Looking for a Head Count

[Useless]

Out of curiosity, who the heck still submits free sites? Not necessarily looking for daily submitters, but people who still put in the effort to submit a few free sites per month.

What is the primary goal of your free sites? Good old fashioned paysite sales, push traffic to your other properties, promote your own site(s)?

Also, if you used to be a regular free site submitter but have stopped, can you tell us why? Traffic declined, conversions went to hell, too much of a pain in the ass, reviewers are bastards, link list model is dead, found something better to do, etc.?

While we're at it, if you have any ideas on how you think the remaining link lists could modify themselves to improve the model, inquiring minds would love to know. What would get people to build and submit free sites again?

[Cleo]

I try to do a TGP gallery each day and then I take two of these galleries and turn them into a free site so I usually do two to three free sites a week.

Main reason I do them is for sales to paysites but also to feed traffic into my hubs and LL.

Don't know how to motivate more people to do free sites. Most people, I think, do TGPing regularly so they have a bunch of galleries that could be turned into free sites so they are just leaving money on the table. But hey, money is so terrific, why spend your extra time doing something that can bring in more money using just the crap sitting on your server.

The one thing that use to see from my submitters, the ones not submitting anymore, was people submitting the same niche with the same sponsors day after day. If it ain't selling then why keep on promoting the same thing day after day? It isn't the medium, it's what you are using the medium to promote.

[babymaker]

I am going to start again I stopped because LL's seem to be dead, but also I started submitting tube edits when pornotube hit and then others and I made a ton of sales and real money for once, 15+ sales a day most of the time as opposed to freesites making one or 2 here and there.

[LD]

I have never been a once a day freesite-er, but I was doing 2 or 3 a week a while back.

My primary goal was to make a sale, but freesites are a great traffic tool, too. I can send hits to my blog, my tube, link list I have...

I haven't stopped, but have slowed considerably. Simple time invested verses payout. Making less than a shit shoveler in a third world country sucks. Plus I have been taking some college computer course in my old age, which severely limits the time I can build and submit.

I've tried different sponsors, different niches, etc. It might be the quantity...there's just not enough time to do 1 or more a day plus my regular job. I had hoped it would be a side income that would build to a full time thing, but I don't see that happening now. I'm not so sure if focusing on quantity is a good thing, really...

I don't know what link list owners could do. The big ones send tons of traffic, and it's somewhat targeted. I don't know where you could get that much traffic anywhere else without outright buying it. I think there's probably too much saturation. Lots of small list (like mine) that need to catch more SEO traffic to send to submitters. Maybe that will work itself out as people give up and quit. Who knows?

[Mike-mijen]

I build Freeesites twice a week. I promote my own pay sites that I have with Amateur Reality. That seems my best conversion. And I have vested interest in it to see it work. I also do Pic post to a few sites to drive traffic. I am working on SEO and reducing my bounce rate on my sites now also. I have not had much success with sponsors. They seem to promise a lot but not much return for the money in my book. I hope the LL owners stay and work on building more traffic to there LL's. Its a win/win I feel for both the Freesite builder and the LL owner on his links.
Just may 2 cent worth

[Simon]

I do use free sites because they work for me. But I find it takes more than a little work to get a decent return from them. I submit one version of the free site to Link Lists. I use another version for my internal network. I do submit galleries, but not as they are since I use galleries that are designed to work together. I usually combine the two galleries into one, which I then submit to a handful of TGP sites. When I make blog posts featuring that content I either link to the free site's main page or give the readers links to both galleries in the free site.

I use them for direct sales of paysite memberships, pay per view sales, and to drive traffic back to my main sites via one of the links on somewhere between 2 and 4 of the free site pages. I try to use good text, titles, etc and I do get most of the sites and the galleries indexed by Google and other SEs.

The biggest waste of time (for me) is submitting to more than a few Link Lists. I'm down to just 24 LLs from well over 100 that I used to submit to. And I could drop more than half of those without losing more than 2% of the total incoming traffic I get from LLs.

The thing is, I'd really like to submit to 100+ Link List again, but there's no way to justify the time spent submitting for the return gotten. Too many different scripts with different login pages, submission forms, required fields, captchas that expire if you don't submit fast enough (and are too hard to read until you reload the page a few times to get an easier to read one), different amounts of text that can be used for the Title and Description (some only allowing 3 word titles or 60 character descriptions), etc.

I have a very simple suggestion for the hundreds of Link Lists which don't have anywhere near the traffic of the top 6-8 Link Lists. Put your heads together and work out some kind of central submission page where a free site builder can submit to *ALL* of the smaller LLs from one page with one click.

Get cd34/Sparky to help devise the backend needed to dump the submissions into your databases, and have them auto-approved for trusted submitters. Maybe even get MrMaryLou to review the sites put into the central submissions page so you know the free site is a good one since the best reviewer in the biz already reviewed it.

Collect a few dollars from each LL owner to pay Sparky something, and pay MML for reviewing. You'll wind up with lots of new submissions to keep your listings fresh. Then spend all the saved reviewing time working *hard* on building traffic.

Right now it's a losing proposition to spend time making more versions of each site to submit to all the decent but low-traffic LLs out there. But free site builders would build a lot more free sites a lot more often if they knew that once they finished building they could submit to 100 Link Lists with 5-10 minutes of work.

Or don't do anything to make it easier for free site builders to submit and watch the submissions dry up all together on the smaller LLs before long.

Just my opinion of course, so feel free to ignore this idea ... if you have a better one.

