I must see that question on different message boards at least a couple times a day. The obvious reason it's asked is because the person asking is looking for short cuts to riches and forgets one simple thing. Any webmaster that has found a good niche doesn't want to tell anyone about it, because if he does, it won't be a good niche for long. Why? Because a good niche is one that not every webmaster on the planet is promoting.

What I'm about to say is a generalization because even saturated niches like 'teens', are good niches for the webmasters that have been promoting that niche for a while and have built up a solid traffic base. However, for a newbie, the obvious -- and thus popular -- niches like 'teens', 'big tits', 'porn stars', and 'MILFs' are not good niches.

One of the common answers to this question is to pick a niche you like because it's easier to promote something you're familiar with and have an affinity for. That's not a bad answer because if you don't understand the Goth genre, for example, it's not likely that you're going to be able to promote it effectively. The problem with that answer is that for most webmasters, the niches they are most comfortable with will also be the most popular and now we're right back to the big drawback to promoting those niches, which is over saturation.

What are the best niches? The ones that aren't being over promoted yet are not so bizarre that only a few people on the planet will be interested. Obviously, Midget Mud Wrestling is not an over saturated niche, but then again, how many surfers do you actually think would join a site with that kind of content?

Another point to remember is that you need to be flexible. If you find a few niches that work well for you, it probably won't be long before other webmasters discover your little gold mine and begin mining in the tunnel right next to you, and the next thing you know, the vein runs out. When you see your sales slipping, don't stubbornly hang on. Move on.

I know that webmasters don't like to think of themselves as surfers, or admit to it anyway, but personally, I think if you aren't a porn surfer, you are going to have a tough time in this business. How else are you going to know what's going on? What's hot and what's not? If you want to find a good niche, do some surfing and use the search engines. When you think you've found a good niche, do some searches and make sure you aren't the only person that thinks so.

Next, do some looking to see if you can find TGPs that specialize in that niche. Look for toplists, linklists, directories or any sites that you can use to promote the site that either focus on that niche or at least have a category for it. Once you're sure you can get targeted traffic, find a sponsor with a website that features your chosen niche, and go make some money. And when you see someone post on a message board asking "What's the Best Niche?", tell them 'teens' and 'big tits'.

One of the most popular ways to make money in the adult Internet business -- especially for newbies -- is building and submitting TGP galleries. It's not difficult to learn to make them and once you get a system down and have a stock of templates, they can be built in a matter of minutes. They are also cheap to produce and if you use the free content provided by the sponsor you're promoting, they cost nothing but your time (and bandwidth). There is a drawback though. They won't make you any money unless they get a lot of traffic.

I would have to write a book to explain all the details of building good galleries and learning how to submit them properly so that you will be successful, but I did write a chapter on TGPs and TGP galleries in the Klixxx University Newbie Guide that you will find useful if you're new to the business. However, in today's blog entry I thought I'd briefly go over a good way to get things rolling. Please keep in mind that although getting traffic to your galleries is probably the hardest part of the process, all the traffic in the world won't help you if you don't know how to build galleries that convert, and that will take time and practice to achieve.

Let's assume that you've got several (15 to 30) gallery templates built and you're ready to start seriously submitting and by seriously I mean one or two galleries per day. The next step is to actually submit the galleries, but most TGPs will require you to place their recips (small button links) at the top of your galleries. You can usually place 3 to 4 recips on each gallery but, if you're submitting 100 galleries a day, you are probably starting to think this is going to be a full time job. Enter the auto submitter.

There are a few good auto submitters on the market, but I recommend Advanced Submitter. With it, you will be able to create the necessary copies of your galleries to hold all the recips and add those recips to each gallery automatically in a matter of minutes. To find out more about how an auto submitter works I suggest you visit the Advanced Submitter website.

By using an auto submitter in auto mode, you will be able to submit your galleries to hundreds of small TGPs that are listed in the submitters database without actually visiting each site to do it. It is also possible to use the auto submitter in manual mode to submit to TGPs that you have partner accounts with that will not allow you to auto submit to them.

