trends

Time is Money

Ask any successful webmaster how he or she is doing on any particular day and you'll hear a wide variety of responses with one key element shared among all of them. No matter what language they speak, what country they originate from or what segment of the adult online business they are in, they'll tell you in some way or another that they are "really busy." That shouldn't come as a surprise because success and being busy are directly related to each other: Time is money.

Converting your time into money requires plenty of effort, but a new emerging class of webmaster productivity websites aims to give you an advantage by increasing the amount of work you get done and decreasing the amount of time you need to expend managing many repetitive aspects of your web business. This article is intended to profile some of these new productivity sites and to give you a glimpse at how they can speed up the pace of your earnings.

A typical webmaster's day might include finding new sponsor programs that will convert traffic efficiently, determining which affiliate programs are paying high-value "bonus payouts" during the upcoming weeks, figuring out who sent you a check that doesn't have the sponsor name anywhere on it, arranging link trades with quality websites and verifying that existing links are still up on corresponding sites from earlier link deals. Doing all of that manually used to be exhausting and would eat up a large portion of your day before you knew it, but it can now all be done in minutes instead of hours.

Let's say you are running a "MILF niche" affiliate site and some of your sponsors have become "stale" so you are looking for new ones to monetize your traffic. Visiting a site like IndustryIncentives.com will give you an accurate and up-to-date listing of programs that are offering "bonus payouts" along with the dates the offers are good for and the amounts being offered.

"If you are already looking to find a new sponsor in the MILF niche, why not test the waters with one that has recently announced a $75 or $100 PPS bonus that runs all day tomorrow?" asked Dee Wyld of IndustryIncentives. "For a long time programs would send out email to announce their own bonus offers but nobody was really sorting them all out in a way that allowed webmasters to choose the best ones for them to pursue. We make finding bonuses that match your traffic best as easy as a few simple clicks."

Perhaps a few programs you have never heard of before are running bonus payouts on MILF traffic or you dislike the programs that happen to be running them this week. It becomes an excellent time to visit WebmasterScore.com to look at detailed affiliate program reviews showing objective criteria about each program including what niches they cover, what sites they offer and what promotional materials they have available. Recently the reviews also began showing which sites have cross-sales and what kind of cross-sale each site uses as well.

WebmasterScore also maintains the only review site submitter in the adult industry, a tool that has been used by hundreds of affiliate programs to send more than 800 paysites out for review by more than 40 adult review sites. All free thanks to sponsors, it has already saved literally thousands of hours for webmasters on both sides of the equation by simplifying a task that many people used to do manually.

Suppose you select a brand new MILF specific program with a good review like AnilosCash.com and now you are trying to rank your affiliate site higher for some MILF terms you haven't ranked for before like "Anilos." You might want to register an account at Thunder-Ball.net where you can interact directly with hundreds of other webmasters and arrange detailed link trades using specific anchor text and a very simple interface to create networks of link trades that will push your site higher in search engine rankings for keywords you already rank for, and for new keywords as well.

"The way Thunder-Ball.net works, each webmaster can add as many of their sites as they want and can create trades with many other webmasters who have relevant sites in search-engine-friendly A-B-C linking agreements," said Mr. Bond, owner of Thunder-Ball. "Finding quality webmasters to make trades with and then verifying that all of the trades would remain active used to be a big time sink for webmasters; now it can be done in minutes and you can spend your time building relationships with the people you meet via trading … which in the long run will do a lot more for your bottom line."

Now imagine you glance over and see a check sitting on your desk from last week that was made out to your company from a name you do not recognize and has no clear identifier showing what sponsor sent it to you. Instead of posting on message boards asking if anyone has ever heard of the check payer name before, visit WhoPaidMe.com and use a simple search box to access their extensive database of paysite pay names in just a few seconds.

"The primary focus of WhoPaidMe.com is to help adult webmasters identify checks and ePassporte payments which often come from obscure company names. However, we also include Alexa traffic data for over 25,000 sites and maintain a list of new site launches as well," said Michael Phillips, owner of WhoPaidMe. "Our goal is to give you information you could have gotten on your own, much faster than you would have gotten it."

As the adult online industry continues to mature, there is a rising degree of specialization on the B2B end of the business, as well as the consumer end of the business. An increasing number of sites are carving out niches within the marketplace and providing services that actually save webmasters a significant amount of time because they aggregate tasks that each webmaster used to accomplish individually in the past.

These new webmaster productivity sites are an extension of the same reasoning that brought affiliate stat tracking applications like Unified Stats into existence, and best of all, the sites mentioned in this article are all 100 percent free for webmasters thanks to sponsors and other revenue monetization arrangements that don't cost the webmaster using the sites a single penny.

Tasks like buying and selling domain names, which have long been handled by companies decidedly outside the adult arena, are also being brought over to new specialized sites within the industry. Recent discussions of cross-sells and content piracy on industry message boards have highlighted a growing sense among productive webmasters that sending traffic to companies that take an active role in the overall health of the industry is a wise decision when all other things are equal.

So, with a stable sponsorship base of programs willing to keep these kinds of sites free for users and an increased focus on "getting things done" as opposed to "who drank what last night," this new breed of webmaster B2B productivity websites may well lead to a much higher conversion rate on the most precious webmaster resource of all: time.

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