PROVE YOU'RE TRUSTWORTHY

As an independent cam girl you probably get questioned a lot, thanks to the ever growing fraud problem. Most guys who regularly buy shows from independent girls have been scammed in one way or another, and they've learned not to trust girls. Anyone can steal a couple of pictures of a pretty girl from the internet and make a profile with them, or set them as their IM display picture.

Very rarely scammers go as far as making a website for themselves, and if they do it's most likely on a free host such as FreeWebs, and customers know this. Would you trust someone who sells online services but doesn't have a website? You can prove you're for real in many ways, put up a picture of yourself holding a sign that has your contact details, or better yet, make a little video greeting for those who doubt you. I also recommend getting a proper host and a domain name from the start.

Add a chat room, a forum, or maybe a guest book for your customers to leave feedback - possibilities are endless, and it all helps.

  MAKE BILLING EASIER

Having trouble finding a reliable payment processor for your cam shows? The fact is, many payment companies only accept you if you have a website you can put their payment codes on. The best and the biggest companies CCBill and Epoch (Paycom) have low fees, adult friendly, great for billing for cam shows, but both require a website. Trusting your billing company is important for you, but it's equally important for guys who buy cam shows from independent cam girls.

Having a well-known billing company as your payment processor makes them feel more secure and more eager to buy shows - and that means more money for you. You can even have multiple payment links from multiple billing companies on your website for your customers to choose from. Some prefer paying by SMS, some like using their credit card, and when you have them all, you will never lose a customer again. At least not for not having their preferred payment method ;-)

  YOUR VIRTUAL BUSINESS CARD

How many times have you been asked: "You got more pics?" Profile sites are good for storing a few pictures, but when you really want to show them off without any restrictions, it's best to have your own little space on the web. Most community websites such as Myspace don't allow nudity or provocative images, and that's what the majority of your customers will want to see before they decide to buy. Also, you might be sick of answering the same questions time after time, day after day: "How old are you?", "Where are you from?", "How big are your boobs?" and so on. Create a page with an FAQ where you list all your vital statistics, your cam show prices and what's inculded in your show, stick a few of your best pictures on it, and the next time you get asked something for the 20th time, you can just give 'em a link to your page. Bear in mind that nearly all cam sites will kick you out if you give out your website address in your video chat, but that doesn't mean you can't do it the other way around - get more people to come and watch you on the site by putting a link on your own website!

A website is just like a business card; you naturally give the address to all your customers, but you can also spread it around the web to get yourself known and to get people interested. Some will bookmark it and return regularly to see if you've added anything new. The next bit will tell you a few ways to earn from these visitors.

  WEBSITE AS A MONEY MAKER

Having a website can bring you many new customers, but equally opens up new possibilities to earn more from your existing ones. Just think - if half of the guys that buy a show from you also bought a membership to your site, and continue to re-bill every month, while more guys sign up - how much would that be? All you need for a members area is a few videos and a couple of hundred picture sets to start with, and motivation to update every now and then, plus you can raise the membership fee as you get more content done! You can also offer free memberships for guys who buy cam shows as a bonus.

Even if you don't have enough content or will to build a whole members area for your website, you can set up a pay-per-view system that allows your visitors to pay for an individual video or get access to a picture gallery of yours. Even the most loyal returning cam show customer will want a change at some point, and when they do, you have other things to offer them: video clips, pictures, used panties... And what many girls do when it's that time of the month and they are not camming they sell their customers recorded cam shows for a lower price. You might have heard about affiliates but don't exactly know what it means, or think it has nothing to do with you. Throwing a few banners on your website might not make you rich, but it's a nice extra earner that you should consider when you get your website. The basic principle is this: You sign up for an affiliate program and promote their website(s) by sending them visitors through a banner or a link on your website. Whenever a visitor you sent signs up or buys something, you get paid a certain amount or a percentage of the sale. More about becoming an affiliate and more extra earners on the Independent Camming page, and in the Webmasters section.

  HAVE YOUR SAY

Are you a cam girl and would like to add something to this article or have further questions? Go to AWN Forums to share your experiences, knowledge and to get advice from experts.

  KNOW WHAT YOU WANT

One thing is for sure - you can't explain what you need to a designer if you don't know what you want yourself. Thus you should ask yourself a few questions:

• What will the purpose of the site be?
• How many pages do I need?
• Do I need a members area, chat room, forum, blog, shopping cart system etc.?
• Is it likely that I want to add more pages/update the site later?
• What's my budget?

When you know the answers to these questions, it's time to start thinking about the design. Layout, color scheme, possible theme, style, pictures you want to use on your website... And the list goes on. You've probably seen a website or a few that you like, and I believe it can help the designer a great deal to see some examples. Naturally no web designer in their right mind would build you a carbon copy of an existing website, but you can show them a few websites and tell them what it is exactly that you like about those particular websites.

  PRICES

So what can you expect to get when you hire a professional designer? A good designer will not only do the creative work for you, but also build your site and install any scripts that your site needs to function. My idea of a service worth paying for also includes listening to your wishes, teaching you basic things like changing text here and there if needed and delivering the product in a timely manner. When your website is done, it should be ready to take visitors, and it should function perfectly in all major browsers. Don't settle for anything less. Depending on your needs and the designer you choose, you could end up with a $2000 bill, or you can get it all done for $100. I'm not even going to mention getting a website done 'by a friend' for a couple of bucks, as those cases always seem to end up in tears and frustration. Like my mom used to say: "If you're going to buy a website, you might aswell do it right and hire a professional". Ok, she didn't say that, but you get the point. There are as many prices as there are designers, so you'll surely find one that fits your budget.

  MAINTAINING & UPDATING YOUR WEBSITE

Your site is ready and everything is perfect, but what happens when you need to change text, you've bored of your old pictures, or your contact details need updating? Some designers will teach you how to do it yourself if you have motivation to learn, and some will do it for you for a small fee. Either way, it's best to find out before you choose who you hire.

This is especially important when you are planning on having a members area. Are you prepared to pay for a designer every time you update with new content? It might be more than you think - just adding a picture set or a video might take an hour or two of the designers time if it's done manually. Some designers have an option available that might initially cost more but be cheaper in the long run, and that is CMS. They install it for you and customise the look of it to fit your site design, and when you need to add content, you go to your members area, log in and upload your content, and the CMS will take care of the rest. There are differences between CMS's, so you may want to see an example of a working members area to be sure it's what you want for your site.

  CHOOSING A DESIGNER

Never hire a designer without a portfolio/website is the number one rule to follow. Anyone can give you tons of URL's of great looking sites and say: "Yeah I did that one". Most serious designers are also happy to give you the contact details of a previous client (or other proof) so that you can make sure the designer has indeed designed all the websites they take credit for.

