grasscity , and I recommend them to anyone looking to break into that segment of the market.

#2 - A Website

Grasscity has some amazing tools for helping display content on your site. They have an XML feed for products/pricing that I've intergrated into a shopping site. So that covers my advertising, but since I'm not selling boobies, I really don't have a hook that makes me different than the other 300 sites out there selling bongs.

As such, I put up a second domain to get some traffic too. This site has minimal advertising, but with so little advertising on the site, it allows me to focus the user in on the ad, and I get an amazing click through rate.

#3 - Traffic

I hear most new mainstream webmasters gripe about traffic the most. Yes, traffic is hard to get... traffic that is going to buy is even harder.

I guess when you switch from adult to mainstream, you start feeling overwhelemed because the sites in adult would pull in 6,000 unique per day, but the mainstream site isn't doing much more than 10 or 15 per day.

Well, I finally found a method, but its still no quick fix like gallery/freesite traffic.

First, get link trades going. Top Lists on the most part don't work. Only the most novice web users will click on links from mainstream top lists. Instead look at the community your selling in.

With Bongs, there are 3 or 4 main directory sites that send out most of the traffic, so I setup link trades with them (boosting my google rating as well as traffic).

Next, I needed some SEO done, so I went through my 2 main sites and optimized the shit out of them with all white hat SEO tricks. I see no point of doing black hat tricks when the risks out weigh the gains.

Finally, I started putting out more "catcher" sites to pull visitors in. Mainly blogs and portals. In my upcoming project tutorial, I will give away a secret of how to get 1000's of pages online in 6 months with just a click of a button.

The first month (I believe it was October last year when I tried this method for the first time) I made 2 or 3 sales. My second month saw 8 sales, and it has grown steadily since then.

Each day I'm throwing out 100 - 200 pages of content all specialized for the spiders as well as the readers.

The biggest thing in mainstream to remember is the customer expects more from you. While you can pull "Scams" a bit, your long term gain is much more proffitable from respecting your customers just like you'd respect there business in a "real world" setting.

One last thing.... a mistake I see a lot of is people jumping into mainstream and selling 15 different sponsors with 3000 different products. This will never work. Unless your an expert in 15 different areas of products, you will just get overwhelemed. Try to keep your sponsor list down to 3 or 4 and swap them between sites and see who sells where. Its like a puzzle... you need to find that right combo before the $$ will start coming in.

Anyhow, keep looking here for the project announcment. Should only be another few weeks and it will be online.

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PaperJam :: CMS - E-Commerce - Design Solutions

Atlas

Thats a really nice tutorial, thanks Stiffy. Its the first one Ive ever read for mainstream that gave some specifics.

I just had some questions.

1. What are white hat seo tricks and what are black hat seo tricks? I dont know what that means. Is that a Linux thing? Like redhat linux?

2. When you say that each day youre throwing out 100 - 200 pages of content all specialized for the spiders as well as the readers, do you mean youre making some pages ona different domain and letting it float out there?
Like a full page ad?

3. When you do your blogs and portals is that a 1 time thing, or do you go back and update them every day or every week?

For the first time after reading this I feel like I can understand more what to actually do.

StiffyMcSpliff

White hat is using tricks that you aren't "Cheating" by doing. IE: Keywords, Meta tags, domain and directory naming

Well that really depends on the site I'm working on... for instance my news portal throughs around 300 stories per day into the content system. Each of those is SEO by using some tricks so google see's http://www.whatever.com/widgets/I_fu...e_at_this.html

instead of

http://www.whatever.com/index.php?op...alue&duh=value

It really helps with your placement in both mainstream and adult.

Depends again on the portal, but with some of my blogs I use RSS feeds through WordPress to import content automatically (I use this trick with some portals as well).

If the blog isn't auto updated, I usually update about once a week. I have enough sites on the go that 3 days of my 6 day week are occupied updating sites, the other 3 days are dedicated to big projects for traffic (IE: for one site I'm producing a free documentary to help with the traffic flow).

Glad I could help. If anyone has any other questions post away

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PaperJam :: CMS - E-Commerce - Design Solutions

PornFactory

This is very nice tutorial and I'm looking forward to see your project ...

Also, I think that it would be very interesting to us if you could share some tools that you use ... for example, CMS that works good with seo, tips on how to find good link trades, directories and similar to those ...

Anyway, you made a great point in this thread and I'm sure it will help a lot of us to start making some money in mainstream ...

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StiffyMcSpliff

Well as a heads up for the project, I'll give you the basics to get you familar with the software.


For CMS's I'm using mainly Joomla. I find its the has the best selection of plugins and functionality with descent security. With the exception of my bong store, all the sites are based on Joomla with an assortment of plugins. I'd recommend the following ones to get up and started:

- Feedgator which is an RSS reader that puts the content into your database under various sections/categories based on your specifications.

- OpenSEF which helps you majorily with SEO and organization

- Community Builder which is a great start point for sites that will have members (paid or free)

Everything from there on out will be covered in part 1 of the project. You'll need the following for those of you that will participating:

- 3 domains on a server with PHP/MySQL
- Joomla installed and running
- A targeted market (anything you want as long as it doesn't contain anything illegal or adult) and a few sponsors with RSS feeds, though that isn't a "must".

Everything is free too except the hosting and the domain names.

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PaperJam :: CMS - E-Commerce - Design Solutions

PornFactory

Thanks for info about tools ...

For me, domains and hosting are not the problem ... but probably I will need some help with Joomla because I never worked with it ....

Also, you could give us some hints where to find good sponsors? Especially sponsors with RSS feeds...

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thomasbyers

You gave me some great ideals there and I really do thank you. Great informative tuturial very well done.

tomy

I look forward for your project StiffyMcSpliff

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erots

True. I also must say that Joomla rocks. OpenSEF can be kind a buggy but all the problems I have found have been fixed on the same day by someone already. I actually wanted to write tutorial about Joomla but I don't know if it could actually help somebody.

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droopy

Great tutorial, thanks Stiffy!

tadiz

thanks for the tutorial

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fresh

great tutorial, it deserves go up

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