Adult Webmaster Health

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

Sounds to me like you are a webmaster. Most of us realize that working at a computer everyday can and often is, bad for our health in one way, shape or, form. However, how do we alleviate these potential problems with our health?

Well in this article I will detail some of the things that can often affect the webmasters in our industry and how they can be solved.

RSI (Repetitive Stress Injuries) are the results of, as you may have figured out already, the effects of constantly doing the same movements over and over again using specific parts of your body. One of the most common of these that webmasters are aware of is CTS (Carpal Tunnel Syndrome) which is a result of typing a lot.

So, how do you combat the effects of CTS? First and foremost, if you experience any form of pain at all, your first port of call should be the doctor, the pain you are feeling could be an indicator of a bigger problem. If you think your pain might be caused by use of the computer then an occupational therapist might also be a good person to visit.

CTS is often attributed to use of your digits and poor hand positioning when you type one way to solve this problem is to go to Office Depot and purchase a wrist rest, this will ensure your wrist has ample support whilst you are working throughout the day.

You might also like to try re-positioning your monitor, as a general rule of thumb, having your monitor placed about 20 inches away from your face will usually result in good posture and that in itself can often be a solution to the potential medical problems. One other thing on your posture, get a good chair, one with a high back may be good, these generally offer you more support and, can stop that awkward habit of leaning into your keyboard when you type.

Eyestrain, Eyestrain is another common problem that the webmaster faces, often it leads to things such as excessive headaches, fatigue and, blurry vision, the most acceptable relief from eyestrain is the use of screen filter that will reduce the glare your monitor emits.

There of course, some other things you can do to alleviate this problem such as, Adjusting your monitor so the top of the screen is no higher than eye level, as already mentioned, keeping the monitor a safe working distance from you, usually between 18 and 30 inches is recommended by doctors.

We know computers are machines and tend to forget that our own bodies are complex machines which, should be looked after just as our computers should be, we often forget that sitting at the PC building what was meant to be a 10 minute site can turn into an hours worth of ‘online work’. Take some time every now and again to stand up and walk for 5 minutes, even if it is just to the local store to buy some more smokes, you are actually getting some exercise and, even though the tar in your smokes will end up killing you anyway, you’ll at least be able to work a little longer without getting any problematic computer related medical symptoms.

This article is not meant as an alternative to visiting your physician and, should you think that any of the above are relevant to you then it is recommended that you visit your doctors without delay and follow any advice that they give you.

Article written by Lee.

10 Ways To Promote Your Site

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

As we all know, getting productive traffic to your site can be a long and tedious task of course, there are ways to generate ‘optimized’ traffic at very little cost and time involvement. Below are just a few suggestions about how you can increase traffic to your
site and, inevitably, there are hundreds of different variations of these that will work for your site, I think the key to getting a successful traffic source is dependant on how much effort you put into it and, if you work hard and play little, you will reap the benefits tenfold.

1. Create an email discussion list. The list should be related to your web site’s subject. Place your ad on all posts and it will remind people to visit your site.

2. Prove your site is a bargain. Add a lot of free stuff to your offer or, if you’ve sold the product for a higher price before, show them the difference or, show them how much your competitors charge.

3. Make your web site more useful. Sell ad space, generate hot leads, answer visitor questions, offer free content, be news friendly, etc.

4. Make the most of each visitor. Sometimes your price is to high. You should provide a variety of similar products at different price ranges.

5. Test and redesign your banner ads till you get your desired click through rate. Once you do, join many banner exchanges and buy ad space.

6. Use holidays as a reason to get free publicity. Write a press release or article about the current holiday. It’ll have a high chance of being published.

7. Utilize the free content on the internet. Publish one article on a single web page and your main web site link then upload it as a doorway page.

8. Test your new products on the bottom of your home page. You don’t want to take away hits from your best selling products until others are proven.

9. Make commissions without joining an affiliate program. Just propose a joint venture offer to web sites that don’t have affiliate programs.