Browse the portfolio, visit the sites if possible, and look at them from a surfers point of view. Pay attention to things such as:

• How fast do the sites load?
  No-one likes to wait around, and attractive site design should make people want to stay, not leave in a hurry and frustrated. Fast loading speed also tells you the code is clean and the designer knows what their doing.
• Are there broken links?
  This might not always be the designer's fault, but if most of their sites have little glitches like that, it's not a good sign.
• Is navigating around the sites easy?
  The graphics might be fantastic, but if the navigation and the rest of the layout are too confusing, visitors won't stay long.
• Do the sites make you want to buy the product?
  If the sites don't create any feelings in you, they most likely won't entice anyone else to buy either.

The designer's own website can also give you a hint of their talent and dedication. If a designer can't take care of their own site and make it presentable, how could they take care of yours?

  WE RECOMMEND

We can only recommend designers we've worked with, but feel free to recommend your favourite designer on the AWN Forums.

• Gimme-Website  Design & Websites for amateur girls and webmasters

  HAVE YOUR SAY

Are you a cam girl and would like to add something to this article or have further questions? Go to AWN Forums to share your experiences, knowledge and to get advice from experts.

  GO SHOPPING

No, not for shoes or handbags, but a domain name, and some webspace. You can get them separately, which I recommend, but some hosts also offer you a free or a cheap domain name when you rent your web space from them. I say rent because you don't really buy webspace, but pay a monthly fee for the right to use a small space on a big powerful server that you share with others. You can get dedicated servers, but you won't need one at this point, if ever.

Also think about your domain name. But don't think too hard, all that really matters is that it's not too long for people to remember, and if it doesn't have your name in it, it should at least be somewhat descriptive. More about domain names and hosting under Hosting & Domain Names.

  GET YOUR TOOLS READY

All you really need to get started is a text editor program, and an FTP program. If you don't know what these are or how to get them, read my article about software.

  HOW TO UPLOAD CONTENT ONTO YOUR SERVER

Now we need to get you familiar with uploading things to your webspace. I'm going to call webspace a server from now on. So, install your FTP program and fire it up. It will look complicated at first, but don't be afraid to explore and get used to the interface. When you have time, it's good to read the help files to get to know your FTP program a little better. They are all sightly different, and I can only give you general instructions. You can see the interface is divided into two fields, one will be your server space, and the other field should have your local files on it, e.g. the files on your computer. To connect to your server you need to put in your FTP account info. Look for "Site Manager/Manage Sites" or "Add a site" in the FTP programs menu, and click "New Site", if needed.

When you see fields for "FTP Server/Address/Host", "Username" and "Password", log in to your control panel in your host's website and find these details, they are usually under "FTP Accounts". You can usually give the connection a name, too, so that you can identify it later. If the "port" field is empty, type in 21. If there are options for login type, choose "Normal".

When you've filled out this information, you can click "Connect". First you can test the connection with a single file. I'm sure you've got a few pictures on your computer, so browse your folders and choose one. Right-click it, and choose "upload". Now visit your website and type in the path to your image, i.e. http://www.yoursite.com/image.jpg. Voilà! You now know how to use FTP. When you need to make a new folder on your server, just right click your mouse in the server field and choose "Create Directory" or "New Directory". The path to the contents of this folder will naturally be http://www.yoursite.com/newfolder/

  WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT FILES

One important thing to remember is that your main folder (it's called root) needs a file called index. This is the page that your visitors see when they go to http://www.yoursite.com, it's the page that loads by default. Equally, when you have created subfolders in your main folder, it's good to put an index file in each of them, if you don't want people to see a list of all the files you have in that folder.

So fire up your text editor and copy-paste the following html code into your document:

<html>

<head>
<title>Page title goes here</title>
</head>

<body>
Your content goes here!
</body>

</html>

Save it as index.html, and go where you saved it and double click it. It will open in your browser, and it should be a white page with the text "Your content goes here!" If you upload this file onto your server, it will be the first thing you see when you visit your website. If your host has a default index.html page on your server, your FTP program will ask you if you want to "overwrite" this file, because it has the same name as the file you're trying to upload. When you overwrite files, you replace the original with the file you upload, so always be careful not to overwrite anything valuable by mistake, and keep back-ups of all your files on your computer.

Whenever you upload something or overwrite an old file with an updated one, you have to refresh your page before you see the changes. Because of the cache, i.e. the browser's "memory", you might have to refresh you page more than once, especially when you replace an image. If you still can't see the changes, try clearing your cache:

• Mozilla Firefox:
  Tools > Clear Private Data > Tick "Cache", untick other boxes > Click "Clear Private Data Now"
• MSIE 7:
  Tools > Internet Options > Under "Browsing History", click "Delete Files..." > Find "Temporary Internet Files", click "Delete Files" > Click "Yes"
• MSIE 6:
  Tools > Internet Options > Under "Temporary Internet Files", click "Delete Files" > Click "OK"
• Opera:
  Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Click "Empty Now" button next to "Disk Cache" > Click "OK"
• Safari:
  Edit > Clear Cache > Click "Empty"

File names - technically you can name your pages and other files whatever you want, but there are a few guidelines it's good to follow to make sure your site works perfectly for every visitor. These guidelines also apply to folder names.

• Avoid capitals and uppercase in file names.
• Use hyphen (-) instead of underscore (_).
• Never have a space in a file name. Ever.
• Make them descriptive, and keep them as short as possible.

  IMAGES

You will probably want to include some pictures and graphics on your page. There are three image formats that every browser supports: gif, jpg/jpeg and png. Just to avoid frustration in the future: when using the jpg/jpeg format, stick with only one of them - jpg or jpeg. Don't have both, images that end in .jpg, and images that end in .jpeg, as it will be hard to remember which one you used with each image. I also recommend keeping all file extensions lowercase for the same reason. If you happen to have a mixture of different file extensions, it's easy to change them in your FTP program: right-click and select "rename".

So which image format should you use? The general opinion seems to be that you should only use gifs for small or animated graphics. Gif is a very simple format that allows animation and full transparency, but doesn't have as many colours as jpg or png, that's why you should avoid using gif for photographs, they will look terrible. Jpg is the most widely used format, and you should always use this for photographs, and it's perfectly good for graphics aswell. Png was created to replace gif, and to be honest it has the best quality. It's the only format that allows partial transparency, which enables you to create very attractive graphics, but unfortunately no Internet Explorer version before IE 7 supports this feature, they will display the image without transparency. Other major browsers support png partial transparency just fine. One last tip: when placing images on your page it might seem easier to resize images within the <img> tag using the width and height attributes instead of opening up your graphics editor. This, however, isn't recommended. First of all, it won't reduce the size of the image file, and therefore won't make your page load any faster. Second of all, image quality will suffer tremendously and your images will look much less flattering.

