Free Site School

Free sites - the bedrock of any adult business. This week, I want to look at making a free site in DEPTH, starting with the index page, and following through all the main pages. We're going to look at things like where to put the ads, WHAT to say in the ads, and everything else that you need to know to get one of these essential little sites up and running.

The INDEX page... PART 1

The index page is the start page of your free site, where all of the traffic will come in. This is a very important page of the free site. One thing that you'll see I do with my free site first page is to add a healthy dose of advertising on it. The first page also has to contain a simple warning to make it look like I'm doing my level best to keep out the children. I also need to put the content's title 18 text on here to help keep me legal. Other than that, I can do pretty much ANYTHING I like here.

Much of this tutorial will be devoted to the INDEX page...

Starting ANY webpage and be pretty daunting. Planning things out on paper can really help get you started.

But WAIT! I'm missing out a critical step here: WHAT is this site going to be about? What will the title be? What keyphrases will I be targeting?

I've decided to make a lesbian site so next I have to decide on the main keyphrase for this site, and some others too. It's time to go to Overture and mine a main keyphrase...

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

I type in "lesbian" and start looking down the long list of useful keyphrases. One that I really like, that's not TOO competitively sought after is:

"lesbian love"

I'll use this as the main site title, and as the primary keyphrase on the index page. Now I'm ready to plan out the site, and start building. The site will live in a sub-folder on one of my other domains:

http://www.classy-boobs.com/lesbian-love/

One of the first steps is getting the COLORs right. Play around with the color scheme and see if you can come up with something interesting. You can always make a quick page to test out the color scheme like this: http://www.classy-boobs.com/lesbian-love/colors.html

Here's something that can really help you get going AND make more money. Make the colors on your site match that of the paysite's tour you're promoting. In my case, this site will promote http://www.lesbianextreme.com/prog.html

So I'm happy with the way it's going, and I've made a plan for the page. Planning out a page strategically is very important. You're going to be getting people into this site - just like a theme park, and if you DON'T think about how they'll flow around the pages, and from page to page, you'll lose money. If I do a good job, most of my surfers won't ever see the content pages of this site.

I've got the basic design for the start of my index page now:

http://www.classy-boobs.com/lesbian-love/index-part-1.html

All I've done here is go back and forth from the tour, and pick out the important parts that I found there. I've also worked in some basic search engines text - as a place-holder more than anything else. I'll probably come back and alter this later on.

Remember that graphic ads look really good - but they take AGES to load on a slow connection (which most people have). Always try to do as much as you can with TEXT - and nice CSS effects - and make your ads load as fast as possible. SPEED is so important in making the sale!

I've used three effects on this page which will enhance it's appearance in my target browser - Internet Explorer. While the site will still look good in Netscape - most people are on Internet Explorer, so it's worth making it look even better for those people. The effects I've used are:

- Table rollover
- Glow effect
- Hover over links effect

Please, view the source and take anything you like. I don't have the copyright on these effects, and they're something that anyone out there can use to enhance their pages.

Try to make each new free site, or at least each new 'template', if that's how you work, a bit different from the last one. Keep your brain alive by challenging yourself to reinvent the free site on each major re-model. It's always tempting to go for the 'center everything' feel - but that won't always get the best results. Make yourself come up with new layouts and effects - it's tough as hell but will make more money.

OK, that's where we'll leave the free site for now. Tomorrow we'll look at fleshing this page out, adding more ads, and at the important search engine optimization, as well as the legal requirements and so forth.

Happy building!!!

TOM ^"^

ICQ 12616560
Email tom@tomsnewbiebooster.com