10. Persuade other web sites to link to yours. It can improve your search engine ranking. Just offer them something of value in return.

Article written by Lee.

The Successful Marketing Approach

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

In today’s volatile and competitive marketplace, the strategic manager must possess a sophisticated perspective regarding creating and maintaining the overall image of the organization.

In order to accomplish this goal, marketing must play a key role, regardless of the company’s size.

To be truly effective, a company must be up-to-date with it’s marketing ‘psyche’. In bygone times, companies concentrated on items it was able to produce, not on customer needs and wants. This type of outdated thinking will most likely lead to a rather short lifespan.

Today, marketing is a holistic approach that is often more complex than first thought.

What Is Marketing?

It is a process through which an organization identifies a need and then provides a means of filling or satisfying that need.

Customers are more informed and savvy than in the past and they expect more – in the quality of both products and service. Today’s customer is not willing to merely sit passively by and consume – he wants a voice and relationship with the companies with whom he chooses to conduct business.

Marketing is not deciding where and how to advertise. This is only one component of the process. Effective managers make sure they have a well-defined and mapped out strategy that deals with the entire lifecycle of the process. The most successful companies have a keenly honed customer-centric marketing model.

This model outlines a process that allows the company to determine the needs and wants of a “target market” and deliver this while instilling in the customer the belief their company’s ‘satisfaction solution’ is better value than the competition’s.

The first step in a marketing strategy involves the identification of unmet needs within a market and delivering/developing products and/or services to meet those needs.

Define Your Market First.

Is it a business-to-consumer company, a business-to-business company, or both? Regardless of the target(s) a company must be able to clearly identify a common need amongst a large portion of this market, as well as that portions propensity and ability to buy that product or service.

Once the target market has been identified it is time to do some analysis. The depth, complexity and related cost should remain proportionate to the ratio of overall business this product or service is anticipated to generate.

Analyze Internally.

What will be involved in creating this product or service? Is there access to all of the necessary components? How much volume can be handled? Are their efficient distribution channels? What will it cost to make or provide this? The next phase is an external analysis that looks at specific trends within the target market. With this information in hand, a company is then able to make an informed decision as to whether or not it is feasible to proceed. Now that the target market has been identified and the operational side has been flushed out, a strategy can be addressed. How a company decides to communicate its message should be in correlation to its overall marketing strategy. Whether the most effective method of conveying you message to the target audience is through traditional advertising channels, the Internet or more innovative activities, it should be apparent from the prior analysis. The final phase of a marketing strategy should examine the component of customer relationship management: What processes are in place to service our customers? How do we ensure a positive resolution of customer complaints? What performance measurements will be used to determine how well clients are being serviced? And, most importantly: How will customer relationships be maintained so they will do business with us again and again? By developing a comprehensive strategy that spans the entire lifecycle of new to repeat client, a company will find it is able to effectively address the present needs and wants of it’s target markets, as well as being able to incorporate new areas as they develop. Article written by Lee

Outsourcing – Becoming More Profitable Online

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Employment | Response: 0

As webmasters we already do a lot of outsourcing from hosting our sites to design and marketing to getting traffic which we send to our sponsors. However, many of us are missing out on opportunities to outsource even more of our work and, by missing these opportunities, we are losing money.

Outsourcing work can consist of anything from translations, design, scripting, marketing, seo, site submissions and pretty much anything and everything in between.

However, before we outsource some work to others there are several factors that need to be taken into consideration these are what will be addressed in this article.

Cost.

Ensuring we work ‘cost-effectively’ is one thing we all want to do, we need to make a profit whilst still being able to develop our business further. One good way to find out if the costs of outsourcing outweighs the cost of keeping the work in house to make a simple list of both the time and financial involvements both in and out of house. For example, in house you may have employees that need paying to do the work, you will almost certainly need to spend a lot of your own time on the project and, more likely than not you will need to research the work you want to undertake, all of this can become costly when looked at in detail a good reason to outsource your work to another company or individual.

