For any business, planning and more important - following the plan, is the key to a smooth ride. In the case of adult webmasters, who are mostly one man shows, it is highly important to know where you're heading to. With a new trend coming up every day and a fast changing business landscape, you have to work towards a systematic operation, where growth and returns are accompanied by a coherent strategy.

SPONSORS vs. ADVERTISERS

This is one the primary things you need to decide before you begin. If you plan to continue directing surfers to sponsors, then you need to work on building a systematic directory style arrangement of all your links into niches, with a huge amount of pages dedicated to every niche you can find in the 'Open Directory Project'. If you plan to go for revenue through adverstisements, then what you need is a great index page, like the 'Drudge Report', more like a blog.

LINK EXCHANGE

With google demanding incoming links, exchanging links has been turned into an art form and a lucrative industry in itself. What gets missed in all this 'PR' hoopla is that there's only a finite amount of links you can put on a 'links page'. After some time, it becomes a maze of a page with zero relevancy for surfers and a huge amount for the SE's. The right way to do link exchanges from the beginning is to leave your pages intact of links and create a directory on a subdomain - eg: directory.yoursite.com. Install a directory management script. Categorise the directory for niches and everything that comes under 'adult' and start putting in links to partner sites in those categories. After some time those pages will begin to gain relevancy in the search engines and can also be well designed and pleasing to the surfers eye, besides serving as doorway pages to bring surfers into your site.

BRANDING

Free sites act as routers between paysites and surfers. It's logical to assume that your basic goal, in this case, should be to:

• Link to as many paysites as possible.
• Let as many surfers as possible know about your site.

The key to letting surfers know about your free site is branding. You can bring in traffic from anywhere - Trading, gallery submissions, search engines, linkbacks - but unless the surfer remembers and bookmarks your pages, you're swimming against the tide. There are a multitude of ways to achieve this. Forum posting is one good way, in the sense that it batters the surfers with your site name. Of course, it helps if you keep your site updated with the newest sponsors and you're able to do a bit of SEO to get your links in the top 10. If you are successful, it will ultimately free you of the bother of trading traffic or catering to the search engines.

A few points - Always use your site name when you are posting on forums or exchanging links. Your site name at the top of every page of your site, in a well designed banner or text. Your site name in the title meta tag of every single page ( Your site name shows up in the search engines ).