Making money with a website?

[No Thanks]

Edit: Nevermind. My website was a terrible idea.

[dj_patm]

You need to spend money to make money. Buy server space, higher someone to make you a REAL website, get some user generated content and hope for the best.

There's no secret to making money off the internet, the more people come to your site, the more your adspace will make you.

Invest in Google placement, use keywords for tags, post ads of your own (on porn sites?).

There's no easy button but the internet can make you a living if you do it right. Any site you visit regularly is probably making its owners enough to live off... comfortably.

[KTrain]

Here's a video that anyone trying to make money online should look at:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/981-t...g-money-online

My advice is simple to say and not so simple to execute:
Make a site your users will want to come back to constantly. Allow them to generate content in the easiest way possible. Allow them to find content as easy as possible. Keep it simple to start but leave room to add features as you grow.

Also, if you're ashamed of what you're doing you won't be successful at it.

[No Thanks]

Thanks for the advice. Trying to come up with content that will keep people coming back is our biggest problem. We get a lot of hits from people looking for info on a specific club, but someone who wants to read a review of a club in Las Vegas probably won't care that we put up a new review of a club in Montreal. Plus we'd go broke if we were trying to review a few clubs each week. I think your idea about user generated content is probably the best solution to that problem, so that people can come to the site to post reviews as well as read them.

Is adsense the best way to advertise for now? They don't seem to be properly targetting their ads for our blog so far, unless our readers are really into ballet.

Originally Posted by KTrain

Also, if you're ashamed of what you're doing you won't be successful at it.

Luckily my friends are shameless .

[dj_patm]

Also, know the law.

Libel can be a pain in the bum

[CaptainCrunch]

Stripper of the month photoshoots and video clips.

Sell porn

[dj_patm]

Originally Posted by No Thanks

I think your idea about user generated content is probably the best solution to that problem, so that people can come to the site to post reviews as well as read them.

Yeah user generated content for a site like that seems like a no brainier. It would be like a much funner version of "Rate My Prof" lol.

[CaptainCrunch]

Wouldn't strip clubs pay to advertise on said site?

[No Thanks]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

Stripper of the month photoshoots and video clips.

That's in the works. It might be tough to talk dancers into leaving the club with us for photoshoots unless we become well-known, but for now we're having them send pictures if they're interested in being our featured dancer of the week/month. Maybe that's payment enough for the time we put into the site.

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

Wouldn't strip clubs pay to advertise on said site?

Probably, but that's the part that I don't know about. Anything beyond google adsense is beyond my knowledge. Are there other ad services that can give targetted advertisements, or would I contact potential advertisers directly?

And sorry for the ambiguous "thanks"/"no thanks" to everyone. I usually just thank useless posts from this account, but in this thread I actually mean it as "thanks."

[Sliver]

Is there a way to post the site without getting yourself into trouble? Like could you say google these exact words and we're the top hit? I'm not sure if that's possible or not, but it'd be easier to help you if we could see your current site.

[No Thanks]

I just put a link to the blog in my profile if you're curious about the reviews, but there isn't a real site for anyone to see at this point. The blog is just a completely unorganized collection of the reviews that we've done, but we're getting the other content ready for the actual site to go up by the start of the summer.

I think we'll be alright as far as content is concerned, but I'm just clueless about advertising.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by No Thanks

That's in the works. It might be tough to talk dancers into leaving the club with us for photoshoots unless we become well-known, but for now we're having them send pictures if they're interested in being our featured dancer of the week/month. Maybe that's payment enough for the time we put into the site.

If you have good professional photo shoots of naked or barely clad strippers, or better yet video samplers you can probably charge a pretty hefty membership fee. Plus I would volunteer to be the spritzer boy for free.

I believe that there are management companies for these girls as well so you can contact them too.

Originally Posted by No Thanks

Probably, but that's the part that I don't know about. Anything beyond google adsense is beyond my knowledge. Are there other ad services that can give targetted advertisements, or would I contact potential advertisers directly?

Let the strip clubs create thier own ads or lineup cards for you in a format that you can upload to the page. I'm sure that they would be willing to work with you on this.