Benefits.

How will outsourcing benefit you and your business? As with the cost example above make a list of things that will benefit you from the time saved on the project to the monetary benefits of outsourcing the work and the completion times often, by outsourcing your work you can have it done in much less time than if you handled it yourself ‘in-house’ so to speak.

Flexibility.

What are the indirect benefits of you outsourcing your work? Not necessarily the money saved but more along the lines of time management. if you give a designer a list of ideas and suggestions you WANT your work to have, chances are, they will get it right the first time whereas, if you amble along experimenting with what you actually create you may, in effect, take much longer to complete the task in hand. By saving yourself time what else can you get done, whether it is building more sites or marketing your existing sites further the indirect benefits all weigh up more often than not, these benefits will be favorable to outsourcing the work.

Risk.

This is probably THE most important thing to take into account when considering outsourcing your work, what happens if, you pay for the outsourcing and, overnight the company who is doing the work for you goes out of business? What happens if someone you have in your employ decides that they would rather be doing the work rather than you outsourcing it? Financially can you afford to outsource the work? All of these factors need to be considered before undertaking any form of outsourcing.

Basically, what I am trying to tell you is that, if you spend a few moments actually running the numbers as oppose to the ideas you have in respect of your workload you will see that outsourcing can be come a valuable asset to your business and, more importantly, your bottom line profits.

Article written by Lee

Seasons Greetings For The Adult Surfer

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General, Promotion, WebDesign | Response: 0

How do the national and, international holidays affect our sponsors sales? More than you would think especially if you can offer your surfers something ‘seasonal’ when they hit your site. However, that said, when should you start planning for these holidays and, more importantly, how can you ensure that once you have implemented your seasonal marketing campaigns that they actually work?

Seasonal Marketing – The Basics.

Seasonal marketing is, in effect a method of changing your marketing approach around different times of the year to affect both the volume of sales you make and, more importantly, the uniqueness of the product you are offering your surfers. A good example of this is at Christmas time, many of the sponsors will provide their webmasters with banner with a holiday feel to them, perhaps using scantily clad men in Santa outfits or half naked women in elves costumes. By offering a seasonal marketing approach to your site surfers you actually increase the chances of making a sale.

Holiday Porn.

One of the best ways to offer your surfers a fresh marketing angle is to ensure that you plan for all of the major holidays throughout the year in advance so for example, as mentioned above, Christmas is a big holiday as are, New Years, Easter, Thanksgiving (US), Independence Day (US) and, Halloween. By building sites specifically for these holidays you are increasing the chances not only of building your sales but, of gaining additional traffic that you might otherwise lose out on. It has been said certainly over the last four years i have worked in the adult industry that many webmasters experience an increase in search engine traffic searching on keywords such as ‘Christmas Porn’ and, ‘Ghost Porn’ around the various holidays, build now for next year and, when the holiday season arrives, you will be one step ahead of your competition.

Seasonal Marketing Overview.

As already mentioned the holiday season especially Christmas time, can be a great way to gain additional traffic, not only from those surfers specifically looking for Christmas Porn but, also the newbie adult surfers who have perhaps only just got their first computer on Christmas day, by adding to your collection of seasonal porn sites year after year you will not only learn a lot about the way the various holidays and seasons affect your sales but, you will also be able to profit from your surfers in a way that not many other webmasters do.

Article written by Lee

Domain Name Renewals – The Basics

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Domain Names | Response: 0

As an adult webmaster there is one thing that we all own which we build our businesses on, a domain name and, with this comes the responsibility to ensure that as long as we are running our business from any given domain that we ensure they are constantly under our control this is where domain name renewsl come into play.

Domain Name Registration Periods.

Almost all reputable domain name registrars will allow you to purchase a domain for anywhere between one and ten year periods. Many webmasters however only choose to register their domains for one year at a time and this, is where many webmaster can run into problems with their domains. More often than not webmasters will either forget to renew their domain names completely or, are not aware that they are even coming up for renewal. For this reason it is usually best to ensure that you register your domains for a minimum period of two years, this gives you a good time frame to start using the domain as well as ensuring you have enough funds available by the time the domain name comes due for renewal.

