Converting Chinese Adult Traffic – The Niche Paysites That Work

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

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

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.

Traffic Brokers – Buying Additional Traffic

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

For many adult webmasters traffic is the one thing they can get and, good converting traffic it would seem is hard to find in bulk. For those webmasters who simply can not or, will not work towards getting a good converting traffic base you now have several options. These option come in the form of the Adult Traffic Brokers that have seemingly multiplied over the last 12 months.

Traffic Brokering – The Basics.

So what is traffic brokering? In layman’s terms, it is the process used when one company sells / buys their traffic to / from another in order to turn the traffic they are selling / buying into a profit. Often webmasters will purchase traffic from a broker for several reasons, the main one being that they simply could not have generated the same amount of traffic they have purchased by any other means.

Traffic Brokering – The Costs.

The costs for purchasing brokered traffic vary greatly from traffic broker to traffic broker however, as a rough guideline, you could spend anywhere between US$1 and US$3 for each thousand (1000) unique hits that the traffic broker sends you. The cost of this traffic however can change for many reasons as do the rules for where you can actually send the purchased traffic to.

Brokered Traffic – The Uses.

There are many uses for brokered traffic as those webmasters who do it on a consistent basis will tell you. However, by far the most popular method of using purchased traffic would seem to be sending it to a central ‘hub’ site or a gallery page. From this point on the traffic can start to filter itself even more.

In addition to this, some webmasters choose to send their brokered traffic directly to their sponsors pay sites if they have purchased niche specific brokered traffic.

All of the above methods have their pro’s and con’s involved however, for most webmasters, the fact that they have purchased traffic at a relatively low cost will mean they can turn a profit. That said, purchasing traffic from a broker does not guarantee you a profit on your investment.

Traffic Brokering – Overview.

In overview of this article i would say that for webmasters who are unable to gain mass traffic through conventional methods, the traffic brokers offer a service of value and, whether the traffic that you are buying is profitable to you is an outcome that no one can say until the traffic has been used. one thing to consider though when purchasing traffic is that you need to have a clear, concise plan of what your needs for the traffic are, do not just send it blindly into the proverbial unknown but build up a solid plan of what you ultimately want to achieve.

Also, before buying traffic ‘en mass’ you should always spend a few dollars in the first instance to run a small test of the traffic, this way, you will be able to send thousands of hits to your sponsors or hubs and judge for yourself which broker will offer you the best traffic for your money.

Article written by Lee.

Using Basic Server Side Includes (SSI)

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Server side includes are what their name sounds like.  A way to include the contents of another file into your current web page BEFORE the web page gets sent off to the surfer.  Not only does this include contents of a static file but you can also include the results of a CGI program and on some web servers, you can even have it display the current date and time.

Now, many web hosts do not normally have server side includes turned on. You will have to ask your host if they have SSI turned on and if they do, what is the file name extension for SSI.  By default, SSI files have an .shtml extension.

Sometimes, you can turn SSI on yourself.  If you host doesn’t have SSI turned on for you already, you can try adding the following two lines to your .htaccess file.  Then create a file with the .shtml extension, include a SSI command and see if it works.

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml

When you use SSI commands, you place them exactly in the location within your web page where you want the output of the SSI command to appear when you finally browse the page.  If you have SSI, then you can use the following command to include a file.  When you include a file, you can either give it a path name to the file or you can give a URL to the file. I’ll list both here.

<!–#include file=”/some/path/above/my/web/to/my/header.html” –>

This is an example of how to include a file based on its path name.  Now,
here’s the same file put included with its URL.

<!–#include virtual=”/to/my/header.html” –>

And this is an example of how to use a URL.  With a URL however, it cannot be a complete URL such as http://www.somesite.com/somefile.html.  It has to be within your current website.  You can also use the URL method to run a CGI script!  Here’s an example of that:

<!–#include virtual=”/cgi-bin/somescript.cgi?myfirstarg=1amp;mysecondarg=2″
–>

As you can see, we can even pass arguments to the CGI script just as if you typed it into your browser!  There is also another way of running a CGI script but this is not as widely used any more and you should use the #include virtual method instead.  Here is the same example so that you will know what it means when you see it.

