• Using Mainstream Sponsors On Adult Sites

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Sponsors | Response: 0

    With the adult industry moving more and more into the mainstream web every week that passes as late i thought it would be an idea to show you guys how it is possible to use mainstream sponsor programs on your adult sites to build up a steady commission check even when a surfer going to your adult site doesnt actually buy anything from your adult sponsor.

    Mainstream Sponsor Programs – The Choices.

    The first thing that you need to do is to choose a mainstream sponsor that offers you a good choice of products / services to market to your surfers mainstream affiliate programs such as Click Bank, Commission Junction and, Amazon.com are all good places to find a selection of mainstream products and services you can offer your surfers in addition to the adult sponsors you currently use.

    Mainstream Affiliate Programs – Setting Up.

    The first thing that you need to do however in order to offer the mainstream affiliate program products to your surfers is to register a generic, non-adult domain name and, instantly get this domain setup on your current web server.

    This will be the domain name you use for all correspondence between the mainstream affiliate networks and yourself in addition, this will also be the ONLY domain that you utilize the mainstream linking codes on.

    Using Mainstream Sponsors – Getting Started.

    The first thing that you need to do now you have your domain and mainstream affiliate networks sorted out is to build a couple of specific ‘doorway pages’ on your new generic domain name. This could include something like an article or product review or perhaps something as simple as an image of the product and a short description which you can use to lead the surfer into the mainstream affiliate programs site, either way, the idea is to have the root of the domain 100% free of adult content and utilize specific doorway pages which you can link to from your adult sites.

    Generating Mainstream Traffic.

    Onto the really easy part, your current free sites all have an enter and exit link correct? If so then you are already half way finished, all you now need to do is to ensure that EVERY SINGLE exit link goes to your mainstream doorway page for a specific product or group of products. Make sure that you do not link to the root of your generic domain at any time but only to specific doorways and, that each of these doorways has a link to the root domain.

    By linking to your generic site in this way, you are enabling the surfer to choose whether they first of all, want to look at your adult site or, they want to leave the site and go to your mainstream affiliate network sponsor in the process giving you the potential of making a sale at the mainstream affiliate program.

    Mainstream Sponsor Programs – An Overview.

    By utilizing mainstream affiliate programs in this way you are not only potentially increasing your bottom lines but, you are also utilizing every single click that you get both to and from your site, to often webmasters send their exit links to places like disney.com or google.com and in doing so, they lose out on potential incomes, hopefully when you start marketing your exit links in the manner explained above you will begin to see the benefit of how both adult and, mainstream sponsors can be used in conjunction with each other in order to increase your bottom line profits.

    Article written by Lee

  • Converting Japanese Traffic – The Niche Paysites That Work

    Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

    Up to this point we have only looked at the European traffic sources and what niches convert for them however, we will now take a look at the Japanese specific adult surfers and, see just what makes them tick when they come to look online for porn.

    Japanese Adult Traffic – Dispelling The Myths.

    Contrary to popular beliefs Japanese porn surfers are not all looking for Bukakke or Hentai orientated adult sites in fact, the results we saw far from backed this up. Also, many webmasters believe Japanese traffic is worthless again, from our results this is simply not the case.

    Japanese Adult Traffic – The Niches.

    We were extremely pleased with the results we found from the Japanese traffic we got to our hub sites in fact, we altered the type of sponsors we used on our Japanese hubs so that we could see just how well this type of international adult traffic converted and, i think you will see the results are worthy of you sending your Japanese adult traffic to sites that do not encompass dialers as the only means of revenue for those surfers after reading this article.

    Asian.

    We set up a small niche specific ‘Asian’ hub trap that we could use to primarily filter our Japanese traffic through and, as we expected, very little of the traffic actually purchased memberships to these sites that were supposedly made specifically for Japanese surfers instead, all but 2 sales came from sites outside of this ‘Asian’ specific hub.

    Ebony.

    By far our best converting niche on Japanese traffic, the sales figures we saw from a join perspective were enough to warrant that we altered the rest of our hub site to ensure maximum exposure of the Ebony niche sites we were using to get them in front of the Japanese surfer as quickly as possible.

    Anime / Hentai / Toon.