What you're going to quickly find once you get started is that using an auto submitter and submitting to 500 TGPs a day is not going to make you rich. It might not even make your car payment. What you need is what are called 'partner' accounts. Without them, except for the small TGPs that are just getting started and will accept auto submissions or give out partner accounts to anyone that asks, your chances of getting your galleries listed on anything approaching a regular basis is slim at best.

For those of you that are just getting started, getting partner accounts with the big TGPs for free is just not a possibility. They already have more partners than they need. Once you've been doing this for a while and can build very good galleries and use good content (not the free stuff provided by your partners) you might eventually get some decent partner accounts but it will be a slow process.

So, how in the world do you get partner accounts if there aren't any to be had at the TGPs that will actually send thousands of hits a day to your galleries? There are two ways that I recommend. The first, is to pay for partner accounts. You'll need to be cautious though and if your galleries don't convert, you'll lose money for sure. Most of the large TGPs are now charging a fee for a partner account which is a good thing for newbies because it levels the playing field and gives you a chance to get accounts where you normally would have never been able to before. The problem is that the TGPs make no guarantees and I've heard stories that many are overselling and don't have enough daily spots to get everyone listed. One TGP I would definitely suggest to anyone is my friend Shemp's site which is coincidentally called Shemp.

The second option is to use a new program called the Partner Requester, which allows you to request partner accounts at more than 1200 TGPs and MGPs, automatically. Using an auto submitter along with a serious plan to get as many partner accounts as possible, you'll find that it won't take long to actually start making some money.

The next step in the process will be to manually request partner accounts with larger and larger TGPs and once you're confident that your galleries will convert and make enough money to cover your bandwidth bill and still leave you with a profit, you'll be able to move up to the next level and start paying for partner accounts and eventually even buying spots on the TGPs.

Playing the TGP game can be very frustrating and I'm not guaranteeing that you'll make money, but by starting with a real plan and understanding a bit about how the game is actually played, you will have a lot better chance than most and hopefully I've been able to smooth out the learning curve for you a bit.

I've always enjoyed participating in the live chat rooms during the YNOT radio shows -- although I don't have the time to do it as often as I'd like anymore -- but I always thought it would be nice to have a place to go for live chats with other webmasters at other times as well.

What I'm hoping for is to achieve something as close as possible to a friendly get together at a coffee shop where adult webmasters can get together to chat, ask questions and share ideas in real time. Using instant messaging services like ICQ is nice but doesn't allow for a single conversation with several webmasters at once. So, I decided to give it a try and started a chat room. It's java based and seems to work very smoothly in FF and IE and the people that have checked it out seem to like it.

Webmasters can stop in any time and chat with anyone in the room but we'll also have a few scheduled chats during the week as well as periodic topic specific chats. The schedule will be listed on the website.

Stop by and check it out and I'd love to hear feedback and suggestions. Click here for our new Live Adult Webmaster Chat.

Writing is something you should have learned in school. I'm not suggesting that everyone should be capable of writing a novel, that is an art, but knowing the difference between there, their and they're -- for example -- is not. Anyone with a moderate level of intelligence should know how to spell, use punctuation and proper grammar and if they don't, I have to assume they either aren't too bright, didn't pay attention in school or are just plain lazy. Right or wrong, I tend to base my opinion of their professionalism on how they write an email, an ICQ message, webpage, blog or post on a message board.

First impressions mean a lot in business and if I meet you in person and you're dressed like a slob, have poor communication skills and don't look me in the eye when you're talking to me, I make some immediate assessments about your character, intelligence level and business sense. Those may not necessarily be completely accurate, but, taken as a whole, my assessment of you and whether you're someone I'm interested in doing business with will largely be affected by my first impressions and I'm usually pretty accurate when I rely on my gut instincts.

Those of us that work in the adult industry often don't meet many of the people we do business with face-to-face so we have to base our impressions on other things. When I read a post on a message board or an email and it's filled with typos, uses little or no punctuation and has the grammatical style of a third grader, I am going to immediately form an impression about the person that wrote it and it won't be good. At the very least I'll assume they're lazy. How hard is it to write something in a word processor that has a built in spell checker, copy it and then paste it into a post on a message board? I'm probably more anal about this than others and reread all of my posts before I hit the 'post' button and then read it again once it's posted, frequently using the 'edit' command to fix something I missed the first time.

