Dream Weavers: Teleteria Makes Internet Dreams Come True

With offices in New York and Connecticut, and a staff of 15 full-time and part-time employees, Website design and hosting company Teleteria (www.teleteria.net) is moving ever closer to their goal of establishing long-term relationships with their customers by providing 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week service.

"Teleteria is the world's largest provider of custom adults turnkey passages," declares Telteria president Jay Servidio. Servidio knows of what he speaks, as he teaches a class called "How to Get Started and Make a Profit in the Adult Internet Industry" at The Learning Annex in New York and Toronto every month.

Since 1995, Teleteria has been providing custom Web design solutions for large and small clients using HTML, Photoshop, and flash. Their experienced team of certified design professionals include HTML coders, graphic artists, writers, and back end application developers who specialize in complex back end database applications. They offer a maintenance plan for regular updates and minor changes, spam filter, chat rooms, message boards, e-commerce via online ordering systems like shopping carts, and can even transfer Websites between different hosting platforms.

"I came into the business in September of 1994 through a very close friend of mine who was very large in the phone sex industry," reminisces Servidio, who for 13 years prior worked for AT&T, MCI, and Sprint, and is a karate enthusiast. "He took me to the ia2000 tradeshow and introduced me to all the players, explaining what they did and how they made their money. The majority of people in the room made their money by offering other people the opportunity to come into the audio sex industry and then skimming a percentage of their minutes without paying them on it. These people pretty much invented the adult Internet industry and they were all doing the exact same thing. What they were saying was, 'Here's some content. Here's a Website. Go and market it, and we'll take care of the billing and give you a percentage of the revenue.' The Webmaster has no control of their money. So the philosophy that we started the company on was, 'We're gonna provide a beautiful Website with a lot of content and hosting and teach them how to market those sites.'"

Yet, once Servidio got into the business, he immediately recognized some of the difficulties of trying to make money on the Net.

"We understood when we started that people are uncomfortable spending money on the Internet. So we offered people a money-back guarantee in writing," he explains. "So if we sell a Website to you for $3,500, you give us a 50 percent deposit with a signed contract. The contract states clearly in black and white that once the site is built, you get to review it. If you love it, you pay the balance. If you want us to make changes, we'll have them done for you in 24 hours. If you hate it, you can have your money back. We're the only company in the industry that will offer that."

Building The Perfect Beast

Teleteria's key product is a custom adult turnkey Website. They will provide you with a custom-designed Website where you own the domain, and the billing company name is set up in your name so you get paid on all of your revenue directly. Your membership section taps into their library of over 100,000 images, and they buy various feeds from other companies. Best of all, the client does not share this profit with Teleteria.

"One of the most important things that we do is we get Webmasters an account directly with the billing company," Servidio notes. "We don't share in their profit so we can't screw them out of their profit. They get their money directly from IBill or CCBill, case closed. So all of our clients get paid on their revenue directly from the billing company."

In addition to building sites, Teleteria offers a variety of virtual hosting plans. Plan 1 includes 50 MB disk space with 50 GB of expandable bandwidth for $24.95 a month, billed annually with no setup fee This includes unlimited FTP access, a free shopping cart, and exclusive control panel with full suite of Web administration tools, a mailing list manager, and free promotion. Plan 2 is $90 per month (40 to 80 GB), Plan 3 is $140 (50 to 100 GB), Plan 3 is $175 (75 to 125 GB), and Plan 4 is $19.95 (250 MB). "As you and your needs grow, we grow with you," Jay says with a smile.

Of course, the bedrock of any Web-based business is its servers, and Teleteria's is built on one hell of a big rock, as theirs are located in the Globix.com building, which happens to be down the street from the Federal Reserve Building. "During 9/11 and the power failure that the East Coast had last summer, our machines were not down for a second," boasts Servidio. Unlike most providers, Globix owns and operates its own Tier 1 Global IP Network, which allows Globix to control resources and deliver network quality and control. Globix closely manages capacity and content delivery across all links on its network to minimize spikes in traffic and ensure that there is always adequate bandwidth available.

Starting Up The Start-up

The first step toward launching a Website is registering a domain name, and Teleteria is an ICANN accredited registrar, offering complete domain registration and management services to make getting and keeping your domain name hassle free. They also offer an automated submission program, which is perfect for getting top listings on major search engines. For even more exposure, they can submit a site to over 1,500 search engines and Web directories worldwide for $689 (for a 12 month period). An automatic meta-tags generator is also included. Plus, if you purchase any annual search engine submission program, Teleteria will renew it for the second and third year at no extra cost.

