The Adult Internet – More Than Just Porn

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

So you have several adult websites up and running and, if you are one of the lucky few in this day and age you have already started to make money from your adult sponsor programs however, there are so many other ways that webmasters can make money in the adult industry in addition to their regular ‘porn site’ sponsors yet, many webmasters do not realize there are vast opportunities awaiting them.

Lets spend a few moments to look at the alternative sources of income that we can use in the adult industry and also take a look at the basics of each type of affiliate system.

Email Collection.

Opt in email is big business, there is no denying this fact so why not jump on the opt in email collecting bandwagon? Most email collection sponsors will offer you anywhere from $0.50 per email collected to $2.00 per email collected and, better still, to start making money from your existing traffic base all you need to do is include a small email collection box.

Software Programs.

Many of the larger adult affiliate programs now offer their webmasters a range of software products to generate additional income, many of these products are good for use not only in adult but, also in mainstream. For instance, Anonymous browsing software, history deletion software, IE Toolbars and even submission programs are all good ways to generate additional income either on a per download or, per sale basis. Best of all, you only need to add a new banner to the sites you currently have in order to get a share of this lucrative market.

Herbal Products.

Penis Pills, Breast Enlargement, Vitamin Supplements, you name it you can sell it on adult traffic. Whether you run a TGP, Link List or your own collection of free sites, these herbal products can often sell much better than ‘porn sites’ and, for the most part, the payout levels are the same, if not higher than what your regular ‘porn site’ trial will make you. Again to get started with this type of sales all you need to do is add a text link or banner to your existing sites.

Casino Sites.

Gambling makes BIG money, just look at Vegas for the example, millions of people a year visit Nevada to gamble and millions more simply can’t get there for a range of reasons however, almost every home in the United States has a computer and internet connection so why not start using this to your advantage? Many of the larger casino affiliate programs will pay based on the amount of funds credited to a new users account and, to get started making money from casino sites it is quite literally as easy as adding a banner or text link to your existing sites again.

Pre Paid Services.

Such as Credit Cards and the likes, selling these types of products to your adult surfers not only offers then ‘anonymity’ on the web when they do make online purchases but at the same time when your surfers sign up or one of these pre-paid credit cards you will be making some money in the process. Often however you will find that these types of affiliate program do not payout as much ‘long term’ as they are pretty much a first time deal as far as, once the surfer spends money to initially ‘charge’ their pre paid card with funds, that is when you will make money and not again. Still, even if you can make $50 by selling one of these cards, its still an additional $50 you wouldn’t have made otherwise.

Adding To Your Profits.

As you can see from the above, there are a wide range of products and services you can offer your surfers and, as we all know, the more things we can offer our ‘customers’ the more chance we have at one of them buying something. Of course, as with anything, the more effort we put into marketing these products and services the more chance e have at making a sale however, unless we try to sell the surfer something other than porn, how will we know whether they will buy or not?

Article written by Lee

Organizing Your Hard Drive And Server

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Hosting | Response: 0

We have probably all done it at some point, we get in such a hurry to upload our new site that we have just spent the last 20 minutes building that we don’t think about maintaining the site at a future date or, worse still, we need to change a site we built 6-8 months ago and can not remember where we uploaded it to.

By organizing your server from day one of your steps into becoming a webmaster you will, inevitably, save yourselves a lot of time in the long term future of our business model.

Lets take a look at how we can accomplish this ‘organization’ though.

On your hard drive you need to have a ‘central’ location for all of your online files and folders, what better place to keep this than in a folder named ‘Online’ of course, this is just an example but it will son become apparent to you that this is probably the most logical folder name to use.

Now, within this folder you are also going to need to have a few sub folders, i would suggest using a folder for each of the domains that you own so for example, for your first domain, you would name it myfirstdomain.com, your second would be named myseconddomain.com etc.

