How long before you became profitable?

[longsack]

So I have to be honest, I have been reading the board for years and years, but never really posted often.... I have had more time recently so I have decided to try to become a little more active.

I started making galleries and posting to thumbzilla and others probably in the late 90's. That lasted until about 2008 and I got away from it for about 7 years. between the late 90's and 2008 I was lucky if I made 100.00 a month and was always happy when my little $ would come in the mail! Finally in 2015 I stated back up, here about 6 years later I have found what I believe to be a little profit, 42K to date this year (munus 8K for servers)...

But damn it feels good to just watch the $ come in and not really do much, just monitor it. I want to grow, but I honestly don't have the time or know how to really grow much more beyond were I'm at now.

I guess bottom line is over 20 years later finally the $ is coming in...

For each of you, when did you finally know or feel like..... ok, I can do this and see a profit?

[Mr Pheer]

It was late 1996 for me. I read an article in Wired magazine about people getting rich selling porn on the web. So I right clicked and saved a bunch of photos and put them in newsgroups linking back to pages with just banners to click. Made several hundred dollars a day from the beginning, it was so easy that it felt wrong and I was scared to cash the checks at first.

About a year later, I worked with Daniel Sundin to automate it. Modems dialing out constantly at my house, girls always asking whats that noise

[fuzebox]

From 2003-2007 I always felt left behind, everyone seemed to be making a ton of sales and I had no idea where to start. I was still building freesites, trying to submit galleries, and couldn't figure how to get good partner passes or how to grow an MGP. Paid spots and paid submit passes seemed unaffordable. I spent years trying everything and couldn't generate any significant revenue. I was supplementing affiliate commissions with programming gigs and it was pretty discouraging.

Starting my own paysites in 2008 finally changed everything for me, now I was making 2x per sale, getting more recurring revenue, and at the same time figured out how to scale what worked for me (clip dumps and blogs at the time).

For a more recent story, I started a new site last summer on paid traffic, and it took me about 9 months to become profitable.

[CurrentlySober]

I'm still waiting for that to happen...

[Publisher Bucks]

I started working online around 2006, selling online books and magazines through an affiliate program, shortly afterwards I began my foray into the adult industry, signing up to a few affiliate programs, ARS, Maxcash, Silvercash, being the primary ones.

After a few months of trial and error, sales slowly started to roll in ad, as they did, I started building more and more sites, replicating the ones that had shown success while leaving the ones that didn't have any sales to fester and slowly die off.

A few years went by and then I began to branch out into a variety of different niches, most notably (for me) Asian, black and BBW, all of which seemed to be experiencing a growth spurt in popularity in the industry at the same time the larger adult affiliate programs began promoting the 'Build Your Own Tour' business models and direct to join form linking, much like the AVS/AEN systems had been doing for years prior.

Around this same time, I also created a CCBill account and began rolling out my own private member areas, they were rudimentary yet, still sold.

A year or two later, I consolidated all of my web properties and sold them to a good friend, he still runs a couple of them.

After selling I broke back into non-adult, again selling books, magazines and a range of other textual based products and services, which almost immediately picked up where I left off sales wise before entering the adult industry.

Around 2018 I decided to start dabbling in adult again, this time primarily focusing on create traffic generation sites, TGPs, Link Directories and basic multi-page, niche specific websites developed just for search engine traffic, over the past few years the traffic on these sites has had its ups and downs but, they're slowly paying off and generating income without any hands-on work needing to be done.

Meanwhile, I saw a boost in non-adult sales over the past few years, in part because of people being quarantined at home with nothing to do but browse the internet and buy stuff online, to the point where I've hired 3 part-time staff to write exclusively for me over the past 12 months and manage my content aspect of the business so that I can focus on R&D in addition to in-house traffic acquisition again.

As with anything, the timing to see rewards over effort is directly correlated to the effort put in, along with the market conditions at the time, when I first started out in adult, it took me a good 3-6 months to generate my first slew of sales, this time around, due to market saturation and people not having as much disposable incomes as they once did, due to being out of work, housing prices and medical issues, its taken a little longer but, its improving on a weekly/monthly basis.