[Greenguy]

I submit free sites each & every day (as well as a gallery) I see sales from them, but not like back in the day

But I will continue to build & submit because I still think that there is a good surfer base with link lists

[Fonz]

I haven't submitted a freesite in 7 months, but I'm building a bunch of them right now so I can submit them over the next 2-3 months or so. I started with galleries 3 years ago and still submitting 2 a day. That takes a lot less time than freesites, which is a good thing since I don't have that much time for adult anymore the last 2.5 years, but the conversions are a bit worse.

Anyway, I'm not turning my back on freesites.

[Cleo]

I built and submitted one today.

[Bill]

I'm a daily freesite builder/submitter, altho i'm taking a few weeks off from it right now cuz sales are so bad and cuz I'm doing other shit that is making more money.

I figure I need to review my freesite building system.

[MadMax]

I'll be submitting again shortly, but I need to get back up to speed on the current debacle status of 2257 before I get into anything but stories/toons.

Simon's idea about a central submit location is intriguing, but I can see an enormous number of technical issues involved with that concept. For good submits with a recip, I'd be open to talking about adding them to the database myself if there was a place for freesite builders to post them.

[MadMax]

Originally Posted by Cleo

I built and submitted one today.

Not to me you didn't

[Cleo]

Originally Posted by MadMax

Not to me you didn't

You have a PM

[JustRobert]

I still build/submit freesites (almost daily) for paysite sales, promoting my own avs sites and traffic/links back to my network.

[plateman]

I know I said it before but I am ready to start building FS and galls

[Sven800]

I have run out of time between my real job and some of the other things I have been doing. I really need to start sitting down and building again, since I am still seeing sales from old sites. My main problem is prioritizing - I still have a bunch of domains that I have yet to do something with, so that needs to be attended to too.

[GirlsOutWest]

I try and build/submit a freesite once or twice a week Mainly to generate sales to paysites, but also to build traffic to my own hubs etc.

[Mike-mijen]

Originally Posted by Simon

.

I have a very simple suggestion for the hundreds of Link Lists which don't have anywhere near the traffic of the top 6-8 Link Lists. Put your heads together and work out some kind of central submission page where a free site builder can submit to *ALL* of the smaller LLs from one page with one click.

Get cd34/Sparky to help devise the backend needed to dump the submissions into your databases, and have them auto-approved for trusted submitters. Maybe even get MrMaryLou to review the sites put into the central submissions page so you know the free site is a good one since the best reviewer in the biz already reviewed it.

Collect a few dollars from each LL owner to pay Sparky something, and pay MML for reviewing. You'll wind up with lots of new submissions to keep your listings fresh. Then spend all the saved reviewing time working *hard* on building traffic.

Right now it's a losing proposition to spend time making more versions of each site to submit to all the decent but low-traffic LLs out there. But free site builders would build a lot more free sites a lot more often if they knew that once they finished building they could submit to 100 Link Lists with 5-10 minutes of work.

Or don't do anything to make it easier for free site builders to submit and watch the submissions dry up all together on the smaller LLs before long.

Just my opinion of course, so feel free to ignore this idea ... if you have a better one.

I like your Idea. I would be willing to pay a few dollars for such a program. As long as they LL's were the good ones that do send traffic. I do it in a heart beat.

[Cleo]

This would never work as each link list is running different scripts and has different categories and whatnot.

But I have no problem with autosubmitters as long as I'm not autosubmitted crap.

[Simon]

This would never work as each link list is running different scripts and has different categories and whatnot. But I have no problem with autosubmitters as long as I'm not autosubmitted crap.

Regarding autosubmitters, I think it's now much too late to convince enough (or any) good free site builders to go spend $180 per year to buy a script they've been told repeatedly not to use for years in order to submit to more Link Lists which still don't have enough traffic to make it worth the time, effort and now money. (You know I don't mean your LL, since I do submit there.)

I don't of course buy into the "this would never work" argument since to me it's evident that it could work by having this same kind of autosubmitter as its backend. Builders would see the front end where they entered whatever was needed for all the different LLs to which they wanted to submit their site. Two or three versions of the title, half-a-dozen versions of the description (different lengths mostly), selection of categories, etc. But then with one click they submit that to the main review database from which MML could approve all good submissions before the backend autosubmitter sent it to all the participating LLs as a pre-approved/trusted submission. Or without an MML in the loop, the submissions could still be sent as trusted submissions to all LLs with the same one-click for a builder.

I've said this before... if everyone lets yesterday's scripts (and their limitations) dictate how they operate today, we have a good chance of not being here tomorrow.

On the other hand, there is a part of me which hopes no one will listen to my suggestions, and that the pool of good free site builders will keep shrinking, so that the few of us willing to do what we do now will have all the remaining traffic to ourselves.

[Mr Spock]

I build sporadically , but I need to build more consistently. I also submit galleries - I track my sponsor hits using campaigns ie) galleries and freesites. I noticed that freesites were sending more hits to sponsors than galleries and then you should also factor in that some links on the freesites go to my hubs and some to dating sponsors. So I think its still worth it based on that.

[LeRoy]

Not to take anything from MML.

Freesites coming from trusted submitters. Why the review?

Some lists are on auto. Just my .02

[Cleo]

Originally Posted by LeRoy

Freesites coming from trusted submitters. Why the review?

People make mistakes. Site URLs end up in descriptions, media doesn't get uploaded to a server, coding errors, URLs get messed up, etc.

[LeRoy]

Originally Posted by Cleo

People make mistakes. Site URLs end up in descriptions, media doesn't get uploaded to a server, coding errors, URLs get messed up, etc.

I see your point. Although a bit blown out of proportion but I do see it

[Greenguy]

Originally Posted by LeRoy

I see your point. Although a bit blown out of proportion but I do see it

Blown out of proportion? You've never reviewed sites for 6 hours a day, have you.