Think Fresh – Work Smarter

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

We have all experienced it at some point in our webmaster career, more often than not though, we hear about it all the time. What is it? Wanting to give in when we hit that proverbial brick wall.

Hopefully this article can offer you some help and advice when it comes to getting your sales back on track or, even getting them started at all.

Ask For Help.

The one thing that amazes me about this industry is that despite the fact we are all business competitors we are all (mostly) willing to help other webmasters out for little or nothing in return. if you hit that brick wall then imply ask for some help.

As webmasters we have a barrage of free tools readily available to us for asking the advice of others whether it is in email from your sponsors support reps, icq or even on the many industry related chat boards, by actually spending sometime to help yourself by asking others you can often see things from a new perspective and, get advice as to why thing that should be working are not.

Start Over.

So you have been doing this webmaster job for the last few months submitting to the TGP’s, building free and AVS sites but you still haven’t made a dime, something is wrong somewhere but how do you pinpoint the error? By far the easiest way to find out what is wrong is to start afresh. Head over to one of the webmaster resource sites and see what others are doing ask for advice and feedback on your sites and learn from the experiences they tell you about. Just because you might have heard the same information before doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask about it, often one webmaster will be able to tell you an alternate way of doing something that another webmaster is. One of the best ways to get a grasp on this learning curve is to read articles and tutorials, there are thousands of them on the net from HTML to Programming and everything in-between emulate the information contained in these articles and adjust that same information to suit your needs.

Don’t Stagnate.

If you are not having success at the AVS side of the business try something else, you already have a good base for building free sites and even TGP’s just because you have never tried using these sources of traffic and income doesn’t mean you wont be any good at them.

If traffic is your problem as mentioned above, ask others where they get their traffic from and how they built it up, learn to start small and grow instead of running head first into millions of hits a month that are being wasted.

Research The Industry.

If you are thinking of quitting, before you do spend a day or two just doing a little background research in the industry, its no secret that webmasters who join the online industry today have to work two or three times harder than our peers who joined several years ago, this is and always has been true in any business. By researching the industry you should be able to find out how others that joined before you failed and, more importantly, WHY they failed, learn from those experiences.

Finally.

No matter how hard and meaningless you find the work stick at it, just because you are not making any sales it doesn’t mean you wont make any sales tomorrow or even next week / month / year. Keep turning those sites out and, soon enough, when you least expect it you’ll make a sale and, you know what… the euphoric feeling you will get will be more than enough to make you realize that you HAVE been doing something right all along.

Article written by Lee

Everybody’s Going Gay

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General | Response: 0

The past few months in the online adult industry have seen some rather dramatic changes happen from Visa charging additional fees to accept their credit cards online, Paypal no longer processing adult and, several large companies going out of business. However, one thing that also seems to be changing for the better is the amount of webmasters looking at new niches to promote. Surprisingly, the one niche that many webmasters are looking at is that of the gay niche.

Where The Money’s At.

For years, the adult webmaster community has been split amongst themselves, those that are only focused on straight niches and, those that focus on gay niches however. As of late, more and more of those webmasters from the first group are looking to make additional income from the gay niche. With this inevitable surge in gay adult sites coming online, there are bound to be some knock-on effects, and those webmasters just starting to look at the gay niche, will return to what they know. However, for most, i think this is going to be a fruitful encounter with one of the industry less socially accepted markets. Many of the webmasters who have been concentrating solely on the straight market for their income are going to realize just how much money they have been losing out on for all these years. And with this realization, comes its own set of problems for the industry as a whole.

The Gay Market.

Whether you are a straight webmaster or a gay webmaster the one thing that will become apparent is that your sites are going to reflect you in both, how they look and, the marketing techniques you use. More importantly, the attitude you have towards your gay surfers will in fact show through. Many of the straight webmasters whom, perhaps are not as tolerant towards this niche will, almost certainly fail before they can really get going. Marketing gay adult sites is far different than marketing straight adult sites. You have to know the surfer, understand what they want and, more importantly, know the terminology in the gay market. Many times a post can be seen on various message boards belittling those webmasters who are openly gay – often accompanied by terms such as ‘fag’, ‘queer’, ‘homo’, etc along with with images being posted that, quite frankly, would turn most people’s stomach.

The gay niche is much more than just a single online market, it is a whole lifestyle unto itself. While this lifestyle is affluent (having an abundance of readily available money to spend) it will take a lot of work and perseverance to ensure you get your share of this market.

Starting Points.

As I mentioned above, the main thing many webmasters are going to have to learn are the terms of the gay market, what is a twink? A bear? A cub? What products work well on gay sites? Despite what most people think, you cant just throw up some banners with naked men on them and turn a profit. Match your content to a niche and then, match your advertising to your content, what use is it having bears on a site if, the paysite you are promoting features Teens ‘n’ Twinks?