Within these domain folders you will also need to have a selection of sub folders again, I would suggest names for these folders such as /html/, /scripts/, /articles/, you are now well on the way to organizing your server.

In addition to these sub folders you will also need to create sub folders for your images that you will be using on your sites, I would suggest using the names /banners/ and of course, /images/ for these two folders, you now know that the /banners/ folder contains all of the buttons and banners you will use on your sites and the /images/ folder contains all of the .jpg and .gifs you will use. Inside the /images/ folder, it might also be advisable to create a sub folder called /thumbnails/ which, you can store your thumb nailed pictures in if required.

One other advantage to organizing your folders and sites in this manner is that over time, it will assist you when it comes to dealing with hot linkers. Instead of having to find the paths to all of your individual image directory, you know instantly where you put them, without the need of logging onto your server.

Ok so you now have a semi-organized folder structure on your HD, so far we hopefully have a folder structure that looks somewhat like this:

C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/

C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/html/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/scripts/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/

C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/html/Banners/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/html/Images/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/scripts/Banners/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/scripts/Images/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/Banners/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/Images/

So, hypothetically, if you created a article called ‘Article One’ you would find this in the following place on your HD:

C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/articleone.html

See how easy that was to find on your hard drive?

Of course, on your server the folder structure will be no different so, your structure will be mirrored EXACTLY from your HD to your SERVER I.E.:

/usr/www/sites/myfirstdomain.com/articles/articleone.html

Not only will you make your server layout a lot easier to navigate but, it should, in theory, save you time when submitting your sites to the search engines, free for all’s etc as, in your head, you will already know the location to any single page.

Try this as an example…

You have created an article site called ‘Online Marketing’ on your third domain, where is it located?

That’s right, you will find it at http://www.mythirddomain.com/articles/onlinemarketing.html

How much time would you have usually spent logging into your server trying to find this page?

One other MAJOR advantage to keeping your server and HD structure the same is backing up your data now becomes easy as pie. you simply have to download your folders into the /online/ directory on your HD, then simply burn that entire directory to Cdrom.

Hopefully this article has given you some insight into how proper organization can be of use to you on your HD and on your server. If you are just starting out in the adult industry hopefully you will see that spending a little time to make a structuring system such as this can save you a lot of time long term.

One last question for you however, where would you find your article called ‘Marketing Shoes’ on your 56th domain name?

Article written by Lee

Now They Signed Up – Learn How To Keep Them

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General | Response: 0

Member retention is going to have a large effect on the adult industry over the next few months, with Visa chargeback rates being lowered and, many affiliate programs lowering their payout model something has to give and, hopefully, the thing that does give will be that affiliate programs start to realize that once they have your surfer, it becomes their responsibility to make that member retain.

With that in mind this article will look at a few things that we have been doing on some of our paysites for the last few months and, instead of having to provide an excess of plug in content we have started updating our sites regularly within the niche confines of what our members are actually looking for, also, despite this increase in content, we have started doing something unique so far as member retention goes – actually communicating with the member directly.

Communication Pays.

Actually spending the time to listen to what your members want can be beneficial on many levels for example, how many of the big sponsors offer the member a chance to become involved in a ‘community’ inside their paysites, i can only think of 3 paysites that i have personally visited that do this.

Often, offering your members a way to communicate to YOU what they want inside the site can, and usually will increase the value of their membership to you in the long run. offer your members weekly polls, offer them incentives to keep an active membership, perhaps some kind of loyalty program, in addition to a method of your paysite members being able to communicate to each other inside your site.

Content Updates.

We all know that paysites need to update however, how many paysite owners spend the time to ask their member what they are looking for? As mention in the previous section, offer your members polls on the next updates you will be doing, ask them what sections of the site need improving and, more importantly, ask them if they are happy with how your site looks and feels overall.

Renewal Time.