  THE HARD PART - LEARNING THE LANGUAGE

When searching the net for some comprehensive HTML guides and tutorials for beginners, all I found was a bunch of useless pages from the 90s that hadn't been updated in years, and were hopelessly outdated. Although I don't see a reason to re-invent the wheel, I've started to write my own HTML guide while I carry on searching. Below, however, is the mother of all tutorial sites, W3Schools, which is always up-to-date, and should be your first stop and your ultimate reference guide for every major language, including HTML, for the rest of your life from now on ;-) That is where you will learn what each HTML tag does, and how it should be used. It's called syntax, and you can consider it as the grammar and the vocabulary of HTML language. The site also has a "try-it-yourself" editor that you can use to learn by doing, and when you have done your homework, you can test your skills with their "HTML Quiz", and even take an exam to get yourself a diploma!

UPDATE: I've found and added another great HTML guide I think you should visit.

• W3Schools HTML Tutorial
• WebDesignFromScratch HTML Tutorial

And now that you've spent hours of your time and all of your energy learning a new language, I'm going to tell you some good news, and some bad news: the bad news are that HTML will gradually be replaced with a new language called XHTML, and the good news are that it isn't exactly a new language, but a stricter and cleaner version of HTML that will result to better-formed documents. More good news: you don't need to panic, you don't need to learn it right away, and when you do, it will be a piece of cake, as it's almost identical to HTML. Also, what can help you with your task is that many html editors such as Dreamweaver have been updated to generate XHTML instead of HTML.

• W3Schools XHTML Tutorial

  HAVE YOUR SAY

Are you a cam girl and would like to add something to this article or have further questions? Go to AWN Forums to share your experiences, knowledge and to get advice from experts.

  FIRST THINGS FIRST

You will need a simple text editor program to write HTML code. Such programs as Notepad (Start > Programs > Accessories > NotePad) in Windows or TextEdit (Finder > Applications > TextEdit) in Mac OS X will do fine.

To get your pages online you need to have a program to them from your computer onto your web space. This program is called FTP. There are a few free FTP programs available, Smart FTP and FileZilla being the most widely used. FireFTP extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser is the choice for those who don't want to constantly switch from one application to another when working, and also my personal favourite. That is all! That will get you a website with text and some images, which is enough to most people. You can do almost anything you want with HTML code, and learning that should be your main priority. To learn HTML, I recommend W3Schools and, of course, reading my article about building a website ;-)

  GRAPHIC DESIGN

To make graphics like logos, nice text effects and to edit your images you will need a graphics editor. Up until two years ago you weren't able to get a decent, inexpensive program you can use for web design purposes, but there are finally good news for those who don't want to spend hundreds on a program. It is called Gimp, and it's totally free! Not only it will perform all basic tasks like cropping and resizing images, make graphics and text effects, you also retouch and color correct your images to a certain extent with this program. Make sure you download the help file too when you download Gimp, as it isn't included in the package. You will also need to install GTK+ 2 Runtime Environment before you install Gimp.

• Download Gimp For Free
• Tutorials For Gimp

And there is of course the mother of all graphics editors - Adobe Photoshop. You can try Photoshop for free for 30 days (requires registration), but if you wish to buy it, it will cost you approximately 600 UK pounds. It seems to be half the price in US dollars (when you take the weakness of the dollar against the pound into consideration), but that is still a hefty chunk of change. But those who can afford it, will see it's worth every penny and more. Any cool graphic you have seen on the web you can create with Photoshop, and it is the number one program for all professional web designers out there and this program is also the one that is used to retouch those sexy Playboy women!

However, I would not recommend this program to a beginner who doesn't need millions of functions. It is a very powerful and complicated program and therefore can be rather intimidating to a person who's new to graphic design. There are thousands of Photoshop tutorials and whole sites devoted to this program online, and if you choose to buy Photoshop, I would say the quickest way to learn your way around the tools and the effects is to follow some simple tutorials. Don't get frustrated if it feels overwhelming at first, even the most skilled users still learn something new every day!

• Buy or download a free trial of Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Tutorials For Photoshop

  HTML EDITORS

Unlike graphic design, creating HTML doesn't require a fancy program. In fact, a person who is new to HTML will learn it much faster and will learn to write better code using nothing but Notepad. The quality of your pages will only be limited by your skills, not the program you use. A big percent of professionals still prefer the clean and clutter free interface of Notepad. But once you know the basics, it might become annoying having to type the same tags over and over again. You might want to try an editor program dedicated to creating HTML and other languages. It will save you some keystrokes, and most of them have some nice extra features, like syntax highlighting. Below is a list of a few editors that are either free, of have a free trial option.

• Crimson Editor Free
• Ultra Edit Free Trial
• CoffeeCup HTML Editor Free Trial

Every designer and programmer has a favourite editor, but most will agree that Macromedia Dreamweaver is "the Photoshop of web editors", and the industry standard. It has so many features you will feel overwhelmed at first, but you probably won't need a fraction of them if you only create your HTML pages in it. To be honest, any editor will do the job for you, you just need to find the one that pleases your eye the most. However, if you like having the best and the biggest tools on the market, you will love Dreamweaver. You can try it for free for 30 days to decide if it's for you, it only requires registration. Purchasing Dreamweaver 8 from the official website will cost around 399 US dollars or 393 UK pounds.

• Buy or download a free trial of Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
• Tutorials For Dreamweaver

  HAVE YOUR SAY

Are you a cam girl and would like to add something to this article or have further questions? Go to AWN Forums to share your experiences, knowledge and to get advice from experts.

  APPLYING STYLES TO HTML ELEMENTS

Yes, it will require a little bit of studying to get the hang of it, but if you plan on building more than one page, you will be happy you took the time to learn it. The techique is called CSS, and it's a way of applying styles to your all of your HTML documents at once through a single external file.

These styles define how to display HTML elements, and will give you a greater control over your page layout, fonts, graphics and images than HTML on it's own. CSS will save you a lot of time and effort plus make your pages load much faster, which in turn will please your visitors.

• W3Schools CSS Tutorial
• WebDesignFromScratch CSS Tutorial

  LAYOUT

Normally websites consist of three elements: header, content and footer. Although it's not a rule set in stone that every website has to have a header and a footer, it works, and it's a safe way to start.

Header usually has the site's name, slogan or a logo on it, and is often followed by a vertical menu. After the menu comes the site's content, and footer is placed at the bottom. In the footer one might have something less important, such as copyright notice, company/contact information, who's designed the site and maybe another menu if needed. With a layout like this you simply can't go wrong, everyone knows how to navigate within it.