Similarly, your text links, ‘Click Here For Hot Gay Action’ might get you a few clicks but, by targeting your surfers even more, you will see how some of the gay niches can really turn a profit. The trick is this, get the surfer to your site and actually give them something that you think will suit their desires. This may mean making a 10% commission on a sex toy sale as oppose to a $35 commission on a pay site membership. And so be it. Those 10%’ers start to add up after a few sales.

In Summary.

To summarize, the gay niche will make you money however, to make money you will need to invest something that, perhaps isn’t for everyone – a lot of time and understanding. Marketing the gay niche isn’t for everyone, we have seen this too many times. However for those who are, spending time adding a gay market portfolio to there straight, with a little time increase your overall income significantly.

Article written by Le

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.



Using JavaScript To Auto Scroll Text

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Scripts | Response: 0

Using JavaScript To Auto Scroll Text.

There may come a time when you would like to have some text on a page that is simply just to big to fit on a single page. Of course, you could always create a new document for this text but, what if you could make the text actually scroll through the surfers browser?

The following JavaScript will do just that.

Place the following section of JavaScript coding between your <head> and </head> tags:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript”>
<!–

function scrollit() {
for (I=1; I<=1200; I++) window.scroll(1,I);
}

// –>
</SCRIPT>

Along with the following JavaScript coding someone in the Body of your page:

<FORM>
<INPUT type=button value=”scroll” onClick=”scrollit()”>
</FORM>

Have a play around with the numbers in the first section of the JavaScript to speed up and slow down the rate of scrolling until you find a speed that is easy on the eye.

Article written by Lee

Maximizing Your Profit Potential – Upsells

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Sponsors | Response: 0

We all know the reason why pay sites have upsells inside them, to make more money so, the past few weeks I have been ‘experimenting’ with the same type of strategy the pay sites use and, to my surprise, actually found out you can make quite a nice amount of additional income by offering your surfers products or services other than porn!

Now, this may come as a shock to many but, when you build a free site, TGP Gallery, AVS site etc you can use non adult products on them.

I have found the following work well for the various different types of site:

Free Sites.

Dating Services such as http://www.oscardate.com , http://www.adultfriendfinder.com, etc etc.

Video Stores such as http://www.mallcom.com and http://www.moviemountain.com.

Sex Toys such as http://www.gayadultshopping.com and http://www.mallcom.com (Mallcom sells toys and videos)

Also, to my surprise, search engines have done really well on our traffic. Where we would usually use a text link I SSI’d some files and included some text files going directly to a variety of niches earning me in excess of $0.40 per click in some instances!!

AVS Sites.

Dating Services like those mentioned above e have found have done reasonably well however, for some reason not as well as they did on the free sites, you would think that they should do better than on free sites so I guess it is something wrong with my marketing, either way, we just plugged a link to one of our dating affiliates and, sure enough made some $$$ from them.

Penis Enlargement programs did VERY well inside our AVS sites again, all we did was place a simple text link with ‘enlarge your penis’ for the text and, surprisingly we made a few good sales from that.

We also integrated our own little MallCom store front on its own domain and have been sending traffic to that and, again, the results have been reasonable.

TGP Galleries.

To my surprise, the most profitable thing that we have tested on our TGP Galleries is again, Penis Enlargement type programs, Viagra sales from http://www.kwikmed.com have been doing well the last few weeks and we even had a rebill already!

One thing that I didn’t expect to work well that did was email collection, in fact, after just 10 days we already have 95 email addresses purely from our TGP Galleries. These emails will be used further in time to send out our newsletter and hopefully make some recurring sales from them.

I guess the point of this was to let you know you can use alternatives to your adult orientated sponsors on any type of site you build and make a profit from them.

Anyway, I’m off to do some more testing, I have found a nice casino sponsor imp going to send a few days of traffic to.

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.

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

Thinking Of Starting An Adult Website In The UK?

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

We all know that there are many foreign / international adult webmasters and there are some very well known ones based in England however, before you start building your online empire what are the legalities regarding the type of content you can and cant use on your adult pornographic sites?

To be honest with you, there are no ‘defined’ laws in England (At the time of writing this article) regarding the use of online media to promote adult activities however, it is a commonly held belief that as long as you stay to the same standard as what most ‘top shelf magazines’ or ‘R18 Videos’ have in them you shouldn’t go far wrong.

So what are these standards? That’s the information that I am about to give you.

Content that IS NOT acceptable.

1) Any material which is in breach of the criminal law.

2) Material (including dialogue) likely to encourage an interest in abusive sexual activity (e.g., pedophilia, incest) which may include depictions involving adults role-playing as non-adults.

3) The portrayal of any sexual activity, whether real or simulated, which involves lack of consent.

4) The infliction of pain or physical harm, real or (in a sexual context) simulated. Some allowance may be made for mild consensual activity.