So you have managed to keep hold of your paysite member for a few days without them canceling and, their trial period is ending what now? Well, more often than not, communicating to the member that they are about to get rebilled can have a positive effect, send them an email prior to the rebill informing them of what your next set of updates will be, let them know they are a valued member of the site and, more importantly than this, that you are there to help them and listen to their suggestions. This is also an ideal time to remind them of why they joined your site in the first place, you have a lot of exclusive content that, simply put, no other paysite can offer them, you listen to their feedback and, again, value their feedback, all of these things will ensure that your member base retains well over the trial period.

Second Month Renewals.

So you have managed to keep your member for a month, and, again they are due a rebill, as with the first rebill you gave them, re-iterate the points of your site and, tell them what has changed over the past month, give them some sales speak about how your site is doing and, more importantly, what you have coming next month, by communicating these updates to your members a day or so before they have to renew, you should, in all honesty, keep their interest in your paysite and, more importantly, make more money from your members.

So Your Member Cancels.

Okay, so perhaps you managed to rebill your member for a few month or, perhaps they left after the trial period, what now? Simple, send them a follow up email, find out the reasons they cancelled their membership to your site and, see if you can offer them an alternative to stay, perhaps a reduced cost membership or, maybe even an alternative site altogether, if they entered your teen pay site and, were looking for amateur teen pics, even though you know you don’t have them yet, you will probably know of a site that does, tell this cancelled membership about this site and, get them to try it out, if you can match what the surfer is looking for to a site you own then you have a second chance at keeping their membership and, making money.

Retention Overview.

When all is said and done the one thing that is apparent so far as pay sites go is that a lot of them do not communicate with their members and build the sites they operate around what their members are looking for, we can all say we actually do this constantly but, how many of us really, hand on heart, can prove that they ask, listen and, more importantly, implement the feedback from their members base?

Article written by Lee

How To Claim Back European V.A.T

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Billing Solutions, General | Response: 0

With the recent legislations requiring US businesses to charge Value Added Tax to EU Member state customers for purchases of digital product / image downloads there are many new questions going around enquiring how companies and small business owners can claim the VAT back this is what we will look at in this brief article – The basics of claiming back your VAT from Europe.

What Is V.A.T?

Value Added Tax (VAT) is a consumption tax levied on goods and services in many countries across the globe. Over the last decade, legislation in the tax systems of Europe, Canada, Japan and South Korea allow for a refund for the majority of non resident entities, worldwide to a refund of VAT in most instances however, especially in the business world, registration must be achieved prior to claiming back your VAT and, preferably before the purchase of Vat able goods takes place.

Who Is Entitled To A VAT Refund?

Most businesses will be entitled to receive a VAT refund however, as the laws vary from country to country, the best way for you as a business owner to find out the laws as they affect you is to contact your company accountant who, should be knowledgable enough to inform you of what you need to claim back from each of the EU member states where V.A.T has been charged.

What Products Can I Claim V.A.T Refunds For?

Most typically value added tax recoverable expenses can take form as one or more of the following items:

Business Property Expenses.
Transportation Costs.
Inter-company Billing.
Marketing + Promotional Services.
Exhibitions, Conferences + Business Meetings.
Importation V.A.T.
Digital Downloads (Business Related).

How Do I Register For V.A.T?

When a company inside the domestic US conducts transactions in the EU countries where value added tax registrations may be required the registration for the VAT refund should be done prior to the transaction taking place however, on occasions which vary from individual EU member states this registration process may be done retroactively. By becoming registered to claim your VAT back the company is legally required to d the following:

1) Register for the VAT in the EU country where the transaction takes place.
2) Account for VAT on all invoices or receipts issued to your European customers.
3) Deduct the V.A.T incurred from your European suppliers of goods or services.

Value Added Tax – An Overview.