Another popular and intuitive layout is the two-column layout with a sidebar e.g. for menus and submenus. This type of layout often has a header, but you can also place the header's contents at the top of the sidebar. AdultWebcamNews.com is one example of a two column layout. Although centering the pages comes naturally to most, there will always be people who want to be different and 'stand out' by leaving the page left-aligned, or even right-align it! It will certainly make your site stand out, but not in a good way - only few sites are able to pull this off. If you happen to have a 800x600 resolution monitor, you most likely don't see the importance of centering, as you don't get much empty space on the sides of the pages, but more and more people are upgrading to big monitors these days, and you should always aim to design for the majority.

  NAVIGATION MENU

Assuming that you are designing a website with multiple pages, navigation is one of the most important elements on your pages. It needs to be easily found, and should be placed either near the top, or on the left hand side, as people tend to scan web pages starting from the top left corner.

If you are using graphics as buttons, you should make them big enough for people to notice, but small enough not to take half of the page. Same goes for text-based menus. With text, make sure it stands out and can't be mistaken as part of the content. Using a different and/or bold font and leaving plenty of space between the menu and the content should do the trick. You should also leave enough space between each menu item to separate them from each other. If you only have a few pages on your site, you can have links to all of them in your main menu. If you have a lot to say, and need to have over ten pages, you are better off placing the less important pages somewhere else, for example a sub menu, or a drop-down menu. Only the most important pages that you want everyone to visit should have a place in your main menu.

Naming your menu items is crucial. This is not a problem to most, but every now and then you see sites that make you wonder what the pages behind those menu links contain. Quite simply: if the menu link takes you the home page, name it "home", if it takes you to a page where you tell more about yourself, name it "about me" or "bio", and so on. This way you also make sure even your foreign visitors have a chance to understand your menu.

It's good to keep the link names short, too. Maximum of two or three words should be used. If you need to explain it with more words than that, put the longer explanation into the link tag's title attribute, so that when a visitor moves his cursor over the link they will see a little title box.

  BACKGROUND

As much as you would love to use your newly learnt skills to create a glittering, shimmering, colourful or even an animated background for your website, you shouldn't, unless you're intentionally going for the 'totally amateur' look. I'm not trying to be a buzzkill, but to teach you to learn from others' mistakes instead of your own. A background too busy will draw all most of the viewer's attention to itself, instead of the content that should be the priority.

For the same reason you should not use a photograph as your background image. Also you want your site to look the same for each visitor regardless of the size of their monitor. No matter how clever you try to be with a photographic background, there will always be visitors with small monitors who can only see a fraction of your cool background, and people with big monitors who see your image multiplied and tiled as a pattern. Best backgrounds are static, quiet and often monochromatic instead of multi-coloured. If you really need to have a pattern or a logo as your background, make it simple and reduce the opacity/contrast in your graphics editor program, watermark-like, so it won't interfere with your visitors' viewing experience too much.

• Example of a successfull pattern background
• Example of a successfull logo background
• Example of a successfull logo pattern background

  COLOURS

Some people have an eye for colours, some people don't. If you're one of the latter and can't pull together a working colour scheme if your life depended on it, don't worry. There are plenty of tools online to help you with colours. You can pick an entire scheme, or generate a scheme based on your favourite colour.

• MainstreamWebmasters' colour schemes generator
• SteelDolphin's colour scheme tool

These colour tools will give you 4-5 matching colours, either different shades of one base colour or two colour groups that create a nice contrast, based on the options your choose.

It's best to use the brighter ones sparingly for smaller details and to grab attention to something important. Keep one of the shades for your background, and use others when you need to highlight parts of your content, or bring colour to graphics such as menu buttons. If you don't want to use white background colour under your content/text, choose the lightest shade for that if your text is dark, and the darkest shade if your text is light. If you took a look at those colour tools, you probably noticed that for every shade of every colour there is a different six-character code that starts with a hash(#). It's called the hexadecimal value, and it's how web pages tell browsers exactly what colour to display.

Every decent graphics editor program has a built-in colour chart and an eye-dropper tool that will tell you the code of each colour. You can also find charts online:

• HTML color codes tester
• Hexadecimal colour chart

The hexadecimal code is not the only one way to display colours on web pages, there are others such as RGB and CMYK, but most people prefer using hexadecimal because it's easier to memorise a six-character code than a nine or twelve-character one.

It's also possible to use basic color adjectives such as yellow, white, red, green, blue, black and so on. There's nothing wrong with using this method every once in a while, but you should most definitely get in the habit of using any of the mentioned colour codes, otherwise you'll be limited to only a few basic colours.

  IMAGES

Different types of websites have different needs for images. Adult websites such as a cam girl's home page should be rather visual, so pick out a few of your best pictures to spice up your pages, to add 'eye candy'. One of the purposes of your site is to act as a preview of what the visitor will be getting when he buys a show or a membership, so you might even want to have a little gallery page for pictures as an addition to your eye candy. These preview gallery images should be larger than your eye candy pictures, 800x600 is a good standard. Eye candy pictures in the other hand can be whatever size that fits best on your pages next to your text.

Amateur style photos rarely match a bright, colourful, well-made design. This is where graphics editor programs step in. It's surprisingly easy to improve photo quality with these programs, lighten and brighten them up, remove unflattering shadows and little skin imperfections if you wish. This part about image formats and resizing is from my article Building A Website:

 There are three image formats that every browser supports: gif, jpg/jpeg and png. Just to avoid frustration in the future: when using the jpg/jpeg format, stick with only one of them - jpg or jpeg. Don't have both, images that end in .jpg, and images that end in .jpeg, as it will be hard to remember which one you used with each image. I also recommend keeping all file extensions lowercase for the same reason. If you happen to have a mixture of different file extensions, it's easy to change them in your FTP program: right-click and select "rename".

So which image format should you use? The general opinion seems to be that you should only use gifs for small or animated graphics. Gif is a very simple format that allows animation and full transparency, but doesn't have as many colours as jpg or png, that's why you should avoid using gif for photographs, they will look terrible. Jpg is the most widely used format, and you should always use this for photographs, and it's perfectly good for graphics aswell. Png was created to replace gif, and to be honest it has the best quality. It's the only format that allows partial transparency, which enables you to create very attractive graphics, but unfortunately no Internet Explorer version before IE 7 supports this feature, they will display the image without transparency. Other major browsers support png partial transparency just fine.

One last tip: when placing images on your page it might seem easier to resize images within the <img> tag using the width and height attributes instead of opening up your graphics editor. This, however, isn't recommended. First of all, it won't reduce the size of the image file, and therefore won't make your page load any faster. Second of all, image quality will suffer tremendously and your images will look much less flattering.  