For $1200 per year, they will even insert meta-tags into all the pages of your Website before submitting to engines and directories. This will rank a site higher as the engines look for meta-tags. Your site will also be listed higher in at least three of the engines, including MSN, AlltheWeb (FAST), Lycos, Google, Metacrawler, Northern Light, Excite, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Overture, iWon, Webcrawler, Alta Vista. They do all this because they are not just building sites for the adult world, but for mainstream, the business world and beyond.

"The type of clients we have are college kids, mom and pop that want to make additional revenue from home, dentists, doctors, lawyers, teachers, politicians, etc. If you pick a category, I've got a client in there," reckons Servidio, who also recently introduced casino sites to the Teleteria list of offerings. "Maybe less than five percent of the Websites we build are for people in the adult entertainment market. The rest are commercial sites. What we cater to is the average guy that knows the Adult Internet market, people looking for alternative sources of revenue."

With a variety of clients comes the need for a variety of designers to customize a wide range of sites.

"All of our designers are Flash and Photoshop certified," he says. "Every site has unique styles, graphics, colors. We use a certain model because it has the best conversion ratio that we've ever come up with, but they all have different domains and are unique. The client has a choice. I can register the domain under you, which means that anybody on earth could look up you and find your home address and phone number, that you've got a porn site. So most of our clients want to register it under Teleteria."

They also guarantee top-notch support. "Clients can call us 24 hours a day on our toll-free 800 number or can e-mail us," he says. "If a client has a problem, they need help with marketing, they will e-mail support and set a phone call appointment for an over-the-phone, online tutorial. We don't just sell the Website and tell people ‘Have a nice day.’ We don't make a big profit on just selling one to five. We want to sell you two or five or 10. And in order to sell you two or five or 10, one of them has to make you money. If it doesn't make you money, it fails, you fail, our business plan fails. So, we have a robust Webmaster resources area. We teach people how to use it."

It's that personal touch that Servidio believes separates Teleteria from the rest of the pack.

"When we sell a Website to a client, we take a 50 percent deposit with a signed agreement. The vice president of production, David Sokorsky, then calls the customer on the phone and they go over the domain and layout of the site. The site gets assigned to a designer and once the customer approves the home page, the rest of the site gets done. This takes about seven days. Then the customer looks at it, approves it, pays his balance, sends in an email with acceptance, we get him fixed with CCBill and the marketing begins."

As smooth as that may sound, Servidio is trying to streamline that process even further. "We're trying to make it even smaller. Just like Ford and General Motors and Chrysler have numbers on how many cars they can assemble in a day, I wonder how many sites can we get off the assembly line in a 24-hour period? We're trying to make our assembly period as short as possible to increase revenue and to get the customers satisfied faster."

The Secret of My Success

What is the secret to Teleteria's success? How have they outlasted much of their competition and blossomed into the mega site builder that are now?

"The object of running a company is not to keep sales flat and maintain a comfortable lifestyle, it's to grow," explains Servidio. "So I set out on a campaign on January 1 of this year to grow. As of June 30 of this year, I have sold more Websites to clients than all 12 months of last year. You have to be as smart as possible."

"The model that he's got for turnkey adult sites and turnkey casino sites is tremendous," enthuses vice president of sales and marketing Adam Dreyfus, a former TechTV talent booker. "The goal here is to make Teleteria the absolute best turnkey company on the planet, for casino, for adult sites, you name it. We're perfectly positioned to take advantage of that and constantly looking for new revenue streams. I think we've got as good a model as anybody out there for adding bang for the buck, so to speak."

"It's a very competitive market," he continues, "but the good news is you've got 150,000 people a day logging onto the net for the first time in their life and they're all coming to look for porn. But now they're coming on with high-speed models versus 28.8 like 10 years ago, when I first got on. That helps our industry grow a billion dollars a year. So when people use words like saturation, I say there's no such thing because 85 to 90 percent of adult Websites that are online suck. They poorly built. They have little to no content. And the owners have no idea how to market them to make money. So they fail. You can't have saturation. It's an impossibility."

So what does the future hold for Teleteria?

"Where I want to be in five or 10 years is doing exactly what I'm doing now on a larger scale with more employees," says Servidio. "My goal is to continue to provide A1 service to our clients in design and hosting. I'm creating wealth for people. Not just our clients that are buying adult and casino Websites for us, but I'm providing an opportunity for my employees to follow an Internet dream and make wealth for themselves."