I think something that is pervasive in this industry -- and more so than in others -- is a lack of professionalism. It doesn't take a college education to make money with adult websites and in many cases, it doesn't require the website owner to do business with others, but for those of you that hope to develop business relationships with others in this industry to further your success, please, take a little time to read over your posts or emails before you send them and for goodness sake, bookmark Dictionary.com and look a word up if you're unsure how to spell it.

Note: I realize that this is the World Wide Web and that means there are many for whom English is not their first language, and in those cases I always make allowances.

What's in a name? In the case of a domain name, quite a lot. It can potentially have a big impact on your success. The problem is that most of the good ones are already taken, and I'm sure you've discovered that if you were hoping to find a name like Sex.com, BigBoobs.com or FreePorn.com.

Why would a domain name like Sex.com be better than BigAlsAwesomeTitParade.com? First of all, it's short, which makes it easy to remember, but there are other very important differences. With a name like Sex.com you get lots of free type-in traffic. Several years ago it was even more valuable because at that time if someone simply typed the word 'sex' into their browser's address bar -- whether they included the www or the .com or not -- they ended up at Sex.com. That has changed and now when you type 'sex' into the address bar in Firefox, you end up at http://www.sxetc.org/ because it's a non porn site for teens. If you type 'sex' in your Internet Explorer address bar you end up at the search results page of MSN just as it appears you do for any word or phrase that does not include the .com. However, when I typed the words 'big boobs' in the Firefox address bar I ended up at http://www.lanasbigboobs.com/main.php. I imagine that at some point Firefox will fix that though as soon as MSN, Yahoo or Google make them a lucrative offer.

The type-in traffic a website does receive from surfers that type in something like Sex.com out of curiosity can be quite substantial, just as it is for any website owner that is lucky enough to have gotten one of these golden domain names. Mainstream sites would see the same benefits. Can you imagine how much type-in traffic sites like Books.com, Cars.com, and RealEstate.com get? My point is illustrated by the amazing amounts that are being paid to purchase domains such as these. Business.com was recently sold for $8 million. According to Great Domains, they've received a bid of $10 million for the domain name, America.com.

Another very important aspect to consider when choosing a good domain name is SEO (search engine optimization). Search engines place a heavy emphasis on the keywords that appear in a site's domain name. Each search engine uses different algorithms and places a different value on where keywords appear, but they all weight the keywords in the domain name heavily. Another important thing to be aware of is something called 'keyword density'. If the words 'shaved pussies' appear 10 times on a page with 300 words, the density is going to be much higher than if the page has 1500 words. I'm not going to go any deeper into this today because I'll go into greater detail in my upcoming SEO blog entry, but you probably get the basic idea. If the words 'shaved pussies' appear in the title of your site, in the body text and in the domain name, you will have a much better shot at receiving good placement when a surfer searches for 'shaved pussies' on a search engine. So, if the focus of your website is 'shaved pussies' it is obviously going to be important to pick a domain name that contains those keywords.

Some of you may have heard that hyphenated domain names, like teens-with-tiny-tits.com work better on the SEs, but in my experience that is not true. To test my assertion, simply try your favorite searches on Google and notice the highlighted words in the domain names of the sites that come up. Using my example, 'teens with tiny tits', no hyphenated domains appear on the first page.

Whatever you do, DO NOT register a hyphenated domain name because you can't get the non-hyphenated version. The same goes for registering a .net, .org, .biz, etc. If TeensWithTinyTits.com is not available, look for another name, because if you register Teens-With-Tiny-Tits.com or TeensWithTinyTits.biz, I guarantee you that you will send most of any type-in traffic you'll get to the guy that owns the non-hyphenated domain.

Just exactly how does one go about finding a good domain nowadays? Well, you can plop down in your chair, open Domain Direct, or whatever registrar you like to use and start typing in names as you come up with them, but I don't recommend it unless you really don't have anything better to do. Considering the fact that every short, keyword dense domain name has already been registered, the logical thing to do is to look for expired domains. Some webmasters even get on waiting lists and hope that someday the owner will forget to reregister or for some reason will just not renew. I like to use a website called Deleted Domains, which allows me to search for domain names by using keywords and narrowing my searches by allowing me to select more than one keyword, the number of letters, etc.

