For those that don’t know, Picposts were one of the earliest sources of free porn on the net. Long before free sites, link lists, TGP/MGP galleries, and of course, tube sites.
The concept is simple. You submit a picture (or more) along with a description and a banner or text link pointing back to wherever you want to direct the surfer. Most, but not all, of the picposts will want you to put a link on your site pointing back to them as a traffic trade of sorts.
Picposts have to be one of the least popular sources of traffic these days. But there is still good enough reasons to spend a little time with them each day. Mainly, the people who surf picposts are generally more ignorant surfers who happen to spend money. Or, I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s possible that they don’t have high speed connections, and they really aren’t able to view anything but pictures. Finally, professional images tend to be of higher quality than videos, especially screen shots, and there are even surfers out there who specifically like looking at high quality images over crappy quality flash videos for example…it doesn’t really matter why they do it, the important thing is that they still do.
I’m not going to provide an exact example of what to do with your project as the possibilities are endless and up to you. It really depends on how much time you want to put into it. Sure, you can be lazy and just submit to picposts that don’t require a reciprocal link back, and send them directly to the program you’re promoting. But there are more effective ways to manipulate this traffic. I’m going to explain the thought process I go through when setting one of these up.
Take a look at some picposts, and pay attention to where the banners lead. Are they going directly to a paysite tour? Are they going to what we call a “landing page?” Etc…
I like to send surfers to a landing page for multiple reasons, you will understand why if you read this all the way through. It takes a little longer to set something like this up, but once it’s done, your able to work this page for as long as you want, or until you run out of content to submit. My landing page is generally just a simple html page. I pick my best converting niche, or paysite/program and build it around that.
Ok, so I know what I’m going to promote, so I create a directory like this:
whateverdomain.com/name-of-niche/
This is where everything’s going to stay to keep organized.
Create an index.html page and save it in this directory. This is where your visitors are going to land when they click your links or banners.
Find a good full page ad, or even a half page ad, and put it directly at the top of your page. The more inexperienced, or the truly interested, will generally click right through this ad. That’s good.
Below the top ad, you want to create a somewhat busy looking page for the people who actually scroll down. We want to give the impression that they have arrived at a page that is full of content and resources about whatever niche you’re promoting, without actually giving much away at all.
Toplists
Toplists are scripts set up on other websites that allow you to trade traffic with them and others. You create a account on their site, and they give you a special code for you to link back. This code keeps track of how many people visit the toplist from your site. The more your site sends, the higher up the toplist your banner goes, hopefully resulting in more traffic from the toplist to your site. A lot of them require banners of 468×80, and/or 468×60, some even require odd sized banners. You will need to upload these to your server before creating your account. For a project like this, I generally use banners already made for the site I’m promoting by the affiliate programs. But you can always create your own if you really want to stand out. Just avoid using banners that have images that look like thumbnails or media players on them.
Navigate to your favorite search engines and enter the phrase “Your-Niche Toplist”. You should have no problem finding them unless your niche is extremely obscure. Which can easily happen. You basically want to join the ones that look like they have traffic, and don’t appear to mess with the surfer by installing crap or whatever. I generally tend to join about 10-20 toplists if I can find them.
Directly below your full page ad, put text links with your specific link code to the toplists. You can arrange this however you want. I tend to keep it simple and sweet. People who bypass your ad at the top will eventually click these links. The more traffic you get, the higher up the toplists you go.
Rest of the page.
Below your toplist links. You basically need to add a bunch of crap to make it seem that there’s content on the page. This is where you can actually have some fun with all those stupid ad tools your affiliate programs make, that you really can’t use anywhere else. I tend to evenly distribute a mix of ad tools to banners, depending on what’s available. For example, you could have a banner, then a bunch of links to free hosted galleries, then another banner, then a bunch of hosted flash videos, etc… It’s completely up to you. Just keep all of the ads relevant to your niche. You give the impression that you’re giving away free content, while the entire page is nothing but an advertisement for the niche you’re promoting.
After you fill up your page with a bunch of ads and teaser content, add another banner ^_^. Then it’s time to place the recips to your picposts that you’re going to be submitting to.
There really isn’t that many functioning picposts out there as there used to be. This part won’t be that difficult. The amount of places you’re going to be submitting to, depends on the niche you’re promoting. As with the list of no recip adult directories I’ve added to this site, I may eventually make a list of active picposts for everyone to have easier access. To find them, do a search for “niche picpost” or even better… “Webmasters: Click here to add your link and image!” This is a footprint that is in most picpost scripts. Some picposts show the date the images have been posted. Keep an eye out for ones that had their last images listed back in 2003-2005. These are all broken, but for some reason, someone is still paying the hosting bill.
I usually put the recips towards the bottom of my landing page, then use the landing page as a tool for submitting the pics. Click the recip, it takes you to the picpost, go to the submit page, and of course submit the info.
Put some more ads, links to your other sites, then copy and paste those links to the toplists you signed up for. This is basically a last chance effort to get a click from people who have scrolled all the way to the bottom. Now you’re good to go.
I’ve never spent a lot of time on a project like this. I crank it out as quickly as possible. When I do this, the landing page is generally…ugly. But feel free to make it as attractive as possible. It’s your page, you can pretty much do what you want. You can even add popups, pounders, exit consoles, etc… Just be sure that you’re not breaking the rules of the picposts, or toplists you’re working with.
Once you have your page setup, you really don’t have to spend much time on this at all. It’s then just a matter of submitting some pictures every day. I generally find myself doing this with my morning cup of coffee and I’m done. Once you get the hang of it, you start to think about even more ways to exploit the traffic. It’s also easy enough where just because one niche doesn’t work, something else just might, and cloning the process is super easy.
Once you find a niche that does work well, it’s easy to automate the process with something like imacros. Fireform also helps out a lot with this. You can also help perpetuate this traffic by doing a search for the picpost script that most people use… The Shaven Ferrett Picpost Script. The developer stopped supporting it years ago, but it’s still available if you just search around a bit. And it’s free. If you end up installing it, let me know and I’ll add yours to my submission process…and the picpost list once I get around to making it…
If there’s something I’ve missed, leave a comment and I’ll try to clear it up.
