Thanks for all the good info! I am going to have to check out that hosting offer for a bunch of my adult blog type sites. If you want good ranking, just use a SEOd wordpress site to promote your affiliates. It will get you up in no time and you can keep it looking nice and clean. 90% of all my sales to my paysites come from google and yahoo.
I try to dominate my niche getting multiple results within the top 10 spots, but even then the revenue is nowhere as good as it used to. But if you find a good niche, you can make lots of good $$$.
I think I need to really improve my lame members areas as well as revamping my tours... Most of my templates follow this design:
1 Lactating Babe has the most amazing lactating tit pix of BBW Lactating Mom and lactation sex videos!
I have about 5 templates around the same idea to make it easy to add any type of content, but oh well. I can't afford to be #1, but if I have 100 sites getting 1 sale a day I am happy. The rebills keep me very happy.
If you are signing up for an affiliate program, try to get their average member retention #'s then base your opinion on that. I would imagine you would make way more money with rebills if they are an honest program. Even with a crappy members area, like mine, I usually retain members 2-3 months.
I am going to try some hardlink trades just for PR, not for traffic. I don't need any crappy traffic that is poor converting, even though I have made some money filtering crappy traffic through to niche toplists, that end up getting me decent sales of 1:500 or so. Same with TGP and free sites. I filter that traffic through a page with toplist links on places I know I will get sign ups.
I haven't tried much affiliate marketing, but the programs I get from are AEBN for live strippers, moviedollars.com for PPV, friendfinder for dating and cams.com. If anyone is getting steady checks for feed type sites to add to a paysite or maybe when promoting with other affiliate programs, please post them here.
I will be working on my auto updating database over the weekend, hope to add 25 more sites across 5 templates and 5 niches that are all SE friendly. Some day I will get a good affiliate program running text links... 2257 records is too much of a pain to really do it legally.
Anyone else in the adult area paying 'licensing fees' to Acacia?