As most of you have probably heard by now, XBiz has decided to start yet another adult webmaster convention called the XBiz Summer Forum, July 12-14, in Las Vegas.

I'm pretty sure that Alex Helmy has an agenda and it's not only to provide another convention, but to undermine the other two summer shows, Cybernet in San Diego in June and Internext Florida in August. Sure some sponsors send reps to every major show and will hit all three, but for the average webmaster, it is necessary to pick and choose the shows they'll attend.

Personally, I like to go to three or four shows a year. In the last year I attended Cybernet in June, Internext Florida in August, The Island Gathering, Curacao in October and the Phoenix Forum a few weeks ago. I currently have plans to attend Cybernet in June where I will be one of the panelists at the Newbie Seminar and I will be at Internext Florida in August. I will not be shoe horning the XBiz show in the middle.

I just read a thread on YNOT where a member had posted looking for some content and since he's a friend I took a look to see if I could help. It wasn't until I'd read some of the replies that I realized this was a thread that was originally posted on Monday Aug 23, 2004, and had been bumped by a content provider to spam their site.

Bumping a thread that is a year and 8 months old? WTF? Look, I don't have a problem with bumping threads that have fallen down the page to bring new life to them, or bumping a thread that you run across that is a few days old because you hadn't been to the board recently and wanted to add your two cents, but when a thread is weeks, months, or years old, leave it alone and start a new one.

For those of you that don't understand message board etiquette, let me point out that you won't endear yourself to the community if you go around bumping old threads, for any reason, spam or not. Sure there will always be plenty of new members that may not have seen the thread in the first place, but anyone that was around when the thread was first started probably did and chances are we won't remember it so we'll waste our time reading until we either notice the original date or someone flames the bumper.

Two lessons here and the first is one that I obviously need to do more often and that is to always take a quick look at the post date of the first post in a thread and the second is, don't bump old threads, damnit.

Will we ever have a definitive answer as to the legal meaning of obscenity in the U.S.? Just think how easy it would make things if instead of leaving it up to some ambiguous 'community standards' we actually had a federal legal definition to go by.

Personally I think there's a big difference between 'pornography' and 'obscenity' but in too many cases it seems that the two words are used interchangeably and incorrectly. There is nothing illegal about pornography unless it's obscene, but what is considered obscene in Los Angeles, CA is considerably different than what is considered obscene in Wichita Falls, TX.

Here are some things that are considered obscene in most U.S communities: scat, pissing, fisting, double penetration, extreme bondage and bukkake. Sure, I find scat disgusting, but I'm not sure I'd consider it obscene. For those of you that like to look at pictures or videos depicting defecation, who am I to tell you that you can't watch it in the privacy of your own home any more than I want someone telling me I can't watch two attractive ladies having lesbian sex. To each their own is an adage I like to live by, unless it's harming someone in some way.

Realistically, the only things that I think can be considered obscene in the way of pornography are child pornography and actual rape, but we all know that since our government is supposed to be a democracy and a democratic country is governed by the ideals of the majority, I'm not naive enough to believe that we'll ever convince the majority of the people in the U.S. that pissing and extreme facials are not obscene, but if the government decides that websites that contain that kind of content is illegal everywhere and not just in certain communities, at least we'd know what to avoid.

Of course, just because some things may be considered obscene in the U.S. doesn't mean that other countries will agree. Hell, the legal age of consent in Canada is 16 and of course then there's Denmark. So, short of blocking IPs in the U.S. -- which is apparently being considered at this time in Australia -- the government can't stop anyone from viewing questionable material and if that's the case, why bother trying?

If you provide a service for adult webmasters, the reasons for attending an adult trade show or convention are obvious, but in my opinion, anyone that considers themselves to be an adult webmaster should attend at least one convention a year.

This year's Phoenix Forum wrapped up last week and it was one of the best shows I've ever attended with over 1,400 webmasters registered and filling up the entire Mission Palms Hotel and spilling over into several other nearby hotels. The venue was absolutely perfect with plenty of places to network, which is the number one reason for attending a show like this. I'm already looking forward to next year's show.

