Every business, big or small, needs a market. A visitor comes back only if he knows that he's going to get what he expects.

BUSINESS MODELS

The easiest way to explain this is to consider news websites. What do they offer? How do they make money? What do they have to do?

• They offer news. Every single day. It's new, offers a continuity from the previous day's news. I mean - Yesterday you read that Internet Expo was about to take place, today you read that it's in progress and tomorrow you'll read about how it went off.
• They make money by offering advertisements for services related to what the surfer is reading. The sponsors for these ads are mainly concerned with branding for their products, rather than actual sales from the ads.
• They have to generate a lot of traffic ( Don't we all ), they need access to industry insiders to be able to deliver the 'dirt'. This last one is the crux of this whole news game. The reader knows that this mag will deliver the dirt, time and again. So he kees coming back to read the regular stuff, which he can get on every other mag, because he knows that this is where he'll get the real stuff, when it's breaking.

PAYSITE MODELS

I reckon I've seen a lot of sponsors, enough for me to able to say that I know what works and what does not. Every sponsor has a way of going about his business, and it rarely changes. That's because it works for them. If it didn't they'd be out of business. The two most popular models that I see again and again are:

• New Sites : What these guys do is hook up a niche which works for them, and churn out sites in this niche every month. A couple of new sites every month, with a combined pass for access to all sites, and you have a business model whose value keeps appreciating, because the members get access to more and more sites as time goes by. Example: BadGirlBucks.com
• Branding One site : This one is very difficult to get off the ground ( more of a hit and trial kind of thing ), but once it takes off, the site has it's own momentum, and all the promoter has to do is keep the site updated with fresh content. Example: Fetish-Video-Cash.com, who promote Lady Sonia.

TGP MODELS

To earn money from a TGP is not a big issue. To make a living from one, that's a different matter altogether. The only successful model, far as I know, is one where you charge adverstisers for gallery spots, banners and hard links. So, if you're planning to make a living off a TGP, what you need is a torrent of traffic, to be able to convince advertisers to pay you, in advance. How you generate that traffic, is another article.

FREE PORN SITES

Now we're more on home ground. I kind of think of this as my niche. This is more of an amalgam of news and a TGP, insofar as it concerns the adult industry. What the surfer needs to find, or to be able to find your site, is new content, new links, new pages, new whatever. That's what keeps them coming. What makes you money, however, is the Paysite model - Sending the surfer, who comes in looking for your new content, to established sponsors - with either a branded site or a whole bunch of sites. Sort of doorways of new sponsors to bring in the surfers, and then waylay them and smoothly direct them to whichever sponsor works for you. Get this attract and transfer operation correct and you're in business.

Please bear in mind that I'm not talking about search engine doorway pages or redirect scripts. What I'm saying is, you let the surfers know about your site by means of new content, reason being that keywords for new sites are far easier to get rankings in the SE's. So the surfer comes into your site, noses around, and you let him know, by means of neon lights or blinking banners or anything you can think of, where you want him to go.

Obviously, it's not as simple as it is to write about it. I had a lot of 'Eureka' moments, all of them well after I decided and worked on what I wanted to do. Makes for very painful deletion and throwing away of some stuff on which you have put in a lot of effort. If you don't want to go through this, find out and decide what is your strength, and focus on that to build your business and a regular customer base. And it'll be a lot easier if you decide what is your MO before you start your busniess.