  FONT & TEXT

The more text you have on your site, the more important your font color, size and style are. If the only text on your site will be your camshow prices and a couple of lines of text here and there, you can use pretty much any available font of any color and size, as long as the text is readable. In these cases the text often becomes one of the design elements, and you don't necessarily have to settle for the standard fonts and colours. If you plan on having more text than that, e.g. describe your camshows or tell your visitors more about yourself, it's very important that the text is easy to read. That is, if you really want people to read your text.

Let's assume that you want to have more than a few words of text. Deciding the colour is easy - dark font if your background is light, and vice versa. Whatever colours you choose, they need to have a high contrast for easy readablility. You can't go wrong with the black and white combination - it has the maximum contrast.

• Example of a poor colour contrast
• Colour contrast calculator

Next you need to choose font family, i.e. your preferred font and a few other, similar fonts that replace your main font in case your visitor doesn't have it installed on his computer. Below are the most common font families:

• Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
• Times New Roman, Times, serif
• Courier New, Courier, monospace
• Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif
• Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
• Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

You will be pretty safe choosing any of these combinations, although you can always make your own. My personal favourites from the standard fonts are Verdana, Geneva and serif, which I think are the clearest fonts. If you choose one of the other ones, I suggest that you set your font size larger than 12 pixels. Bear in mind that even though you might have downloaded some cool special fonts you'd like to use, the vast majority of web users don't have these fonts installed, and won't be able to see them. The only way for everyone to see your special fonts is to use them in graphics, such as your site header, but do this as little as possible. If most of your text is an image, you will make your page load slower, and search engines will rank you lower in their results thinking you don't have any content on your site.

  GRAPHICS

Website graphics such as menu buttons, decorative headers and eye-catching animations are only effective when used sparingly. You don't want to clutter your pages with graphics to the point where visitors won't know what to look at anymore because there is so much going on. Not to mention excessive use of graphics will make your pages load significantly slower.

That's pretty much it for graphics, just remember to stick with the colour scheme you chose when you started, and you'll be off to a good start. Learning how to use your graphics software is the hardest part. You don't even necessarily need creativity or artistic talent, the net is so full of great tutorials for any major program.

  RECOMMENDED

Normally I like to do the research and writing myself, not just link to other people's guides, as the majority of them is written by geeks to geeks. Usually these guides are either boring or unpractical, or both. However, I recently found a website that's neither of those, but still has pretty much everything you want/need to know about anything regarding making your own website. I strongly recommend this site for anyone who is interested to learn more about design, inexperienced or not.

• WebDesignFromScratch

  HAVE YOUR SAY

Are you a cam girl and would like to add something to this article or have further questions? Go to AWN Forums to share your experiences, knowledge and to get advice from experts.

  CHOOSING YOUR DOMAIN

Choosing a domain name that suits you can be difficult. It's like naming a baby - you don't know what it will look like, you don't know its personality yet. You want the name to be unique, short enough for people to remember, easy to spell and descriptive. What makes it even harder to think of a good domain name is that you can't have a name that someone else already has!

A domain name should tell people something about you even before they visit your site. Having your (stage)name as your domain seems to be popular, and tells people it's a personal homepage. I think it's the best way to go, unless your stage name is something like "2hot4u_69". That would be difficult for people to remember, easily misspelled, and not very descriptive nor unique.

If your stage name is a normal, popular name like "Claire" or "Kelly", you don't have a chance getting a domain name like Claire.co.uk or Kelly.com. In this case you can combine your name with a descriptive word, such as "BBWClaire" or "CamgirlKelly", or with an adjective: "SweetClaire", "PetiteKelly".

If you don't have a stage name or if you aren't well known yet, consider changing your name if you can't find a good enough domain with your current one. If you do, I suggest you don't go with a very popular name. Baby name websites/books are a great way of finding unusual pretty names that will make you stand out from the crowd, and of course, make it easier for you to find a domain name.

  CHOOSING A TDL

A TDL is the little 2-6 letter extension each domain name has. .com, .net, .org, .info are all unrestricted generic TDL's that anyone can use, an some country code TDL's such as .us and .co.uk are also available for everyone. The most popular one is obviously .com, and it's the safest way to go, since if people can't remember your TDL, they will always try .com first. Plus it's the correct option, since your site will most likely be a commercial website.

If you can't find the domain you want as a .com, try .net - or .co.uk if you're from the U.K. But make sure that the .com equivalent of your domain isn't owned by a competitor, otherwise you might lose some of your type-in traffic to them. Usually it's not worth going with any other TDL's than the ones mentioned above, especially not country codes. Some will think it's a foreign language website, and often people are suspicious of TDL's they haven't seen before.

  GETTING A DOMAIN

There are countless of domain name registrars you can get your domain from and you can get it for as low as a couple of dollars/pounds a year. There isn't really any reason why you should pay more than a tenner, it's just a domain, and you will most likely end up paying for the company's brand, or some extra security features you won't need. Security is important, of course, but unless you have a very valuable domain such as sex.com, porn.com, amateurporn.com etc. and as long as you steer clear from trouble you don't have to worry about someone snatching your domain.

When choosing a domain registrar, I recommend doing some basic research (=googling) on the company of your choice before you sign up and purchase your domain. If people have had horror stories with that particular host, you'll want to know. GoDaddy seems to be the most problematic domain registrar in the adult field, but to my knowledge it's also the most popular. Out of the other major registrars I found the least horror stories associated with NameCheap and Moniker. Moniker also seems to have representatives on every major adult webmaster board, which is a bonus.

  WHOIS INFO

When you register your domain, your details are stored in a huge public database, in case someone needs to contact you or has a complaint about your website. There are plently of online services you can use to find out who owns a specific domain, such as Who.is. It returns your full name, address, e-mail and phone number, available to anyone who wants to know.

However, most decent registrars offer a free WHOIS privacy with your domain, and it's a must have for cam girls in particular. Your details will be replaced with your domain registrar's details in the public database, and can only be requested through your registrar, and not just by anyone. So make sure the domain registrar you choose has this feature. You usually choose whether you want it or not in the process of purchasing a new domain, but you can also do it later.

  CHOOSING A HOST

To me the most important thing in a hosting company is excellent customer service. Of course the ideal situation would be having no problems at all, but no matter how great your host is, you will at least need to ask a question or two every now and then. And you may even encounter problems that can have a significant effect on your livelihood. Times like these you really appreciate a customer service staff that's always there for you and knows what it's doing.