How To Stay On Top Of Your Renewals.

The simplest way to ensure that you keep on top of the domain names you own and when they are due for renewal is to keep a written document detailing as much information as possible about your domains, this document should include information such as the domain name itself, the registrar you used to register your domain name, the cost of the domain name and, most importantly, where the domain is pointing to, the period of registration and, the date when the domain needs to be renewed. By having this information readily available and, by keeping this document up to date with each new domain name purchase you should be able to ensure that no matter when your domain/s become due for renewal that you are on the ball with paying the domain name renewal fees.

Domain Name Renewals Overview.

Regardless of when you register a domain name the one way you can be sure to be the owner of the domain for years to come is to ensure that you keep accurate, detailed records of each domain name purchase, whether you keep this written on a calendar, on a piece of paper or, somewhere else, you should make part of your monthly routine checking this document and making sure that the domains you own are all fully working and, more importantly, are fully paid up.

Article written by Lee

Bandwidth Explained

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Hosting | Response: 0

Bandwidth is the total amount of data that can be sent in a given time between two computer devices. The more bandwidth that is available, the faster the server.

Any webmaster expecting a decent amount of traffic to their adult site will require a web hosting package that includes a large amount of bandwidth. This is so important, especially with the growth of your online business and, ultimately your sites. The more bandwidth your server has, the larger the number of surfers who will be able to view it at the same time, and the access it quickly will be. If you don’t have enough bandwidth, surfers will not be able to access your site as quickly, and that may turn them off which in turn, will mean they will leave your site.

For this reason alone, it is important to select a hosting company that can offer you a great deal of bandwidth. As an example, larger hosting providers will have T1 lines or fiber-optic relays to access the Internet; these will provide a fair amount bandwidth. Another way is to get a dedicated server which, in turn, gives you exclusive access to your server’s connectivity instead of sharing it with others, as such allowing for maximum hardware performance.

To calculate your bandwidth needs, you must know how large each page on your site is, including the graphics and any script usage you may have. Then, you multiply that by the number of views you expect the site to get every month.

For example, say you have three 5k images on your page and a 2k HTML file – you would have 17k of data on that page. Multiply that by your expected page views (let’s say in this case it is 100,000 per month), and you get 1.7 G of data to be transferred that month for that page alone. Now calculate this for each page, and you will know approximately how much bandwidth your entire site requires.

The best way of using bandwidth efficiently is to keep the size of your html pages low. In other words, ensure your HTML programming is adequate enough to use minimal amounts of coding for the purpose you want and, that your photos and graphics are small. To reduce photo file sizes you should always use JPEG format, which can reduce files up to 5% of its original size. Make sure to use the GIF format for graphics, as opposed to TIFFs or BMPs, which are generally much larger in file size.

If you attach URLs to your IMG SRC that link to another person’s images without their permission, this is known throughout the online industry as hotlinking which, costs the person you are linking the image of money and not yourself. For this reason, hotlinking, is looked upon dimly.

The unfortunate truth is that hotlinking is rife in the online industry. However, lets not let that deter you, by utilizing a file called .htaccess on your server, you can prevent other dishonest webmasters hotlinking your images.

As with most things in this industry, you need to shop around to find the best prices available to you. However, that said, as a general rule of thumb, a gig of transfer can cost between $1 and $5 these are usually thought to be good prices for a gig of bandwidth. You can also get certain hosting packages that have a specific amount of bandwidth included in the price, however, the one draw back of these types of deals is that, if you go over that limit, you will either need to pay and excess bandwidth usage fee or, upgrade your hosting plan.

Article Written By Lee

Marketing And Building For Women Sites

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Promotion, WebDesign | Response: 0

When marketing sites to the female surfer, just how different does the building process become, are there things that you should leave out or add in that you usually wouldn’t for the male adult arena? Hopefully this article will explain this in some more depth.