    Again another surprise, the sales we saw on these niche paysites were lower overall when compared to sites in completely different niches what was also surprising about this is that the vast majority of adult webmasters will actively push their Japanese traffic to sites in this niche.

    Bukakke.

    Finding a Japanese Bukakke sponsors was impossible for us, instead, we opted to send the traffic to a US only paysite and, as expected, we had no sales for this niche on the Japanese traffic we saw flowing through our sites. As mentioned above with the Anime niche, this is often the first type of site adult webmasters will send their Japanese speaking traffic too and, as we thought, this is wrong.

    Teen.

    The teen niche converted really well for us, not as well as the ebony niche did but non the less, we received a steady amount of signups each month, this steady signup rate was also added to by recurring incomes from the previous months signups towards the end of our three month test period.

    Gay.

    As with the Bukakke niche paysite we received absolutely no sales to the Japanese gay paysite we used in our hub site this was surprising as even with the other international traffic we had gotten at least one sale a month but, alas, it seems the vast majority of Japanese surfers do not want to see naked men online.

    Amateur.

    Specifically amateur web cam sites converted for us on our Japanese traffic and again, this was good because of the rebills at the end of the month in fact, we still have some rebills continuing now some 5 months after our test period ended.

    Japanese Adult Surfers – An Overview.

    As expected at the start of the test period, Japanese adult surfers are not primarily interested in Bukakke and Anime sites in fact, it would appear they were primarily interested in the Ebony paysites we had to offer them. This is interesting in itself because, when offered ‘Asian’ niche paysites we only achieved 2 sales a month compared to the vast amount of sales to the Ebony niche, I think it might be worthwhile re-visiting Japanese traffic at a later date so we can evaluate exactly what preferences they have over time.

    One other thing we discovered when testing the Japanese traffic was that, as we have been saying for a long time, Japanese surfers do hold credit / debit cards and, will use them online if their needs can be matched. This is good as if, like us, you use recurring sponsors on this type of traffic you will see some good long term residual income.

    Article written by Lee

  • Marketing to European Surfers

    Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

    Marketing to European Surfers.

    Today we’ll try to answer couple of questions regarding dialers and how to market them to European traffic.

    How to get traffic to your European market targeted site?

    Pretty much the same way as for all the other sites, lets German market for example (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) use SE’s, German link-lists, TGPs,… feed site with your own traffic, and don’t forget to use exit-consoles.

    Is your site translated into specific language?

    Yes, of course you won’t get far using English template on German/Spanish.. sites… You can always contact Adult Site Translation if you need help with translations.

    What sponsor should you use?

    That is pretty hard to say. Practically since almost every European based sponsor offers dialers so it doesn’t really matter which one you choose. It’s the same with per sign-up sponsors: It depends how good you are in sending traffic to them. And as always try couple of them and see which one works best for you. Most of the sponsors will offer to your surfers to pay by CC, bank account and dialers.

    Me personally, I don’t really advertise dialers. I go for sign-ups because most if not all European sponsors are recurring and it brings more money in the long run. But if a surfer wants to pay the (admittedly) high phone bills – that’s fine with me In fact, sometimes I get more money from a 0190-number (dialer number in Germany starts with 0190) than I’d get if the surfer would sign-up with his CC and would cancel his membership after the first payment.

    Why are dialers so successful in the German/European market?
    Well, I can think of 3 reasons for this:

    1.) 0190-numbers are very common in Germany. Many support-hotlines use them, you can download logos for your cell phone via 0190, you can get health-tips via 0190, fax-numbers, etc… Germans see those numbers everywhere and get used to them. Of course they know that they are expensive but I think they tend to forget this because they are so common.

    2.) Much of my income from dialers is from Swiss and Austrian people. Especially surfers from Switzerland LOVE dialers (Some of them spend hours/nights with dialers and in the end if i get 50% of that for me is not bad, isn’t it? :) I think they love dialers because they hesitate to give out the information on their CC (if they have any) and they can’t/don’t like to transfer their money via bank transfers. So dialers are actually their only way to get into the members-area.