The next shows I'll be attending, and I recommend to anyone that hasn't been before, are Cybernet in San Diego, June 8-11, and Internext Florida, August 4-6. If you've never been to an adult webmaster convention before, those are two excellent shows to get your feet wet at.

There are lots of good reasons for adult webmasters to attend these types of shows, the most obvious being networking. You may know a lot of webmasters from the message boards, but putting a face and a handshake with those names goes a long way towards deepening friendships and doing more business together. For new webmasters, the seminars that run throughout the conventions are an invaluable way to learn from the experts. It also gives you the opportunity to meet lots of new people, both experienced and novice alike.

Most conventions last 3 days, with seminars and other events running throughout the day and parties and dinners during the evenings. They offer a perfect opportunity to unwind and have some fun while networking and doing plenty of business at the same time.

If you've never been to an adult webmaster convention before, I highly encourage you to do so and look forward to meeting all of you when you do.

For those of you that have adult websites, I'm sure the issue of age verification and warning pages is something you've all considered and hopefully most of you use. Certainly if you live outside of the U.S., the necessity of such a page may not be a legal issue, but I'm sure that most responsible adult webmasters don't want children looking at their websites, even if it's only because they just use up your bandwidth and can't buy anything from you anyway.

Many of you have been led to believe that there is currently no law in the U.S. that requires us to use warning pages, but most states do have laws that prohibit the sale of explicit materials to minors, and some specifically include the Internet. It's probable that most of those laws would not hold up in court, but it's still possible to be prosecuted.

The closest the federal government has come is the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) which has been shot down twice by the Supreme Court, albeit by a slim margin the last time. The idea behind COPA is to "identify technological or other methods that will help reduce access by minors to material that is harmful to minors on the Internet." Basically what that means is that they want every website that contains material that they deem to be harmful to minors to use some form of age verification system to prevent a surfer from entering the site without first obtaining a password, which would only be issued after they somehow proved their age. Pay sites do that by requiring members to pay for access and credit cards are the preferred method of payment. As we all probably know, that isn't a foolproof method, but it's the best one we've got for now.

The thing is that COPA seeks to make the same requirement of any website that they deem harmful to minors, even free sites, like TPGs, galleries, freesites, linklists, etc. The idea of expecting a surfer to provide their credit card information to access a TGP gallery is ludicrous to most of us, but it's a possiblity if COPA ever passes. Fortunately, as of now, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that COPA is unconstitutional, but the decision this last time was only decided by a majority of one. The next time it could just as easily pass by that single vote if only one more justice decides to vote in favor of the law.

In my opinon (you knew you were going to get it), every website that contains adult content should have a warning page as it's index page and the better the warning, the better for you legally. To my knowledge, no one has been prosecuted for not using a warning page or allowing minors to access their website so we have no way of knowing whether the simple warning that we see on most websites is even close to adequate, but the attorneys I've talked to say that the more ammunition they have, if they ever need to defend someone in court, the better.

Would a simple paragraph stating that the site contains adult content and you must be 18 to enter be sufficient? Not likely, although it's pretty much the only option we see used by free sites. However, a script was developed by attorney Larry Walters that includes a signature field and a drop down menu to select the age. He obviously makes no guarantees, but he does believe that it may hold up if ever tested in court. The script used to be available only to his clients, but I believe he is now making it available for a fee. For those of you that like the idea but don't want to pay for it, I have developed a similar script, although mine uses an age field that must be filled in rather than a drop down menu. The script is free and is available here.

One key feature of my script is a small bit of code that you can add (it's optional) to every interior page of your website (free sites, since the interior pages of pay sites are password protected) and will send anyone that lands on any page -- for the first time -- to your index page where they must complete the name and age fields (name is optional) in order to access the site. This means that you can still optimize the interior pages of your website for the search engines yet still make sure everyone sees your warning page as well. The idea behind the name and age fields is that although it's a simple matter for a minor to use a fake name and age, it can be shown in court that they showed 'intent' just as a store owner's attorney would use if a minor used a fake ID to purchase beer.

In addition to a good warning page, I also strongly suggest that all adult webmasters register their sites with ICRA and add the tags to their pages that help parents use filters to prevent their children from accessing your sites.