I have broken this article down into specific segments that should be considered when building your for women sites these are as follows:

Sub Niches

As with every other niche in the adult industry the For Women market has their own individual sub niches. These vary from young guys to older men, couples, stories, fantasy, bondage, cartoons and a whole plethora of other niches all of which are to many mention here. Your chosen niche should reflect in the content you will be using and, more importantly, the content of the pay site to where you are sending the surfer. This is the best time to get a feel for your content and, it alleviates some hardships later on when you realize you have built a site full of hairy guys, only to realize the only site you can send them to is a gay bear site, not the most appealing site for a female surfer to join.

Where Do You Want To Go With This Site?

Are you looking to create a free site for the sole reason of driving traffic to your surfer trap, are you going to make a free site in order to make a sale, are you building a site for an AVS system? These are all decisions that you need to make before you start the building process, planning at this stage will reap its benefits later on. You should also consider the sponsor that you will utilize on the site, are you going to use all pay sites, sex toy sponsors or, will you use a mix, you need to plan this well as you do not want to end up with a site where all of the sponsors you are using end up negating the values of each other.

What Type Of Female Are You Looking To Attract?

Do you want to attract female surfers looking for erotica or, do you want to attract female surfers who are after something else, take a look at some of the female traffic sites, see what each of the sites presented to you offer their female surfers, can your match or better what these sites offer and, more importantly, can you offer something that the female surfer is likely to want?

Content Is King.

As with every other niche you need to pre-select the content that you will use on this site, do you have something that can be used and, used in such a way it generates interest from the surfer, if you are using stories on your site are they appealing, how do the men in the images look? All of these need to be taken into consideration before you start to use your content, if you do not have any content you need to choose some from one of the for women content providers, keep in your budget, make sure the content is right for your needs, not to hardcore but, not to softcore, keep it simple and erotic.

Layout

When creating your galleries be creative, anyone can stick up a 10 pic gallery but it takes a true marketer to place creative text on the page, provide the female surfer with some additional information, make it up if you have to, tell them the model is called Brian, tell them his stats, let them know some more information about the model. This will be more likely to get the women who visit your galleries / sites interested in both the images and, more importantly, the erotic side of the model you are using, if the model is available inside your sponsor pay site, you will more than likely find that the female surfer will want to get more information about the model out of sheer interest alone if nothing else.

Choose Your Marketing Strategies.

Will you be using banners, text links or, other media to sell your for women sponsor? We all know the proliferation of banners on the internet have made them less ‘click-able’ than what they used to be. Use some ‘erotic’ text over banners or, even use text on its own.

Keywords And Relevancy

Keep your smack talk pleasant but to the point, the majority of female surfers would prefer to click on a link that said ‘Steve erotically caressed his penis against her cheeks’ than, ‘Steve shot his hot creamy load all over her face’ see the difference? one is sensual and erotic the other is pure porn, female surfer are mainly erotica driven not porn driven.

Speak To Another Webmaster / Web Mistress.

The for women niche is still relatively untapped at the moment, the people who are catering for this niche know the niche, most of them are female themselves and, as such, will know what works and what does not. How would you speak to a woman you met in public? There is a difference between speaking to a ‘guy’ and speaking to a female. Let this difference also show in your site too. If you have no idea how to market to women, ask one, you can find a message board dedicated to female webmasters at http://www.femalewebmasters.com and i am sure one of the posters there would be happy to help you out.

Design And Practice.

You now have the basics set you should now move onto designing you layout, keep your design simple, keep it neat, don’t over do the ‘female’ aspect of the site, over use of pinks, pastels and similar colors can undo all the preparation work you have just done, be subtle, know you are designing a site for the female surfer but keep it generalize, soft tones in color are not always the best way to use colors. Pink is not always for girls, blue is not always for boys, shades of pastel blue has just as much of a feminine effect as pinks and reds. Choose your color scheme wisely and this will pay off big time.