    3.) Credit cards are not very common in Germany. I would guess only some 30% have one and many who have one don’t believe that CC transactions on the internet are secure. So most of the surfers have only 2 options left: Paying by bank account or using a dialer. The bank account has 2 disadvantages in the eyes of the surfers: 1st “The sponsor knows my name, my account number, where I live and that I’m a greasy little wanker who pays for porn. -Maybe this sponsor is going to tell my neighbors about it-” 2nd “How can I explain this to my wife?” On the other hand the dialer has advantages: 1st It is anonymous. Nobody knows who and where the surfer is. 2nd The dialer is faster than typing all the necessary information needed for a bank transaction. A few seconds for a 35kb download and the surfer is ready to go. 3rd You can always find a reason why there’s this 0190-number on the phone-bill. “Well darling, you know, I had problems with my new graphic card and I had to contact the customer-support. Those damn bastards are on a 0190-number what what can I do?”

    Well, that’s about it on dialers. One warning at the end: If you like to give them a try beware of those that do auto-downloads and auto-installations. Surfers don’t like them. Use dialers where the surfers needs to click somewhere to download and install them.

    Article written by Lee

  • Newsletter Know How – A Guide To Writing Newsletters

    Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Promotion, Writing | Response: 0

    Email newsletters are a great way to make contact with existing clients and, prospective clients which makes them a great marketing tool. The biggest bonus however, over Email newsletters rather than print ones is that you have virtually no cost involved with writing and, ultimately, mailing them out.

    There is a wide variety of online newsletter on the internet. however, probably the simplest form for most webmasters is the email newsletter. Email provides you with a quick way to keep your name out there, build trust with you readers and, hopefully attract a few sales. If you archive your newsletter also this is a great way to get additional pages into the search engines and, as such, it then becomes a good traffic driver to your website regardless of the amount of subscribers you have. However one of the most important benefits of having an email newsletter sent on a regular basis is that it build brand recognition of your website or business.

    Your newsletter should provide information, not just of an advertising nature but that, should also be informative to your subscribers. In doing this you are offering information of value and, ultimately, ensuring that your subscribers remain. However, remember newsletters are for promoting your area of expertise not just a vehicle for revenue generation.

    One of the first things you should consider when deciding to do a newsletter is the amount of commitment you will have to put towards the project. Whether you start a monthly, weekly or, daily newsletter a great deal of commitment must be made to both the newsletter and, more importantly, your subscribers. For example, We generally spend a good 3 days researching the articles that have been submitted and trying to ensure that the details contained within them are relevant at the time of sending the email, this is not an easy task especially when the adult internet is constantly developing. If you don’t have the time to research and maintain consistency in your newsletter, then don’t even consider doing one, it isn’t for you at the present time.

    Now you have decided you can make the commitment required to run a successful email newsletter what do you do next? Collect email addresses. Probably one of the easiest ways to get email subscribers to join your list is to go through your current mail clients contact list and manually add those email addresses or, further still, you may even have an opt in collection program that you have been using for a while but have never really had the time to commit to writing a newsletter worthy of sending out. Remember though, an email list is only as good as the addresses contained within it. You want to run an OPT-IN email list, any other type of list will be considered Spam and, that will do you more damage than good. Of course, if you haven’t already got an email collection program you can find one online there are literally hundreds of them floating around that you can get for free from sites like http://www.hotscripts.com.

    So, you now have your emails, onto writing your newsletter. I think the greatest part of email is that it is somewhat less formal than writing for print copy. Email in fact tends to be very informal in comparison. The best way at approaching writing for an email newsletter is to write how you talk, it is more enjoyable for the reader and gives your newsletter a personality that no one else can emulate. Content wise, that depends on what you do, what would YOU like to see if you subscribed to an email list of the type you are going to be running and, more importantly, what would ensure you stay subscribed to the newsletter? Ask your friends, colleagues and, peers what they would like to see in an email newsletter, often they have been looking for information that is not readily available, this is an area where you then start to provide a service that no one else does.

    So you are at the point where you are starting to realize that running a newsletter is a lot of work correct? Well, it is. However, the effort, work and, time spent in putting your newsletter together will help you build a relationship with people whom, in all actuality, you may probably not ever meet in a face to face situation and, more importantly, it can become a great income generator over time.

    Article written by Lee

  • The Next Big Traffic Craze – Thumbnail Link Lists

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Link Lists | Response: 0

    As adult webmasters are constantly thriving to create the next craze in traffic sources to garner sales from their sites it comes as no surprise that there is already talk amongst the ranks of the next big thing, what is this new idea? The Thumbnail Link List.