Unfortunately you can't really tell much about the level of a company's customer service before you've been with them for a while, so ask your friends and search forums for recommendations. And, of course, choose a host with a 24/7 customer service.

Other features you might need/want: admin panel, ability to set up e-mail addresses for your domains, multiple domain hosting, statistics for your website and of course DNS management so you can add the domain you just bought on your host. Most hosts also have a wide selection of free website building tools for you to use, if you need them. Although my experience with these tools is, that with the same effort you spend on learning how to use them, you can learn html yourself, and achieve better results. Often hosts offer you a free domain name if you sign up with them. It's always a bonus, and you should definitely take advantage of that offer, but instead of registering your main domain through your host, use that offer to get an additional domain. Sure, it's free and you might not have a need for another domain, but the free domain will be tied to to your hosting account and if you ever need to move hosts, you can't take it with you. Well, technically you can, but it's often very difficult and your host might just refuse to do the paperwork for you. So register your main domain with a dedicated domain registrar and it to your hosting account after you have signed up.

  BEST HOSTING DEALS

Adult Webcam News hosts with an adult friendly European host Servage.net, and can recommend it to both, first-timers and experienced webmasters. There are no setup fees or hidden charges, you get a free domain (see above) with your account, you can host unlimited domains and set up your own e-mail addresses, they offer free WHOIS privacy, 24/7 helpdesk, and traffic statistics.

I, personally host a few sites with Servage, and I think the best features are their admin panel that is easily one of the best in the industry, and their handy auto-installer feature that makes it easier and quicker for you to install large scripts like forums, blogs and gallery scripts. I also like the referral scheme; whenever you refer a friend you get a month's free hosting plus 25 GB more space!

Their monthly fee is £6.35, main payment options are credit card, PayPal and Moneybookers. Your account has 360 GB disk space, when an average website only uses 50 GB or less. By using Adult Webcam News coupon code CUST14326 you get 25 GB more space ;-)

• Servage (coupon code CUST14326)

Feel free to recommend your host on the AWN Forums, and I might add it to this article.

  ADDING YOUR DOMAIN

Adding your domain onto your hosting account might cost a little or be completely free, depending on your host company. You usually do this by logging into your hosting account's admin panel, going to "Domain Settings/Management" and typing in the domain you want to add.

Then you need to inform your domain registrar about this change, by contacting customer service. If you have an admin panel at your registrars website, look around, you might be able to change the info yourself. You will need to know the name servers of your hosting account, and these should be listed inside your hosting account.

Be patient, the it might take upto 48 hours for you to see the domain on your hosting account, and for the DNS to be updated.

  HAVE YOUR SAY

Are you a cam girl and would like to add something to this article or have further questions? Go to AWN Forums to share your experiences, knowledge and to get advice from experts.

  PASSWORD PROTECTING YOUR MEMBERS AREA

The standard way to password protect your members area is with a .htaccess file. To give people access to your protected members area you need a file called .htpasswd where you add their username and password. Most billing providers will take care of this for you when they install their scripts on your server, but because you need to have a working members area before you can get a billing provider, you want to protect your members area untill it's ready.

If you've never heard of .htaccess or .htpasswd before, don't be scared, it's really quite simple. First you need to log into your hosting account and find out if you need to enable .htaccess protection on your server. For example at Servage you can find this in the "Webserver" section, under "Set .htaccess Files". Simply change the status to "Enabled". It will take upto 3 hours for it to be enabled. If your host doesn't require to do this, proceed to the next step. Next you need to create the two files. Open up any text editor program, such as Notepad or TextEdit, and paste the following code into your document:

AuthUserFile <b>/full-account-path/foldername/.htpasswd</b>
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName EnterPassword
AuthType Basic
require valid-user

As you can see, you need to replace "/full-account-path/foldername/" with your full account path, so your .htaccess can find your .htpasswd file that contains all acceptable username and password combinations. Again, you will need to log into your hosting account and find out what your full account path is. In the Servage admin panel this information is in the "Documentation" section, under "Account Paths".

So copy and paste that line into your document, and after it you must type the path to your .htpasswd file, wherever you want to place it. For clarity, I like to pop it in the directory you want to protect, i.e. your members area folder. If you are unsure what the rest of the path is, I suggest you fire up your FTP program, and go to your members area folder on your server. You will see the path in the top field above your files.

Save this file as ".htaccess". No, not as .htaccess.txt or .htaccess.html, but just .htaccess. The htaccess part that comes after the dot is actually the extension, not the name. The file doesn't have a name. This is why the file name starts with a dot.

Now create an empty file and name it ".htpasswd". And no, the "passwd" bit is not a typo ;-) Upload both files into your members area folder on your server, and test it by trying to enter your members area in your browser. If you get an "Authentication Required" box, you have successfully password protected your members area! If you have any problems, don't hesitate to contact your host's customer service - that's what they're there for ;-) Your almost done. All you need to do is to add yourself a username and password in the .htpasswd file, so you can access your members area. You might be able to generate the code on in your hosting account's admin panel, but I like to use an online generator, such as this one.

You will get a line that contains the username you chose followed by the password you chose, encrypted. Simply enter the line into your .htpasswd file, re-upload, and you should get into your members area with that combination.

Bookmark the online .htpasswd generator for further use; you may want to add members manually at some point. When adding another username/password combination into your .htpasswd file, give each combination its own line in the document.

  CHOOSING A BILLING COMPANY

If you haven't read my previous article about billing, I suggest you take a look at that first:

• How To Take Payments

In the thar article I listed numerous popular billing providers - some good, some not - but in this article I'm only going to concentrate on those that are worth your while. The list will be short, in fact, there are only a couple of companies you should use for your members area billing if you are even the slightest bit serious with your online business. CCBill is by far the most popular company for adult websites. Customers trust it, website owners love it, they have a strong presence on adult webmaster boards, low transaction fees, excellent customer service and a spotless reputation. Even if you choose another primary billing company to process your payments, you should consider adding CCBill as your secondary payment option. Their only weakness is that customers can't pay with debit cards through CCBill, and this can lose you a lot sales if your target audience is outside the U.S. They are, however, adding this option for Europian customers in the near future, a couple of countries at a time. Another great thing about CCBill is that you can easily create an affiliate program for your website through them, and it's all free. You will find out more about affiliates at the end of this article.