However you decide to develop your site you should ensure that it melts together nicely, use contrasting colors for your banners, background and text, make sure the content is not too gay looking and that the female surfer knows the site was built specifically for her but, also ensure you have the links visible in case you get surfers from other niches at your site, don’t do yourself out of money just because this is a for women site this is probably the only element that crosses over between niches be they straight, gay or in fact, for women.

Article written by Lee.



Newbie Webmasters – What Is A Newbie?

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: General | Response: 0

Newbie Adult Webmasters are something that is good for the adult industry as a whole. As more Newbie Webmasters join the adult industry the way in which things are done change and, more importantly, the way in which the newbies themselves get taught changes however, just what is a ‘Newbie’ when it comes to the adult industry? This is what we will take a look at in this brief article.

Adult Webmaster Newbie – The Differences.

Irrespective of what anyone tells you, everyone in the adult industry is a newbie its just a matter of figuring out what they are a newbie at. For example, personally i have just taken to learning PHP as a programming tool, i have never coded anything before so, i am officially a php newbie. Likewise there are webmasters who have never built a TGP gallery, they are TGP newbies, in fact, every facet of the adult industry has its own newbies some of them have been around for days whilst others have been around for many years. Going by the ‘true’ meaning of the word however, a newbie is someone who knows very little about very little.

Message Board Newbies.

At some point or other every webmaster will want to start posting on some of the industry’s message forums, whether this is to make friends or ask advice you will instantly be branded a newbie from your first post, if this isn’t the case, make sure that you give a brief history about what you do in the adult industry and, more importantly, how long you have been doing it, don’t go overboard however, just give enough information to let others know what it is you are doing on the message forum.

Newbie Adult Webmasters – Overview.

The perception of newbie webmasters is that many of them do not know what they are doing however, just because someone hasn’t heard the name before on a specific message forum this doesn’t mean the webmaster is in fact a true ‘newbie’ we all need to ensure that when using the term newbie we don’t make ourselves look like newbies in the process.

Article written by Lee

Designing A 404 Error Document

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Designing A 404 Error Document.

Now that we know how to use .htaccess let’s get into how exactly to effectively design a 404 error document page. Here are a few tips when building your document:

Keep The Design Constant.

That is, whatever design your web site supports, consider keeping that design when building your error document. This is not mandatory, however. If you have a good reason to stray from your design, then do so. Otherwise, keep it constant.

Use Attractive Dialog.

Do not use the word error. Error signifies something is terribly wrong, and while that may be so, you should give that information to your visitor in a very friendly way. Instead, consider writing “Sorry, the page you were looking for is not available at the moment”.

Include Contact Information.

Obviously, you want to fix the error, so give the user every opportunity to e-mail you about the error. Some users will not bother to do so, but you still need to give them the opportunity.

Keep The Visitor Moving.

Often, 404 error pages are like road blocks, or brick walls that the user cannot pass through. You need to break through the barriers and allow the visitor to keep traveling through your web site. If your web site supports a search capability, include a form on your error document to let them search for the information they were originally seeking. At the very least, include a link to your home page.

Give Them A Site Map.

When the user clicks upon a page that is no longer available, or was mistyped by the webmaster, consider adding a link to a site map page, or include your site map right on your 404 error document, so the user can get their bearings within your site, and can locate their desired content quickly and easily.

Give Them Help.

List tips on your error document page to help the visitor diagnose the error. For example, ask them to double check the URL in their browser’s address bar. If it’s correct, politely ask them to e-mail you to report the error. Also suggest that they visit your home page (or search utility) to find the information they are after.

List Some Popular Links.

Provide the user with a few links to your most popular content areas of your web site, as it is more likely they were searching for that content than anything else.

As you have seen, error documents are more important than you may think. Merely having a custom error page shows you have put forth effort on your web site and want to help the user find the information they need. Error documents are easy to create and adds professionalism to any web site.

Article written by Lee