Personally I would use a little salesmanship and go directly to the clubs for advertising revenue. When I pop open the sun on Monday there are a few strip club ads so you know they're willing to spend money on. Plus who doesn't want to visit a strip club?

[KTrain]

I don't know much about the demographics of your readership but that seems like a lot of text and not a lot of pictures.

[BlackArcher101]

Are you sure there aren't sites like this already?

I'm pretty sure I've searched and view a few before .
Just making sure before you pull a "Knocked Up" business venture.

[dj_patm]

Originally Posted by BlackArcher101

Are you sure there aren't sites like this already?

I'm pretty sure I've searched and view a few before .
Just making sure before you pull a "Knocked Up" business venture.

Facebook meet Myspace meet Nexopia meet something else, i'm sure.

It's not about who's first, it's about who's more popular.

Fleshofthestars.com is taken and it's not nearly as fun as you think it would be.

[3 Justin 3]

What ever the site is going to be, get the domain name NOW, unless you already have it, because they go fast no matter the content. If you have it already, excellent.

And, can you get lap dances in Calgary? When me and my friend went to the French Maid it seemed so conservative.

I also agree with who ever said "too many words, not enough pictures".

Your essentially selling porn so pictures are a necessity.

Pictures of naked chicks = lots of $

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by 3 Justin 3

What ever the site is going to be, get the domain name NOW, unless you already have it, because they go fast no matter the content. If you have it already, excellent.

And, can you get lap dances in Calgary? When me and my friend went to the French Maid it seemed so conservative.

I also agree with who ever said "too many words, not enough pictures".

Your essentially selling porn so pictures are a necessity.

Pictures of naked chicks = lots of $

This is the most important thing that has been said in this thread. Sex sells on the internet, in fact for many many years it was the only thing that made any money online.

Given his hosting, on Blogspot, I don't think that is a possibility. Get a real host with a real domain name. Shouldn't cost you are more than 10-15 bucks a month for a good host given the bandwidth and storage space you will need to start out with.

[3 Justin 3]

I have a question: How cheap is it to buy a domain name? I just want to buy a domain name and sit on it for like 3-5 years. I want to start a company and I want to make sure I get the domain names now rather than losing them. I already lost one and price for it is $800.

[photon]

Domain names cost $10-$15 a year for most of them, more for some of the more rare ends (.cc or whatever).

http://domai.nr/ is a good place to use

Whatever you do though, if you have names that you really MUST have, search them, and if they are available, BUY THEM RIGHT AWAY. Lots of sites that allow you to search for a domain name also record those searches and register the name after someone searches for it. Scummy but clever too in a way.

As for making money with a website, yeah adsense is the easiest way and there is tons you can do to drive up the traffic and such to your site.. the more traffic, the more ads, the more income.

There are likely adult oriented advertisers though that would be more profitable for you likely, Black Label Ads comes up as one. Or just go to some really popular adultish sites and look at the source code to see who is serving up their ads.

Ads that you find yourself and work out an advertising deal for yourself will probably be more profitable, but if you are starting out and have no idea what rates are for what kinds of levels of traffic you probably won't have any idea what a good or bad deal is, and unless your website has a good level of traffic already most places won't waste their time talking to you (who cares about a few dozen impressions a day).

For hosting a small shared hosting package should be sufficient until you start to grow, though keep in mind most hosts don't allow adult oriented material. If you have any kind of reasonable success at all you'll be switching to a more dedicated hosting anyway (VPS, dedicated server). http://www.webhostingtalk.com is a good source of info for hosting.

And I agree with what's been said here, make your site very easy to use, make people want to come back to it. Think of specific tasks (use cases) you want your users to be able to do on your site and focus on making those tasks dead easy.

Find the best sites in other vertical markets that do the same thing you want to do and study and "imitate" them.

[No Thanks]

Thanks for all the advice, everyone. We've registered the domain at www.stripperpoll.com, but we don't have anything up there yet. We know there strip club review sites, but all of them are overrun with competing club owners/jealous dancers posing as customers and ripping other clubs apart. With us, you'll know that you can compare one club to the next because we're the same 4 guys reviewing every club. I'm a little drunk now and am about to do some business at club cleopatra in monteal. Wish me luck.