Ever thought about starting your own site? Here are the most important things that you need to know.

We’ve talked a lot about winning contests and selling your naughty amateur videos to other sites, but we haven’t talked at all about one of the obvious way to earn money online with your homemade porn: starting your own website.

It’s true, there is a ton of competition out there in online porn videos, but there is money to be made by starting your own homemade porn website. It may not be easy at first (never believe anyone who says it is!) but it is possible if you work at it.

We’re going to cover the basic outline of what you’ll need to have in order to get something like this going as well as what it could cost. In the future we’ll be talking in more detail about this and looking at some couples who have succeeded in creating their own DIY porn sites.

The Basics

Find a Niche

Before you get a domain name, before you get a host and before you get that fancy DV camera, you should probably give some thought about what kind of homemade porn you intend to sell.

You’ve probably seen the different categories that are offered on a typical porn video site, things like big tits, handjobs, MILF’S, teens, etc. Each of these is a “niche” topic that has been proven to attract viewers. You and your partner need to brainstorm about what niche you guys could offer. This is important because it will help you to find a more specific audience of people who would like to buy your DIY porn.

Another way to make this idea clearer is for you to do the following. Go to Google and search for “porn video“. I got back 49.6 million results when I just did that search. Now go search for “porn handjob video“. I got 2.3 million results. If you search for “porn glove handjob video” you get 174,000 results.

So, the more general of a topic we search for, the more competition that we can expect to have – “porn video” is huge. The more specific we got, the less competition that we had, “porn glove handjob video” was much cozier.

We suggest that you have a look at this list of some niches together with your partner to help getting your creative juices flowing:

amateur, anal,Asian, ass, babe, big dick, big tits, blond, blowjob, bondage, brunette, bukakke, ebony, fetish, funny, group, handjob, hardcore, interracial, mature, MILF, orgy, point of view (POV), public, red head, striptease, teen, toys

There are many more, to be sure. Think about the things that you and your partner are into, what kind of physical traits you’ve got and go from there. Don’t feel restrained to one specific niche, you can certainly be involved in more than one.

Register a Domain Name

A domain is simply the name that someone types into their browser to land on your page, for example www.homemade-porn-stars.com is our domain. Hopefully you’ve given some thought about your niche and this might help in choosing a domain name.

At the time of writing this domain: www.homemade-handjobs.info, is currently free (someone already has the .com domain) and this is a good example of having your niche in the name “handjobs” is the focus, “homemade” makes it more specific and using .info instead of .com makes it almost sound like you could make it an erotic site about learning how to give a good handjob. Not a bad idea for a site, actually.

Another possibility is to just come up with a stage name (go to your local strip club if you run out of ideas).  “Bunny Johnson“, might be a fun stage name…and www.bunnyjohnson.com is currently free. Or you could just use your real name. In both cases, the idea is to register a domain named after you.

There are usually several places to go to register domain names, although you can often get one registered at the same place that you host your website. I’d recommend looking here for names at godaddy.com.

They also usually have some pretty cheap prices.

Get A Web hosting Plan:

This is the place online where your website and all the pictures and videos will reside. Think of it as renting space on someone’s hard-drive. Most of the hosts that you may have heard of, Bluehost, go daddy and all those guys do not host adult content and if they catch you with a sex site on their computers, they’ll delete your website and cancel your account…with no refund.

Adult hosts can be really expensive because there is huge business built up around it. Don’t get yourself talked into buying a hosting plan that you don’t need. You need to keep on eye on bandwidth and how much space you have to host your videos and pictures. Everything else is not as important to begin with.

We are personally hosted here and are very happy with it. They have unlimited space and bandwidth, which rocks!

There are more factors to consider here, but that’s a more detailed conversation for another day.

Website Software & Design

These two topic are intertwined. There are, in essence hundreds of ways to get a website created and set-up. Many folks use the “web page wizards” offered by their hosts, others by pre-made templates and only make a few minor changes to them. Some folks go all out and invest a few thousand bucks in getting a custom site designed.

Whatever way you chose, there are some things besides how the site looks that you should consider. These factors should play a role in your decision about what software you choose.

- how easy is it to update? Keep in mind that if someone is going top be paying to see your videos and pictures, you’ll probably want to update the content on your site regularly. If you have to talk to your web designer each time because it’s so complicated, then it doesn’t matter how nice it looks.

- how well does it index in the search engines? One of your best sources of potential viewers will be Google, Yahoo and MSN. There is a whole esoteric science involved in getting your website to show up in the top ranking when someone searches for your niche. It’s called “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) and we could talk about it for days. The thing that you need to know right now is that some software for creating websites is better at being recognized and indexed by the search engines than others. For example Flash websites are often really visually spectacular, but the search engines have a hard time recognizing what content they have.

To cut a long conversation very short, we recommend going for a software/code called “WordPress”. It’s pretty easy to install and operate, search engines love it, adding new content is a snap, it is very flexible in regards how it can be formated to look…and it’s free. We use it and are really happy with it.

Membership and Payment Software

To make sure that only people who have paid have access to your homemade porn videos, you’ll need two additional pieces of software/code: one to accept payments from people and one to hide your content from those who have not paid. Luckily, there are a lot of folks out there who offer this kind of thing.

As with hosting, not everyone deals with porn site, no matter how hot your videos and pictures are. Many businesses are just afraid to be involved with you if you sell adult oriented material. Therefore, you will need to ensure that you have services that accepted and have worked in the adult business world.

How much will it all costs?

We’ll go ahead and create an example of how much everything would cost, using the software and services that we prefer to work with. You could change some things around to make it cheaper or more expensive, but this is hwo we’d do it if we were going to start our own DIY porn site:

niche: Car Blowjobs (Brad loves road head) – $0
Domain: www.roadhead.com /registered with host – $0
Hosting: Arvixe, (Example package)  -  $320
Website: WordPress  – $0
Design: Woo Themes  – $79
Logo: 99Desings  - $100
Membership: - $150
Payment: – $0

Total to get started: – $700

Wrapping it up

You can make a tidy sum of money each month by simply participating in contests and shared revenue sites like Watchme and Xtube (AFFILIATE LINKS)...it’s what we do. But, there also the potential to really step-up your earning power by running your own private porn site.

It does take an investment in time and money up front, but you’ll see that the costs to getting your own online porn business up and running really isn’t that much. We’ve just scratched the surface of this topic in this quick outline; there is much more to discuss.

Go ahead and leave your questions below and we’ll be certain to make address your themin our next articles about this.

Welcome back, Sexy! Make sure to read our popular Make Money with your Homemade Porn section. You won't regret it ;-)