** Continued From: Taking the Paysite Plunge! - Part #1
After your tour is designed you will need to work on the members area. How you set up your member's area is completely up to you, but you should have one main page that links to all of your content. You should have a nice graphic title that says "SITE NAME MEMBERS AREA" or something of that nature. And I recommend using text links to the member features instead of graphics. It costs less in bandwidth and is usually easier to read and loads much faster for the surfer.
Just try to make the members area easy to navigate, and be sure to include a link for surfers to cancel their memberships on the main members page. You don't want to risk getting a chargeback from someone who just wanted to cancel a trial. Remember, too many chargebacks can be deadly to your business! Also include your e-mail address so that members can e-mail you for support if they have problems.
Now, if you aren't going to offer a partnership program, all that is left is setting up billing. You need to find a credit card processor or a third-party billing company. I usually refrain from recommending specific products or services in my articles because I don't like to appear biased, but I must recommend ProBilling or CCBill if you decide to use third-party billing. They are easy to set up, very helpful, have EXCELLENT 24/7 service for webmasters and don't charge an unreasonable amount for processing fees. Third party billing companies will handle your credit card processing for you, also handle cancellations, chargebacks, etc. for you in most cases. They charge an average of 15% of your membership fees to cover their costs, but some are as low as 8% and some as high as 25%!
You can also choose to get a merchant account of your own, but unless you have very good credit and are ready to pay some pretty high fees for start up costs and software, I don't recommend it. Plus, if you go that route, you will have to handle all of the financial aspects yourself, or hire someone to do it, and that's a big hassle. I also want to add another personal endorsement, or I should say anti-endorsement.
Now you're set to start marketing your site unless you are opening a partnership site, which I well get into in a moment. If you are not opening a partnership program and plan to market the site yourself, you can get started marketing. Submit your site to all the search engines you can. Submit it to any link sites that accept paysites, unless you'd rather not put up the required reciprocal link. Submit to any no-recip sites that accept paysites. Build numerous free sites and TGP sites to advertise your paysite. Advertise your site just like you would a sponsor. Use banners, full-page ads, text links, etc. And that's about all you can do! Once the traffic starts coming in and the signups start to happen, you're going to have your hands full doing customer support and handling problems!
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If you decide to start a partnership program you will need to go through some extra steps. If you choose ProBilling or CCBill to process your signups, they have a partnership programs built in.
All you have to do is go though their steps and set it up. They will help you with this. You will need to decide how much you want to pay your partners, usually 50% or so. Also, you need to decide how much of rebills you want to pay. Usually 50% again. You will need to design a site for your webmaster program, and you may want to get a separate URL for this.
For example, if your site is sneezefetish.com then you might register sneezedollars.com. Otherwise you could just use sneezefetish.com/webmasters as your partner URL. On the partner site you will need to add a link for new webmasters to sign up, your e-mail address in case partners have problems, a link to promotional idea and materials like banners, full page ads, and anything else you want to add, and possibly some tips on where your webmasters can market their free sites, how to get started, etc.
Also, you may want to offer free content, especially if your site would be in a niche that would be difficult for potential webmasters to get content for. If you want to offer free content, you will probably have to pay your content provider extra in order to get the rights to give out the content to webmasters in exchange for them advertising your program. Contact them and tell them how many pictures you plan to offer your webmasters, and ask how much a license for this type of use will cost. It may be pretty high, but it is worth it if you can offer webmasters an incentive to use your program.
In today's adult Internet industry, competition is very high and getting partners to advertise your site may be difficult. Anything you can offer that other programs don't is a big help!
Well, there you have the basics. It's going to be a long, hard road, but there's gold at the end of the rainbow if you know where to look and how to get there!