    Thumbnail Link Lists – Re-Inventing The Wheel.

    As the past year and a half have taught us as webmasters, regular TGP’s have almost become a thing of the past with more and more thumbnail TGP’s being created and submitted to daily, why then, has it taken so long for someone to think up the idea of the Thumbnail Link List? Quite simply I think it has been a case of to much has happened over the last 12 months in the adult industry for webmasters to think this idea up.

    So What Is A Thumbnail Link List?

    A thumbnail link list is in effect a way of displaying free sites on your own standard Link List by utilizing small thumbnail samples of the images contained within the free sites galleries, in fact, much the same way that a thumbnail TGP works however, instead of only listing single image galleries your link list will consist of links to individual free sites.

    Much like the Thumbnail TGP traffic source, the thinking behind the Thumbnail Link List is that by showing your surfers what type of pictures the sites within your link list contain they will be more likely to visit the free site thus improving your CTR to your webmaster submitted sites and, ultimately, your site overall allowing you to manipulate the traffic to garner more sales for yourself as the Thumbnail Link List owner.

    Submitting Your Site To A Thumbnail Link List.

    Looking at the Thumbnail Link List idea from a webmaster who would be submitting your free sites for listing (and ultimately traffic) how do the rules of the Thumbnail Link List differ to that of the regular link list which we are all used to seeing, well for a start, the main difference will be that you either need to submit a thumbnail yourself or, enter the url to one of your gallery pages in addition to the main entrance to your free site, this will actually be the only significant change in how you operate your link list submissions compared tot he current link list method, however, as each Thumbnail Link List owner will have their own individual rules you should check before submitting as to what is required from you as a submitter.

    Thumbnail Link Lists – Overview.

    The whole Thumbnail Link List idea is one that, in all seriousness should mean more traffic not only for the submitters of the free sites but, also for the Thumbnail Link List owner themselves, by offering the surfers a preview of the content contained within the free sites they will be visiting they can simply reduce the amount of sites that do not appeal to them and focus more on the sites that do meaning that the webmasters who submit highly niched free sites to the links lists will now be able to benefit from a larger traffic base and ultimately, more sales.

    Article written by Lee

  • Utilizing All The Content You Use On TGP Galleries!

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: TGP | Response: 0

    Utilizing All The Content You Use On TGP Galleries!

    For the last few months i have been experimenting with a few new (but old, if ya see what i mean) ideas.

    Basically i have adapted Voltars 3x3x3 project slightly and incorporated it into the TGP/TGP2 game.

    The results have given me some of the best sales ratios ever! We’re talking under 1:60 almost consistently across all sponsors!!

    What you did is thus….

    Design a NICE 15 pic tgp gallery in a table preferably four rows high and 5 columns across.

    In the first row place one thumb in each cell (5 pics).
    In the second row place one odd sized banner in the first cell and merge cells 2,3 , 4 and, 5.
    In the cells you have merged place some descriptive text about the pics you are using in under two paragraphs and include a line of text where you MENTION the sponsors site name.
    In row 3 place one thumb in each cell (5 pics).
    in row 4 place on thumb in each cell (5 pics).
    under the table place a juicy text link.
    below this juicy text link leave a line or two and add a money bar (one row by three columns using a contrasting color to the background of your gallery page).
    ALL pics go on html pages using the same layout as your main TGP page but, without the table included.
    Repeat this process 4 times once for four different niches, saving each niche in their own sub folder for the main site i.e:

    url/sub folder/niche 1
    url/sub folder/niche 2
    url/sub folder/niche 3
    url/sub folder/niche 4

    You should now have 4 TGP galleries using 15 pics on each in four niches (60 pics in total).

    At the top of each of these main pages place a three cell one row table.

    in this table use text links to describe each niche i.e:

    Teen
    Gay
    Lesbian
    Mature

    in the template for the teen niche you use text for the gay, lesbian and, mature templates and link these to the appropriate TGP template.

    This is where the fun begins…..

    Take all four TGP niche galleries you have just made and do the following….

    Delete the first row of cells (including pics) on all TGP galleries and save the new page layout in another folder using the same navigation structure as the original ie:

    url/sub folder 2/niche1
    url/sub folder 2/niche2
    etc
    etc

    You should now have the following:

    four TGP templates consisting of 15 pics each.
    four TGP templates consisting of 10 pics each.