Epoch (the payment company formerly known as Paycom) is my personal favourite, and CCBill's main competitor. What's best about Epoch is that they allow customers to pay with just about any card, they too enjoy a fantastic reputation and trust among the industry, customers are starting to get used to it, their fees are low, their support is great, and they even give you a personal customer support rep who will help you with any questions you might have. You are able to set up cascading billing, which means that if your customer can't pay with Epoch, they get automatically directed to another payment option you have set up, for example CCBill. Epoch have also recently added a very valuable feature for webmasters, a copy of MP3 Affiliate Program Software. It costs thousands to rent this software, but it's free for all Epoch clients. Again, continue reading to find out more about how this can benefit you as a site owner. The more options you are able to offer to the customer the better. But that doesn't mean you should let just any company on your join page - a list of ten different companies the customer has never heard from will only confuse them and make the suspicious. Stick with the ones mentioned above, and experiment with others one at a time.

SMS and phone payments have become very popular in the past couple of years, and adding one to your repertoire would definitely bring you more business, but from a site owners perspect most of them aren't worth using. Their fees are often sky high, it's hard to find a company that both you and your customers can trust, and their systems are difficult to integrate with members areas while they might be perfect for camshows.

To this day I haven't been able to find an SMS/phone billing service provider that comes even close to CCBill or Epoch, so I won't list any of them here. If you have had positive experiences with an SMS/phone billing company, please recommend them on the AWN Forums. It will benefit the whole cam community as well as you - the more people use a company, the more customers will trust that company. Customers' trust is especially important when it comes to SMS/phone payments, as a few companies *cough*TexBill*cough* have nearly ruined SMS payments for everybody.

  GETTING BILLING FOR YOUR SITE

After you have chosen your billing company or companies, you can start your signing up process. Bear in mind, that both CCBill and Epoch (and many others) need to see you have a working members area before they can set you up, so take care of that first.

Your payment company will inspect your site to see if you are complient with their rules and regulations, so you will need to make some changes to your website. I've listed their usual requirements here to give you a head start.

Once you've completed the online registration process, you will need to sign a contract which they will e-mail you. They will ask you to fax it, but if you don't have access to a fax machine, ask them if you can scan it and e-mail it back to them, or send it via snail mail, and they will give you an address. After you get accepted the billing company's tech department needs to get onto your server to install scripts. This is the reason they ask for your FTP details at some point of the process. When they have finished installing your scripts, it's good to make a text payment to see if everything works. Your payment company should have test card numbers and such for making a test transaction, or you may even be able to do this from your admin panel.

When you've done this, you should be ready to go! Make sure you save all the e-mails you get from your billing company, they often contain important information such as account ID's, usernames, passwords etc.

You can log into your admin panel(s) at:

• CCBill Web Admin
• Epoch Stats

  MEMBERSHIP FEES & JOINING OPTIONS

The trick with pricing your membership right is balancing. You want to try lower prices and higher prices, and see which one makes you more money. Having a low price will obviously get you more joins, and higher price less joins, but one of them will leave you with more money. It's more about the amount of money than the number of joins at the end of the day.

Naturally you have to set the price lower at first, if your members area only has, for example, a few videos and under a thousand pictures. I recommend starting from roughly £5 or $10 dollars. When your content has doubled or tripled, try raising your price and see what happens. Unfortunately an average amateur site can't go much higher than £10 or $20 dollars, even if it has hundreds of videos and picture sets. £15/$30 is considered the absolute maximum membership fee for a single girl website in the industry, but I'm willing to bet that you get better results with a lower price.

Of course the amount of content isn't the only thing that your site's value consists of. If you do camshows for your members, update often, have downloadable content, interact with your members on a message board etc. you can have a higher membership fee than a girl who doesn't interact, doesn't do camshows, doesn't allow downloads and updates rarely. Recurring membership fees are the standard in the adult industry. This means, that when someone purchases a membership, they will get rebilled every month untill they cancel. This will most definitely make you more money than a one time payment. In the long term having a lifetime membership option isn't profitable, since you will either have to come up with new ways to get money out of your existing members, or constantly find new members to keep the money coming in.

If you choose to set your membership as recurring, you will encounter different types of customers: ones that cancel and don't rejoin, ones that cancel every month and keep rejoining because they like your site but don't want surprise charges, ones that didn't pay attention or forget about joining and keep rebilling month after month unknowingly and ones that happily get rebilled because they want to stay as members.

If you have a recurring membership, your billing company will require you to place a little text explaining they need to cancel if they don't want to be rebilled on your join page, along with a "Cancel Membership" link. You might get the occasional pissed off customer complaining that they didn't know they'd get rebilled, but if you have the necessary disclaimers on your site, they can only blame themselves for not paying attention. Once you've run your site for a while and found out what your ideal price is, you can experiment with adding other joining options, such as trials. Trials are usually only a couple of pounds/dollars for a day or two - you decide how low you a prepared to go. You might wonder how trials benefit you - why would anyone buy a months membership when they can check out your site for a much cheaper price? The twist is, when a customer purchases a trial membership, and unless he cancels his membership before the trial period ends, he will get billed for a whole month at your normal rate.

Some people consider this as tricking, or even cheating, but it's widely used in both adult and mainstream. Many customers are aware of the trial trick, and cancel right away, whereas a part of your customers aren't, and get rebilled. It's how trials work, and it's how they are profitable.

If you want to experiment with a trial, you need to add a little "small print" on your join page telling people they need to cancel if they don't wish to be rebilled, even though your billing company's payment forms also have this information.

  CONTENT

It's your members area, so it's up to you if your content is hardcore or softcore, nude, topless or non-nude, if your videos are long or short, and how often you want to update your site with new content. The only rule is: the more content, the better. It doesn't even have to be very original all the time - although it always helps. Most customers join because they like the way you look, and the way you do things, even if they have been done before a million times.

To keep your members longer, I recommend updating as often as you can. To do this you don't necessarily have to make 5 videos and/or ten picture sets a week, but an update can be a blog post, a desktop wallpaper made of your picture, a dirty story written by you, funny outtakes from your videos/picture sets, pretty much anything you think your members would like. All this adds personality to your site, and sets it apart from the countless other sites. Live camshows and a message board for members only are other great ways of making them stick around for longer.

Whatever you choose to do, remember to be honest in you preview/free tour - don't give the visitor the impression that they'll see hardcore content if you only pose nude and so on. They will find out the truth anyway, and giving the wrong impression will only leave you with a bunch of pissed off customers who will charge their money back, and your billing company will not like that. Having good quality videos and sharp, high resolution pictures isn't as important to guys who like the amateur style content, but it certainly doesn't hurt. If you can, upgrade your equipment and you will most likely see a positive change in your rebills. If you can't, compensate with more light and personality.

Regarding technical details, your videos don't have to be bigger than 320x240 pixels, what's more important is the format you offer them in. The ideal situation would be to have several formats, but converting videos is very time consuming. Go with flash, .wmv, .avi, or .mpg to be safe. Always mention the format you choose on your join page, as some people need a special coded to watch certain formats.