When all is said and done, other than the obvious need to increase your pricing structure for certain global markets registering for and, charging value added tax actually has a great deal of benefits. You now get to claim addition refunds from any expenses that you incur from the day to day running of your business, your promotional activities become vat’able so you can now increase the level of global marketing you do and, claim full value back from the EU member states (where applicable). basically, registering in the EU member state will enable your business to grow on a global scale and, at the same time, afford you the luxury of being able to market your goods and services to a greater client base at virtually no cost to yourself this is a good thing especially when you take a look at the growth that international internet usage is making each month.

Article written by Lee

Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 6

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

Stage 6 already!

Only 2 more stages to go after this tutorial until you have a fully functional surfer trap!

Ok as promised in the last tutorial, we are going to implement the table pages you hopefully made in our last tutorial.

You now need to signup for ANOTHER counter code. Use the same counter as you did last time and, again, make sure the URL you send the traffic from the counter to is your main Multi-Site FPA surfer trap page.

Ok, you have the new counter code, what you should do with this is place it on every one of the niche table pages we made yesterday. Nowhere else except on these pages.

Once you have the counter code placed you now need to go back to our consoles, what we are going to do is make these HTML table pages into a secondary console from off the first pop up that we get when a surfer visits any of our FPA’s.

What you should do is enter the following coding in between the <head> and </head> tags of the niche pop-ups ensuring that you choose a DIFFERENT niche to the one of your original consoles:

<!—— BEGIN CONSOLE CODE ——->
<SCRIPT language=Javascript>
<!–
var exit=true;
function exitcnsl()
{
if (exit)
open(“http://www.yourdomain.com/tableconsolepage.html”, “tables”,”toolbar=0,location=0,status=0,menubar=0, scrollbars=0,resizable=0, width=800,height=600,top=0,left=0″);
}
//–>
</SCRIPT>
<!—— END CONSOLE CODE ——->

You need to edit the figures for width= and height= to reflect the size of your table, ideally the frame of the console should be around 3 or 4 pixels either side of your tables.

Ok now once you have added the above to your existing pop-ups you now need to add the following to the newly created table consoles between the <head> and the </head> tags:

<SCRIPT language=javascript>
self.blur();
</script>

What this will do is once the first console loads, it will immediately load a second console but, this second console should be ‘hidden’ behind the main window that is displayed. We have created a blur console.

We now have one last thing to do with this ‘blur console’ that we have just created.

Go to the HTML coding for the table ad console and add the same JavaScript to that page however, this time you DO NOT need to use the self.blur section of the instructions or, change the sizes of the console that pops.

Instead you need to add the following to the <body> tag:

onUnload=”exitcnsl()” so as an example your body tag may look like this:

<BODY BGCOLOR=#000000 onUnload=”exitcnsl()”>

Now you also need to alter the location for the console that will pop this time, you have a choice, you can send the console directly to the ARS POTD program or, you can send it BACK to your Multi-Site FPA page, at which point the surfer will be able to select another niche or leave your site.

Now remember, this surfer trap IS aggressive however, every time one of your counter codes load both from the FPA’s where we implemented them AND on the newly created table consoles we are gaining extra traffic.

If you have ANY questions at all please do not hesitate to post on the forums and myself or one of our administrators will assist you.

Article written by Lee

Viral Marketing – Catching The Marketing Bug

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Viral Marketing | Response: 0

The term viral marketing is offensive. Call yourself a viral marketer and, people will often take two steps back. I know I would do. It is a sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether region somewhere between horror movies and disaster films.

That said however, you have to admire the skills of the viral marketer. They have a way of winning by sheer weight of numbers alone. They piggy back on everyone else and use their resources to grow their own. In the right circumstances the viral marketer can grow exponentially. A virus doesn’t have to mate, it just replicates itself again and, again and, again increasing its power, doubling its effect with each replication.

I
I I
I I I I
I I I I I I
I I I I I I I I

In a few short generations, a viral marketing population can boom as seen in the diagram above.

Viral marketing defined.

What does a virus have to do with viral marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for mass growth in the messages exposure and influence.

Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to hundreds, even thousands in a relatively short period of time.

Before the advent of the internet viral marketing was often referred to as ‘word of mouth’. However, for better or for worse, the term viral marketing has infected.

One classic example of this marketing technique is Hotmail.com one of the first free web based email services. Their strategy was simple.

Give away free email addresses and services.
Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out.
Watch people email their friends, colleagues and family.
Watch these same friends colleagues and family join up to their service.
See the message propelled to an ever increasing audience, all for free.

In closing viral marketing is like watching the tiny ripples of a single pebble dropped pond, one small splash can create ever increasing circles which in turn could create ever increasing revenues.

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

What Happens Your Current Processor Bails?

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

Whilst this is perhaps one of the hardest challenges that a webmaster of a paysite can face in the industry it isn’t as bad as they may seem at first after all, there are literally hundreds of processors to choose from ranging from credit card processors, dialer option, micro-sms billing and a wide range of other systems.

The first and foremost thing you should do however when confronted with this challenge is to try and contact your existing processor and find out what will happen to funds that you are owed, will you be paid (in most cases you will).

The next thing you should do is to evaluate your business billing methods are you offering multiple processors already? If so, simply switch to your backup processor and find a new processor to use as a backup.

However, what happens if you only have a single processor on your site what can you do then?

First things first, you need to make sure you choose a reliable payment processor to start off with companies such as iBill, CCBill, CCBill EU, Netbilling and Jettis are all good processors used by a multitude of sponsors and content providers amongst the other companies.

You will most likely find that these companies are more than happy to work with you in the integration of their system onto your site.

Whilst you are awaiting your setup of your new processor to ensure you do not lose any sales it may be an idea to divert your join page off to a dialer or, perhaps have some form of ‘internal’ billing mechanism set up so that, when you do change over processors you can seamlessly transition your member base across.

Now, presuming that you already have an existing member base what do you do then? How easy or hard is it going to be to transfer them across to your new processor? Well based on the situation some were confronted with when Visa introduced the new fees to process adult payments this can vary from webmaster to webmaster again, as before, the easiest solution for you would be to contact the company you will be using as your primary processor and see what they can suggest.

Hopefully, you will have access to a database of your existing members email addresses this will also come in handy to ensure you can keep recurring those members. Send out an email stating that you will be changing your processor and, ask that, if they would like to remain a member of your site that they update their billing information, it might also be prudent to offer them some sort of recompense for having them change processors perhaps something along the lines of 2 weeks low cost or even free access tot he site, this is sure to mean that most of, if not all of your existing members will input their billing information again enabling you to rebill them until they cancel their membership at our new processor.

Of course nothing is infallible so the best advice i can offer you is to work closely with your new found processor and make sure that the transition period happens as quickly and, as smoothly as possible.

Hopefully this article will be of some use to those who do get affected by their processors going out of business and, will also serve as a warning to have multiple processors in place for those who have not or will not have the need to change your billing company.

Article written by Lee

Obscenity – Put It To The Test

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

Regardless of how long any of us have been an adult webmaster we all need to be
aware of obscenity laws and, in particular how they affect our businesses
whether we think a hardcore photoset is ‘obscene’ or not ultimately, if you get
taken to court on obscenity charges the one thing you should be aware of is how
the courts will decide whether the images you are using will be classified as
obscene or not.

Testing Obscenity – The Miller Test.

The Miller test was developed in the 1973 court case of Miller vs. California
and in comprises of three parts ALL of which MUST be satisfied on order for
something to be deemed obscene by the courts. The Miller test is the ‘official’
method used by the United States Supreme Court for determining whether an
expression or a speech can be determined as obscene and, if deemed obscene, it
is not protected under the First Amendment and is therefore prohibited by law.

The Miller Test – Part One.