    Again, link these new 10 pic templates to each other in the same way as you did the 15 pic templates.

    Repeat this procedure to make the 10 pic TGP page using the original TGP page BUT, this time, delete the bottom row of cells.

    You now have the following:

    4 niche 15 pic TGP pages
    4 niche 10 pic TGP pages
    ANOTHER 4 niche 10 pic TGP pages

    Still with me?

    Its gets better….

    Take your original 15 pic TGP template and do the following…

    Delete the first and the third row of cells including all the pics and save them in ANOTHER folder using the same structure as before i.e:

    url/sub folder 3/niche 1
    url/ sub folder 3/niche 2
    etc
    etc

    Again link these in the same way as before using the text links at the top of the pages.

    What do you have now?

    4 TGP pages using 15 pics
    8 TGP pages using 10 pics
    4 TGP2 pages using 5 pics

    Can you guess what’s next?

    Take that original template again and…

    Remove the first and fourth row of cells do the same when you save it as you have done above…

    What do you have?

    4 TGP pages using 15 pics
    8 TGP pages using 10 pics
    8 TGP2 pages using 5 pics

    Do it once more using the original templates but removing the final set of 2 rows of cells you now have…

    4 TGP pages using 15 pics
    8 TGP pages using 10 pics
    16 TGP2 pages using 5 pics

    In the root of the domain where you are going to upload these pages do the following…

    Create a simplistic warning page… link this to a multi site FPA… this multi site FPA links to each of the niche (15 pic) TGP templates you have made.

    On this same fpa place an email erotica collection box, banner exchange code and a toplist counter code along with an exit console going to a MC POTD program.

    Now, what you need to do is start submitting these pages to the TGP/TGP2’s submit one a day or as many as you can until you have submitted them all.

    Ok still here?

    Next you have to duplicate ALL of the above again.

    Place the duplicate of the above into a separate set of folders/sub domains etc.

    On the new root you have created, link to another multi site FPA AND the first root index.html page.

    You now have the makings of an EXCLUSIVE 3x3x3 TGP hub which, you can leave alone and submit all of the pages intermittently to any TGP/TGP2 you wish for LIFE!!

    All the time you are adding new sections to it and building your link pop in the search engines because you are continually interlinking to each of the separate niche and relevant sub niche folders.

    Of course, you NEED to get the meta’s sorted on the first main template for this to work but, if you change all subsequent meta descriptions etc you’ll have a very reasonable listing in Google for the relevant search terms :)

    Article written by Lee

  • How To Become A Gay Porn Star

    Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Employment, General | Response: 0

    A quick look across the gay side of the adult industry will show it is lacking in one thing that its straight counterpart has in an abundance, amateur male models with their own adult porn sites. With that said, if you wanted to tap into this market how could you go about doing so and, more importantly, could you make money from working on the other side of the camera for a change? This is what we will look at in this article.

    Becoming A Porn Star – The Basics.

    Any web cam model will tell you, to have your own porn site will take a lot of persistence, time and, more importantly, personality, not least from the webmaster side of the industry however, in my opinion I think the pressure that a webmaster may face breaking into the gay male porn side of the adult industry might just be a bit harsher than what the bubbly web cam girls have to contend with, not only because as a male you will be appearing in content but, because your primary traffic base, whether you like it or not, will be a mixture of women and gay males.

    Male Amateur Sites – Getting Ready.

    Before you start to even put your first ideas down on paper you need to do one thing, spend some time to research what is needed in order to start your own amateur porn site. In doing so, you will see that not only is everything in the two paragraphs above true but, you will also learn a little about yourself and, more importantly, about other webmasters and your surfers. Now you have the fundamental questions you need to ask yourself these are, What equipment do you need to run a male amateur site? What amount of investment in both time and money do you need to put into building your site? How much will you charge your surfers for access to your site? and, Is this going to be a long term commitment from yourself that could be possibly better spent elsewhere? Answer those questions as honestly as you can before proceeding and furthermore, think long and hard about the answers.

    Gay Amateur Web Sites – The Alternatives.