5) Any sexual threats or humiliation which do not form part of a clearly consenting role-playing game.

6) The use of any form of physical restraint which prevents participants from withdrawing consent, for example, ball gags.

7) Penetration by any object likely to cause actual harm or associated with violence.

8) Activity which is degrading or dehumanizing (examples include the portrayal of bestiality, necrophilia, defecation, urolagnia).

As you can see from the above, there ARE very specific guidelines regarding water sports, animality and, some of the more ‘out there’ fetishes.

Now you know what you cant use on your adult sites, lets take a look at the list of sexual activities that you can use. Its no surprise that the list of what you can use is considerably shorter.

Content that MAY BE acceptable.

1) Aroused genitalia.

2) Masturbation.

3) Oral-genital contact including kissing, licking and sucking.

4) Penetration by finger, penis, tongue, vibrator or dildo.

5) Non-harmful fetish material.

6) Group sexual activity.

7) Ejaculation and semen.

It also worth noting that the above guidelines are not distinguished between heterosexual or homosexual activities.

So, that’s the low down on what the current status of affairs are with regards to the use of adult content on websites in England and Wales. Actually, that’s not to bad just ensure that you stay within these guidelines and, more importantly, that you do consult a solicitor before commencing any form of adult business after all, that’s what they are there for, to give you SOUND legal advice instead of basic ‘guidelines’.

Article written by Lee

New European V.A.T Laws – Are You Prepared?

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

Under a new law that has been passed in the EU from July 1st 2003 any internet based company selling services or goods to customers inside the EU will have to pay the member state of their customer/client the equivalent V.A.T (Value Added Tax) Rate.

This in itself is not a big problem, online business have been paying taxes for many years, the problems start to occur when you take a look at the current state of the V.A.T system in the EU state members on an individual basis.

The following list shows the percentage of V.A.T that you will need to add to your clients bills if they are located inside a member state of the EU:

Austria – 20% VAT
Belgium – 21% VAT
Denmark – 25% VAT
Finland – 22% VAT
France – 19.6% VAT
Germany – 16% VAT
Greece – 18% VAT
Ireland – 21% VAT
Italy – 20% VAT
Luxembourg – 15% VAT
Netherlands – 19% VAT
Portugal – 17% VAT
Spain – 16% VAT
Sweden – 25% VAT
United Kingdom – 17.5% VAT

This will pose several problems for the adult industry namely, how will our billing processors be able to handle transactions from European Union citizens? After all, with so many different VAT rates across the EU their billing systems need to be able to correctly calculate the correct amount of VAT to the surfers final order.

Several accounting firms have set up new divisions to handle this for the mainstream side of the internet industry however, until just recently, the adult internet was unaware this was happening.

It would seem that although the international market place is a wholly viable one for adult webmasters to break into, it brings with it more complications that simply breaking the language barrier.

This new law will be a good test of the adult industry processors to see how they can handle the economic changes of the global market place and, more importantly, how they handle the new frontiers of international marketing on a global scale.

Article written by Lee

Blogging For Traffic – An Alternate View

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Blogging | Response: 0

Just recently the adult industry seems to have gone ‘blog’ crazy in fact, it is almost a daily occurrence that webmasters mention a blog of some description on several message forums however, when it comes down to it, does blogging really matter at all? This is what we will take a look at in this article.

What Is A Weblog Or Blog?

A Weblog, or ‘Blog’ for short, is a kind of website or a part of a website. It is usually, but not always, run by a single person and they publish bits of writing on the Weblog. These bits of writing, called ‘entries’ or ‘posts,’ generally appear on the front page of the weblog in reverse chronological order, that is, with the newest entry at the top of the page, with older entries progressively further down.

So How Can Blogging Help Me?

Quite honestly, I don’t think it can. Think about it for a moment, you spend an hour or so a day writing a page in your online journal only for it to be erased or archived at a later date, doesn’t that seem strange to you? Instead of blogging why don’t you actually do something constructive such as making a .html page out of the text you were going to use for your blog, keyword it up and upload that directly onto your server? After all this in itself will benefit you in the long term much more than a quick page that will eventually disappear from existence. Of course there will always be those people who do successfully use blogs as a part of their marketing strategy and, kudos to them however, looking at the bigger picture, it makes much more sense to have a fresh HTML page which will remain indefinitely on your site that you can keyword and SEO for the search engines rather than something that is going to become relatively short lived.

Blogging – Overview.

To be perfectly honest with you, all of this talk of creating a blog to get additional traffic is, in itself just ‘hype’ unless you have a source of blog owners to link back to your blog or, an hour or so to kill each day wasting your time writing your blog your time really would be much better served coding HTML pages. After all, HTML pages have worked for the last 30 years, why all of a sudden have webmasters stopped using them?

Article written by Lee.