Everyone that surfs for porn buys mainstream products too and although lots of them are proficient at finding plenty of porn for free and may never actually use their credit card to pay for it, that doesn't mean they don't shop on the Internet, so why not take advantage of that fact?

Many of us use age warning disclaimers on our index pages and most of us have both an 'enter' and an 'exit' link, but how many of you link that 'exit' link to Yahoo or Google? Of course, I can't tell you how many times I've seen webmasters linking their 'exit' page to Disney and let's just say, that linking to Yahoo might be a waste of potentially profitable traffic, but linking to Disney is just plain dumb, unless you really like lawyers. Now, I'm not suggesting that you might be losing thousands of dollars a year in possible income by not linking your 'exit' links to a revenue producing website of some kind, but if your site gets a decent amount of search engine traffic, there are definitely surfers that didn't intend to land on a porn site that will click your exit link, especially newbie surfers who aren't familiar with using the back button. So, don't just give that traffic to Yahoo for free, exit them to a mainstream site that you're an affiliate of.

Consider for a moment the fact that the vast majority of surfers to our hubs and TGPs are looking for free porn and probably won't pay to join a paysite to see what they know they can find plenty of for free. Does that mean that they don't have a credit card or arent' willing to use it to buy something on the Internet? Of course not. It simply means that with the huge amount of free porn available, the majority of them will get off on the free content and we won't make money from them, it doesn't mean that someone else won't make money from them on a non-porn website of some kind.

What kinds of things do most of us promote to our surfers besides paysites? Most of us promote things like adult toys and dvds, penis enlargement pills, evidence removers, adult personals, and casinos. Why? They seem like logical choices because they too are 'adult' related and most of them don't have rules against linking to them from adult websites. I think a lot of us assume that because a surfer is on our site looking for porn, that they're only going to be interested in adult related things, but that's not true, anymore than it's true that someone that goes to a grocery store will only buy groceries. Grocery stores make a huge amount of money on 'impluse' items and products that none of us would consider groceries, like magazines, batteries, cigarettes, children's toys and school supplies, engine oil and the list goes on. The same is true on your adult sites. If a surfer lands on your site looking for porn and sees an ad for chocolates or jewelry and it's close to Valentine's Day, or his anniversay or his girlfriend's birthday is coming up and he hasn't gotten them a gift yet, BAM, you just made a sale to a guy that came to your site with his dick in his hand and probably would have left you with nothing but a higher bandwidth bill.

Okay, hopefully you've got the basic idea, but now many of you are thinking that this sounds good, but you've heard that mainstream sites won't accept traffic from adult sites and will actually dump you if they catch you doing it. You're absolutely right. That is true of most mainstream affliate programs, but not all and I have a solution that will make it possible for you to use any mainstream program. Don't link directly to the mainstream site.

The easiest way to link to a mainstream site is by using an intermediate page. Register a domain name with a mainstream sounding name and create pages on that site that link to the mainstream sites and then link from your adult sites to those intermediate pages. Let's say you want to put an ad for cigars on your adult site, but the sponsor site won't allow you to link directly to them from your adult site. Build your own cigar page on your mainstream domain and use the sponsor provided banners and graphics. If they provide ads for individual products, use those too and link them directly to that product. If any of you are an affiliate of Amazon.com or PECash, you'll know exaclty what I'm talking about because they provide ways to link directly to individual products.

You'll want to be careful and don't use the sponsors actual graphics or ads on your adult site, because that may still break their TOS, even though you won't be linking directly to them. Some of them just won't allow their name to be associated with adult sites. Use stock photos of cigars and build your own banners and ads or use text links on your adult site to link to your mainstream page and then use the sponsor's graphics on that page.

Please note, that cigars is just an example. You'll know better than I what types of products and services will work better on your site. Visit Commission Junction at http://www.cj.com for a huge list of affiliate programs you can join and I'm sure you'll find plenty of mainstream products and services to promote on your adult sites and immediately increase your conversion rates. Remember, your adult site is just the bait. Once you've attracted the surfer, make sure you exhaust every possible option to sell him something before you let him leave the cage.