    So lets stop for a moment and consider that you have realized you do not want to build and maintain your own male amateur site but, you would still like to be male porn material, where do you go from here? Well there are companies who can put you on their books and give you work from time to time such as http://www.redbagproductions.com a male modeling agency for the adult industry, this will in all likelihood be the place for you to start your search, find out how many places there are that can get you talent work and, what type of modeling work you will be required to do.

    Becoming A Gay Porn Star – An Overview.

    With sites online such as Every Stag and the slew of other male modeling agencies finding a medium to start your modeling career wont be hard but, with this career comes uncertain hours, hard work (in more ways than one) and, to some extent, fame amongst the gay adult porn surfer. If this is something that you feel you can devote the time and energy towards and, are able to cope with the voyeuristic side of your personality then go for it, if however, you are still unsure after reading this brief article, perhaps becoming a gay pornstar isn’t for you?

    Article written by Lee

  • Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 5

    Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

    So we hit stage 5 in this surfer trap tutorial.

    It was brought to my attention this morning that we never added any ALT tags to our single FPA link so, in a change to the planned tutorial I am going to touch on this stage as, once the search engines get to our surfer traps this is going to be a crucial aspect on how highly we get ranked.

    So what’s next?

    Ok, now what you have to do is go back to manually editing the FPA’s (All of them!)

    What you need to do is this…

    Take the Multi-Site FPA first then, on ALL of the links that lead to the single site FPA’s you need to add the ALT tag. Again, in the same way as we did originally however, instead of using this tag on the images we will use this on the actual TEXT of the link so, for example the link which may be:

    ‘Voyeur Porn’ leading to the FPA you have for the Voyeur niche in the HTML coding will already look like this:

    <a href=”mydomain.com”>Voyeur Porn</a>

    Will get turned into:

    <a href=”mydomain.com” ALT=”More Niche Related Keywords”>Voyeur Porn</a>

    The reason we are going back over these links now and not earlier on is because you should hopefully have started to get a small amount of traffic from your counter impressions. These counters are virtually ALWAYS being crawled by the search engines due to the amount of people linking to them so, by optimizing our site at this stage, it makes it less work in getting into the search engines.

    One other thing that we can now start to do (as we did a couple of stages back) is to create some more HTML pages with some tables on them, however, these will be HTML pages on their own with no images on them. Again however, you should make them 4 columns across and two rows high.

    What you want to add into these tables are NICHE links so for example, taking the TEEN niche we would make eight links like:

    Teen Sex
    College Girls
    Erotic Teens
    Teen Porn
    Etc
    Etc
    Etc
    Etc…

    You should do this for each of the MAIN niches so you would have a table for Teen, Gay, Mature, Asian, Ebony, Fetish and one for General and again, these should link to the NICHE FPA’s that you already have created.

    These tables will be used for another console on our surfer trap however, before we implement this console we are going to have some fun with them.

    Article written by Lee

  • Writing Your Sales Text – Some Facts

    Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

    Do you know the difference between writing sales text for print advertising i.e. magazines and, writing sales talk for websites?

    Well some of these differences will go against your intuition however, these differences are based on how people read specific items.

    Where Do Eyes Go First When Your Page Loads?

    Contrary to what most webmasters think it may not always be towards the thumbnails and banners on your page instead, surfers eyes will more than likely go to the first few lines of text on the page therefore, your first chance at making a sale before the surfer starts to burn your bandwidth is to have some enticing text on any site or page you build. Another reason why learning to write good text links can benefit you long term.

    Also, as most surfers will only look at a page for between three and fifteen seconds before they decide whether they want to stay on the site they are at or close it this now starts to question webmasters use of heavy graphics on their sites, if a graphic takes three to four seconds to load you have just lost valuable sales time on your site.

    How Much Of Your Copy Do Users Actually Read?

    On average surfers will read about 75% of the length of any given page. Again, this is good news because it now means we can draw our surfers attention tot he ‘important’ sections of our sites by using headlines and bullet points to make them stand out. Also, this means that, given surfers will read only the first 75% of any page that the bottom half of your pages may not be as important as what was first believed.

    Why Do Most Banner Ads Produce Poor Click-Through Rates?

    Again as with any advertising media there is only a specific time frame that anyone will look at something, in this case it has been found that the vast majority of surfer will spend a mere 1.25 seconds looking at a banner which, is about enough time to read say 5 words based on the average college students reading time of 350 words a minute.