Picture size is slightly more important than video size. They need to be small enough to fit in a browser window, but big enough for your visitors to be able to enjoy them. Again, the ideal situation would be to have an option to view small images, and another option for larger images. If you can't be bothered to make every picture gallery twice, consider making a zip files of larger images and giving your members the option to download them. As for the pictures in your picture galleries, I suggest making them no bigger than 800x600 pixels, unless your visitor statistics tell you that most of your visitors have large monitors. The vast majority of professional porn sites offer downloadable videos, simply because their audience has grown to expect that from them. However, allowing your visitors to download your videos can have negative side effects. While most of your members respect your work and don't cause any problems, there are people who will upload your content to file sharing sites such as KaZaA, LimeWire, forums and torrent sites. Some do it to annoy you, some do it just to earn brownie points among their file sharing community.

There are ways to get your content off these sites, and site admins are usually very helpful and understanding if you approach them in a friendly manner. Ask if they have a black list of forbidden sites that you could add your site on, to prevent future trouble. If a forum or a torrent site refuses to take down your content, contact their billing company and inform them of their illegal activity.

If you see adverts on the file sharing site, such as Google Adsense ads or links to porn sites, contact the advertiser/affiliate program. Most companies don't allow advertising on file sharing sites, so they will freeze the site's affiliate account, and this can cause the site to have to shut down. Situations like this are the reason why you should always watermark your content with your site URL - downloadable or not. There are currently no fool proof methods to protect your content from theft. Even if you don't provide your members with video download links, there are ways to download/capture them regardless. If/when your content ends up on a file sharing site, at least it's watermarked, and might even generate you some traffic.

My advice would be to try offering downloadable videos at first, and monitor the situation. If this causes you trouble in the form of file sharing, take off the download links. Perhaps it won't stop content theft completely, but it will certainly make the problem smaller by eliminating the stupid and the lazy people from stealing off you ;-)

  USEFUL TOOLS & SOFTWARE

• Arles Image Web Page Creator The best software for making picture galleries
• JAlbum The best free gallery making sofware
• Frame Shots Takes screenshots of videos, good for creating preview thumbnails for your videos
• HJ Split A free video splitter software
• Media Coder Free software for converting videos to another format
• Movie Maker Free basic video editor for Windows
• iMovie Free basic video editor for Mac

If you like your pictures to be as good as they possibly can with minimum work from your part, I recommend Adobe Photoshop for image re-touching and processing. It has a great batch automation process feature that lets you apply the same changes/improvements to as many pictures as you need - and it will only take a few minutes. You can use it to apply a watermark, rotate, resize, rename, brighten your images... whatever you want. It certainly takes the edge off repetitive tasks like that. More about the feature here.

  MEMBERS AREA DESIGN & LAYOUT

The key to a working members's area is to make it easy for your members to find what they are looking for. A search function would be the best way to do this, but it's difficult to find a good search script if you don't want to have a full CMS script. An absolute must is to have either a thumbnail of each video and picture set next to the link, a brief description, or both. It's very frustrating to browse a members's area with just plain text links to the content. The worst members area I've seen just had a long list of text links, each named something like "Picture gallery 3" and "Video 8". Not only it's hard to find what you like on a site like this, it's also difficult to remember which ones are your favourites.

So split your content into a few sections, depending on how much content you have. At the very least have different sections for pictures and videos. These sections can be split to different themes if you wish, or simply be sorted by the date you added them, newest first - so it's easy for your members to find the new updates.

If you have lots of content and several sections and categories, be careful not to clutter your navigation menu. Again, only list the top categories, and add sub sections to a sub menu or a drop-down menu. Making your members area attractive often makes your members stay longer, but keep the design simple. Don't add pointless graphics just because they are pretty, they will only distract your members. Remember, the reason they joined was to see your content, not to admire your designing skills ;-) Just add your site header at the top of your members area pages, and let your content speak for itself.

  MARKETING

There is much more to marketing adult paysites than I can ever explain in this article, but I will try to cover the basic ways of getting more members to your website.

The idea is to spread your site URL to as many places as you possibly can to make your name known. Start by submitting your website to every single directory that has a suitable category for your site. There are also countless of review sites that will drive traffic to your site even if they give you a bad review. I'm currently compiling a list of directories and review sites on the AWN Forums. A more advanced method of marketing is making making galleries and freesites and submitting these to TGP's, MGP's and link lists. This will require more work from your part, as you need to choose the content, resize images or make video clips, and make an attractive page for them that will tempt surfers to click your link and join. Below I've listed tutorials that explain how to make galleries and freesites. Bear in mind, that these tutorials are made for people who promote someone else's websites, so replace the word "sponsor" with "your site".

• How to make a freesite
• How to make a TGP gallery

People also use blogs as marketing tools, at the moment there are thousands of blog directories where you can submit your blog for free. All you have to do is to write a tempting post about your site every now and then. A good way to do this is to post a picture of your latest video/picture set every time you update and then describe it to the readers in a way that will make them want to visit your site. And don't forget to include a link to your site in every post.

If you choose to use directories, galleries, freesites or blogs to market your site, I have a tip for you: only submit to one or two places at a time. This way you can monitor your traffic, and compare the number of joins you get against the amount of visitors they send you. If one source sends you tons of visitors but none of them buy a membership, forget that place or try another method - you don't want to waste your effort and bandwidth to visitors that don't buy anything. When you find a great source of paying traffic, stick with it, but never stop looking for even better places. One way of reaching a wide audience is to make little teaser and trailer videos and post them on video community sites. Before posting, make sure the site doesn't mind adult content. Huge mainstream video sites such as YouTube usually don't allow adult videos, even if they're just clothed teasing, but there are plenty of adult YouTube clones around. The way to get visitors from these sites is to list your website address in your profile, and watermark your videos with your URL.

Some people find that posting these teaser videos on file sharing sites can bring you some visitors aswell. This, however, is widely frowned upon, since file sharing sites are considered one of the biggest threats to the adult industry. Now you might wonder how all the company run porn sites do their marketing. They simply employ other people to do all the work for them, and pay them a cut of every join they send. These people are called affiliates. You can do this too, and set up your own little affiliate program. Affiliates sign up to your program, you provide them with banners, pictures and video clips they use to promote your site. You can set this all up with both, CCBill and Epoch, and they will even take care of sending payments to your affiliates. Marketing on a more personal level can include offering free or cheaper camshows as a bonus for buying a membership. You can also make a deal with another girl who has a website so that your members get a discount if they join her site, and vice versa. You should also find some adult forums to post on, usually "porn stars" get a very warm welcome on forums, and by posting a few pictures or a video occasionally you can use them to subtly market your website. And don't forget the good ol' banner exchange!

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