[Journey] Starting in the IM world.

Hey there. I've been lurking this site for a while, but it's the first time I post, so I'll introduce myself before talking about my projects.

Background and Motivation
I wanna start making money on my own, as passively as possible. I don't wanna spend the most part of the day working, and I know it's possible to make a living out of this world, with some effort. I'm a programmer, mostly web and apps, working for a friend that is pretty successful in the IM world. I know the numbers that these kind of businesses can generate. I don't intend on getting filthy rich in a single day, but I wanna make it so I'm gonna try.

Ideas
These couple of weeks I've been taking notes on ideas that might be profitable. I wanna try them and see if I can make profit out of them, and discard those that don't work. Some of them require a decent amount of work, some of them are pretty shady, but I'll try to make profit with as many as I can, as long as they don't require all my attention in order to work. For instance, one of the projects is a live 24/7 YouTube channel running on a VPS, which doesn't require much attention. To start, among all the ideas that I had, I picked the one that I thought was going to take the less time to develop (although it may not be the less time consuming when it comes to marketing it).

Current Project
Description
A porn site.

I don't know if I'm able to post the link or even name it, so I won't, unless asked to. I made a simple website that takes videos PH, Xvideos and other porn sites and embeds them into my site. The site is quite simple and took me only a few days to develop (the mvp, at least), and I improved it over the following days.

Traffic / SEO
I've submitted the sitemaps to Google, Bing and Yandex. I've added rich results and OpenGraph data to the pages, so that the data shows in the "Videos" section of Google and others and when you share the links in SM, Discord, Whatsapp, etc...

I've used GSA Search Engine Ranker (trial demo) to get backlinks. I can't tell how successful this was, but I've read some good things about this and similar tools, so I might get the paid version in the future.

To get organic traffic, I've been using a few methods:
- Re-upload porn videos with a watermark with the site URL on it, as well as in the description and user profile.
- Posted the URL on on-topic Reddit threads.
- Solved some of the posts on NameThatPorn and linked to the video on my site.

Ads/Affiliates
Right now, I'm using ads to monetize the site. I have the following types of ads, on different networks.

- Banner Ads on the header. (JuicyAds)
- Popunder (Tacoloco)
- URL shortener with ads for video downloads (Ouo.io, but on of the ideas is to make my own site)
- Some of the videos of the related section randomly select from Tacoloco or TraffDaq
- Sidebar ads, as well as link in the menu, to the webcams section, which is a white label affiliate of Chaturbate

Since I started 10 days ago, I made, between all networks, around 5$. I'm not counting TraffDaq "profit", because atm, every penny I make with it goes directly into buying traffic. Lemme know what you think about this as well.

Investment
I don't wanna really invest much (actually nothing) at first until I see that it is profitable. I spent 10$/year in the domain. I'm using a free VPS from Oracle.

Questions/Advice
Of course, I'm just starting out so I got some questions and I would like your advice on some stuff.

Should I try to concentrate all my efforts into a single ad network? If so, is there any network that supports publish ads in the formats that I use and also has URL shortener?

I'd like to know your opinion on tools like GSA Search Ranker, Scrapebox. Are they worth it right now, or should I wait until I see that this is profitable? Should I invest in traffic? If so, where?

I found out about Otohits and 10KHits recently. Should I use these autosurf services to get traffic or should I stay with TraffDaq? What do you guys think?

Super interesting journey. I saw that you made $5 profit and I’m wondering how much traffic you’re getting?

Cloudflare says ~2.5k unique visitors a day, but Google Analytics, Ackee and the stats of the ads mostly show an average of ~450 per day, with an increasing trend.

bazoo said:

Cloudflare says ~2.5k unique visitors a day, but Google Analytics, Ackee and the stats of the ads mostly show an average of ~450 per day, with an increasing trend.

Click to expand...

As It seems like you have a lot of traffic, wouldn’t it be more suitable to invest more in monetisation methods?

I don't think that's a lot of traffic, but, what do you have in mind?

Hello @bazoo please share your Google search condo insights and how many traffic you got in a day right now and what's the earnings

Update on adult site
I forgot about this post, sorry. I'll give you an update.

I tried different ads networks until one of them was paying good enough, which was Adsterra. After I while I got banned from it before getting payed. Apparently someone complained about bad traffic. This happened right after I included their "Social bar" ad, which sometimes showed full screen antivirus ads that had a misleading closing button that didn't actually close the ad but opened the advertised site instead :/.

After a while, my pages where getting indexed and Reddit/namethatporn/reuploads posts where getting visits, so organic traffic was decent enough so I started to spend less "money" on TraffDaq campaigns in order to get more profit. Profits amounted to around 450$, but, to this date, TraffDaq still hasn't payed a single dime. I tried bank transfer and bitcoin but they just don't pay. Consider it a scam.

I tried to make a clone of the website, this time focus on a niche, but, a few months ago, the website whose API I was using to get the videos information went down, so I was left with 2 empty sites. I went on to make my own API, but during that time was pretty busy with my main job, and I haven't found the motivation to finish it yet, and lately I've been flirting with other projects.

New projects
My new project is an educational blog on a programming language in spanish, with subscription for premium content. The strong points of the project:

• Automatically post to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Medium, Pinterest, GitHub and others when a post gets published, as well as RSS and sitemap
• Good on page SEO, OpenGraph, mobile friendly, good PageInsights score...
• I use AI generated for the post images
• The page follows a theme, including name, logo, website design, and post images
• Using self-hosted Plausible instead of Google Analytics to avoid ad blockers

I applied for Google AdSense but got declined cause I didn't have enough content yet. I'll re apply sometime in the near future. I kinda wanna do fiverr affiliates too, but probably when I get more traffic. So far, I only got a total of 1k visits in about 3 weeks. It still needs a lot of work to do. This is not exactly the kind of site that I want long term, as it requires some active work, but I learning a lot from it.

I got another idea that I want to try, which is not new and has probably been done infinite times already, but I still think it could work. I wanna make a link directory. I already have a cool name, logo, site and social media accounts for it. I have some interesting ideas to make the pages more enaging, tho it will probably have a classic links page section as well. Also, I wanna start promoting it by accepting links for free at the beginning, so stay tuned.

See you next year? LOL, i hope not

Good Luck, looks interesting! Wishing you success.