    Therefore, banners which are animated and can take up to 5 seconds to get all the information across may in effect be completely worthless on our sites. More bad news for webmasters who have fancy animations and the likes on our pages.

    Why Is Reading Online More Frustrating Than Reading Print?

    Did you know that reading text on a computer screen can cause your reading ability to slow by up to 25% in some cases? This means that over inflating pages with text heavy content may actually aggravate the surfer instead of draw there attention! But, how can we stop this from potentially losing us a sale? Simple here are a few suggestions.

    Rather than having one long continuous stream of text have several smaller one or two line paragraphs of text.

    Use headlines to summarize what you are telling the surfer for example, if you sponsor has free trials tell them in bold lettering ‘Free Trials’ you get the point across and, you may draw their attention to click on the text.

    Are Your Web Page Users Not Getting The Whole Picture?

    Can surfers ‘scan’ your website? Lets look back at the above figures, 75% of the page gets read, banners have an attention span of only 1.25 seconds on average, that’s not much time for a surfer to look at your pages.

    I think that would probably explain the reason why surfers tend to ‘scan’ our sites and only concentrate on the free images, how many of us actually take the time to read word for word EVERYTHING on a page?

    I know I hardly do I just sit there and scan the page for things that draw me into the text or site. This is true again for surfers in fact, estimated figures show that roughly 21% of surfers actually spend the time to read every single word on any site meaning the other 79% only scan through our sites this again, cuts down our marketing capabilities dramatically making it more important to have headlines and well laid out pages highlighting the part we want our surfer to look at, namely, our sponsor links.

    If we do not do this we are in effect only making 21% of our marketing efforts count again, taking away from our profits. That’s a huge chunk of our surfers we are losing out on gleaming a sale from.

    What do all of the above figures tell us? Simple, we need to keep our pages quick loading, concise and more importantly unique, we need to draw our surfers to the specific areas that we want them to go to first and, in the process we should start to make more money from each of our sites.

    Article written by Lee

  • Using SSI For Auto Updates

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

    We all realize the benefits of being able to save time when building sites so, I got into thinking, how can I make my sites look as if they are continually updated without the need to go in and update them manually? Enter the world of SSI.

    SSI is actually a nifty little tool, not only can you include files from a central location but, you can include them at specific times of the day, days of the week or even months of the year, very handy indeed if you are building any type of site that needs updating periodically.

    Once the main burst of work has been completed you can pretty much use the same files over and over again to help you out.

    So onto the auto updating SSI, the following SSI coding will enable you to update a page or pages based on which day of the month it is. It will check the day the page has been accessed and display the relevant information again, this is a handy thing to have should your sponsor be running a promotion over several days, all you need to do is update a selection of SSI files and all of your sites are updated instantly.

    <!–#config timefmt=”%d”–>
    <!–#include virtual=”/yourdirectory/$DATE_LOCAL.txt”–>

    What you need to do is create 31 text files named 01.txt right the way through to 31.txt take the SSI call above and edit the location of the SSI files on your server, you may like to have a central folder named /SSI/ for this purpose so the location would be changed to /domain.com/SSI/$DATE_LOCAL.txt

    I the 31 files you created you could have a table ad with eight of your sponsors links, an article in each one or even just a simple text link, anything that you may want to update can be included in these files.

    As I mentioned above you can base the time, date and even month of rotation to whatever you like to alter how the files are rotated and ultimately viewed on the web you should change the %d in the timefmt field to one of the following:

    %d : Day of the month requires 31 files named 01.txt to 31.txt
    %w : Day of the week requires 7 files named 0.txt to 6.txt
    %j : Day of the year requires 365 files named 001.txt to 365.txt
    %u : The week of the year requires 52 files named 00.txt to 53.txt
    %m : The month of the year requires 12 files named 01.txt to 12.txt
    %H : Hour of the day requires 24 files named 00.txt to 23.txt
    %M : Minute of the hour requires 60 files named 00.txt to 59.txt

    As you can see from the above there really are no limitations to the uses of updating using SSI and, apart fro the relative ease of use and the time saved using them should one sponsor not be converting for you all you need to do to swap sponsors is alter your central set of SSI files and you have instantly changed sponsors over all of your sites.

    Article written by Lee

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