Part one of The Miller Test states something may be obscene if ‘the average
person, applying contemporary adult community standards, would find that the
work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest’ In essence, this
means that if the ‘average’ person on a jury or on the bench finds the work to
be deemed obscene then, it is. However for the court to rule something as
obscene it also has to be deemed obscene by the standards set in part two and
part three below.

The Miller Test – Part Two.

Part two of The Miller Test states that something is potentially obscene is
‘the average person, applying contemporary adult community standards, would
find that the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual
conduct’. Basically this is saying that if the images or speech is something
which is not practiced in a manner befitting your local community standards
then again, it may be obscene. However, as with part one of The Miller Test for
a court to find something obscene it needs to fall below the standards in part
three below.

The Miller Test – Part Three.

Part three of The Miller Test states that something is potentially obscene if,
‘a reasonable person would find that the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious
literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.’ This is pretty much where
you could potentially come unstuck after all, everyone has different sexual
tastes and because of this, just because something that may be widespread such
as ‘bare backing’ (to use as an example) could potentially be considered as
obscene if you happen to have a jury who are devout practicers of safe sex.

The Miller Test – Overview.

In essence The Miller Test is a useful guideline for webmasters when it comes
to operating our sites and specifically, when it comes to choosing the types of
content we utilize on them however, for the most part The Miller Test itself is
outdated. Since the early 70’s when this test was devised there have been many
sexual practices that were once deemed obscene that have become more a part of
everyday life and accepted in to society as whole thus, what once would (or
could) have been deemed obscene would no longer be in the same sense as
something that may be deemed obscene today could be found not to be in 5 years
time.

Article written by Lee

Direct Debit Payment Explained

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

Something that is very rarely spoken about as a means of payment is Direct Debit, this is a popular payment method across Europe and, especially in the United Kingdom. Direct Debit can offer your surfers a cost effective, easy way to pay for products and services from your site especially, if they have a ‘recurring’ cost associated with them.

Direct Debit – What Is It?

Direct Debit is quite possibly one of the simplest ways to collect funds from your surfers basically, a form is filled out by the surfer, where they enter their bank payment details, account number, name, sort code. Then, the form is signed either electronically or, in person by the customer, in this case, electronically by the surfer.

Once you have the direct form filled in by your surfer, you may continue to deduct funds from the bank account on the Direct Debit form until such a time whereas the surfer cancels the Direct Debit agreement.

At the present time, around 45% of the population in the UK currently choose to pay their utility bills online by Direct Debit and, around 75% of the total population in the UK have used Direct Debit at least once in addition Direct Debit is also an alternative method of payment in the vast majority of European countries and, it is also used (although not as much) in Australia.

Direct Debit – What Are The Cost?

Direct Debit payments cost around $0.5 for you as a merchant to process, however, this charge, rather than happening on the processors side of the transaction, happens when the Direct Debit request hits your banking account.

This in itself is god news after all, you now ensure that if a membership or product costs $35 per month, you will get virtually the full cost of that membership until such a time when the surfer cancels the direct debit at their bank.

Direct Debit – An Overview.

All in all, Direct Debit is probably one of the only payment solutions that allow you to collect the full price from your surfer at the point of sale and, furthermore, because the Direct Debit method of payment is trusted, this offers your surfers something that no other form of payment can – Peace of mind. There is however one major drawback to this method of payment, it is very hard to find processors that will allow you to utilize Direct Debit on your sites in fact, to date, the main use for the Direct Debit payment method has been payments of utility bills, Gas, Electricity, Water Supply, etc however, many financial institutes will let you pay for goods and services using Direct Debit on ‘credit’ terms which can vary from 1 day to a year interest free or, not as the case so often is.

I strongly feel that within the next 12 months this method of payment could become advantageous to the adult webmaster however, the current online payment processors need to be pushed in order for this to become as widespread as credit and debit card processing is. That said, there are a few online adult companies already accepting Direct Debit as a form of payment so, at least the ‘DD’ revolution has already started.

Article written by Lee