That being said, my primary focus for the past few years (and will continue to be for the immediate future) has been non-adult opportunities and being able to generate and leverage in-house traffic sources.

In my experience, non-adult is definitely an easier 'sell' than adult is these days although the profit margins are slightly lower, the bar is higher so there isn't as much competition, especially if you can create niche traffic sources that match with a specific set of product or products.

As of right now, I have a custom written eBook on Amazon that has been online a little over 1 month and has already generated $1500 in sales, it is very niche specific though and in the top 25 list on Amazon at present.

Find the niches that sell most typically, real estate, medical, health & wellness and diet & nutrition, personal finances, etc. From there, you can build your traffic and content and ultimately sales revenues.

[longsack]

Originally Posted by Publisher Bucks

I started working online around 2006, selling online books and magazines through an affiliate program, shortly afterwards I began my foray into the adult industry, signing up to a few affiliate programs, ARS, Maxcash, Silvercash, being the primary ones.

After a few months of trial and error, sales slowly started to roll in ad, as they did, I started building more and more sites, replicating the ones that had shown success while leaving the ones that didn't have any sales to fester and slowly die off.

A few years went by and then I began to branch out into a variety of different niches, most notably (for me) Asian, black and BBW, all of which seemed to be experiencing a growth spurt in popularity in the industry at the same time the larger adult affiliate programs began promoting the 'Build Your Own Tour' business models and direct to join form linking, much like the AVS/AEN systems had been doing for years prior.

Around this same time, I also created a CCBill account and began rolling out my own private member areas, they were rudimentary yet, still sold.

A year or two later, I consolidated all of my web properties and sold them to a good friend, he still runs a couple of them.

After selling I broke back into non-adult, again selling books, magazines and a range of other textual based products and services, which almost immediately picked up where I left off sales wise before entering the adult industry.

Around 2018 I decided to start dabbling in adult again, this time primarily focusing on create traffic generation sites, TGPs, Link Directories and basic multi-page, niche specific websites developed just for search engine traffic, over the past few years the traffic on these sites has had its ups and downs but, they're slowly paying off and generating income without any hands-on work needing to be done.

Meanwhile, I saw a boost in non-adult sales over the past few years, in part because of people being quarantined at home with nothing to do but browse the internet and buy stuff online, to the point where I've hired 3 part-time staff to write exclusively for me over the past 12 months and manage my content aspect of the business so that I can focus on R&D in addition to in-house traffic acquisition again.

As with anything, the timing to see rewards over effort is directly correlated to the effort put in, along with the market conditions at the time, when I first started out in adult, it took me a good 3-6 months to generate my first slew of sales, this time around, due to market saturation and people not having as much disposable incomes as they once did, due to being out of work, housing prices and medical issues, its taken a little longer but, its improving on a weekly/monthly basis.

That being said, my primary focus for the past few years (and will continue to be for the immediate future) has been non-adult opportunities and being able to generate and leverage in-house traffic sources.

In my experience, non-adult is definitely an easier 'sell' than adult is these days although the profit margins are slightly lower, the bar is higher so there isn't as much competition, especially if you can create niche traffic sources that match with a specific set of product or products.

As of right now, I have a custom written eBook on Amazon that has been online a little over 1 month and has already generated $1500 in sales, it is very niche specific though and in the top 25 list on Amazon at present.

Find the niches that sell most typically, real estate, medical, health & wellness and diet & nutrition, personal finances, etc. From there, you can build your traffic and content and ultimately sales revenues.

this is great stuff and great advice!

[Samsonite]

I started a blog in 2009. I was making money a month later. I was always profitable because my only expense was ever shared hosting. My younger brother went to college then the army and he now works for a big corporation. He makes about half of what I make today. I am still just blogging once or twice a month.

BTW I don't think margins are "slightly lower" on mainstream.

Amazon gives you 4% per sale. Chaturbate gives you 30% revshare for life. This is typical of mainstream and adult in general.

Congrats to anyone who doesn't have to work a 9-5 though.