<!-exec cgi=”/cgi-bin/somescript.cgi?myfirstarg=1amp;mysecondarg=2″ –>

As I mentioned earlier, you can use SSI to display the current time and date. Here’s how:

<!-echo “$DATE_LOCAL” –>

This will display the current date and time. SSI is usually used when you  want to have a standard header or footer on each page.  It’s also used for displaying rotating banners or page counters. As you see above, you can also  use it to display the current date and time or the date when the page was  last modified.

SSI has also been used for cloaking and some tracking  software uses SSI to track each incoming hit to the web page.  If you would  like more information about SSI, go to
http://www.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_include.html.  This is the definitive guide on SSI on the Apache web server.

Most other web servers that use SSI also follow these conventions.

Article written by Lee

Typography Know How

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

Our web sites are nothing without content, and most content is comprised of simple text. Many web designers neglect to pay attention to their typography, and it shows. Proper typography varies based on where the text is and what purpose it serves. Although there are no rules etched in stone, there are a few general techniques that should be followed. Although some of these tips may seem elementary, many of them are not followed.

Headings.

Clearly, headings should be larger, by 1 or 2 font sizes, than your body text. You may consider bold, but be cognizant of the letter width. Arial Black, for example, may create letters too fat for your taste. When using colors, be sure the colors contrast well with the background color of your site. Black and dark gray do not contrast well, while black and white (or light gray) work quite well. Sometimes, even a simple color change can create useful headings.

Also be sure to cascade your headings. A main heading, for example, would be larger than subheadings. This effect creates a sense of emphasis and flow to the information.

Do not italicize your headings. Italics are meant to underscore particular content, but since the text is a heading and of larger size anyway, italics are redundant and often make the text difficult to read.

Fonts.

The default is Times New Roman, which works fine, but many think it is boring. I have experimented with Arial, Georgia and Verdana, and have found Verdana the most readable font face available. This is a personal preference, but fonts should be restricted to the above four to ensure compatibility between all users of your web site. If your user’s browser does not support your font choice, their browser will revert to its default. Since browsers have increased support for CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, whenever possible, use CSS to define your fonts, rather than HTML’s <font> tag. Also, be sure to keep your font sizes large enough for visitors of all ages and eyesight’s.

Stress Styles.

Avoid using all capital letters within your text, as it makes it difficult to read and implies you are shouting at the reader.

To stress words within your body text, decide on a format and stick with it. Some choose bold, while others choose italics or underline. My personal favorite is italics, but any of these can work well. Be careful when using underline, however, as it can be mistaken for a link. In addition, do not overuse these stress styles.

Entire body text should not be bold. Bold, like italics, is used to emphasis words, and usually an entire body of copy should speak for itself in regularly styled text. I like to use CSS to space my body text out a little to increase readability.

Article written by Lee

Whats A Twink

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

I think you would be surprised at the number of times I have been asked, “What’s a Twink?” Or my, personal, favorite “So how do two men have sex?”

If you know me, you know I am never really bothered by questions – I never mind people’s candor. What does bother me, though, is the bulk of the people who ask are trying to work the gay market. Unsuccessfully, I might add.

So, let’s expand our webmaster knowledge. Don’t worry, I am not about to explain how two men have sex (that I will save for my story site LOL)

I have decided, however, to give you a Gay Glossary of sorts. There are many terms that can be included here. But, I thought to start off, we will hit the basics and add to it as time goes on. Keep an eye for future articles and additions on Gay Wide Webmasters.

Here is a list of the most common terms on the Gay Adult ‘net:

• Twink – A buff and lean young man; a 20 something. Age and leanness make the guy a twink. The best example is your typical bar room stripper.
• Teen – This is the same thing as in EVERY market, hot young and under twenty – but LEGAL at 18.
• Hunk/Stud – Beautiful, built and beefcake. The guys commonly posing for calendars and such.
• Chubs (or chubby) – Just what it sounds like, a larger man. Not just muscular weight, most often heavy set.
• Bears – This is a HAIRY man. Not a young guy, most often over thirty, sometimes with a husky build (but not always). You will probably see this niche sold as “Real Men”.
• Cub – This is a YOUNG hairy guy. Sort of a HAIRY TWINK…
• Daddies – Daddies are men over thirty, who like younger guys. (Just a side note here to clear up some misconceptions, not all gay men want to do young guys!)
• Sons – the young male counterparts to Daddies. The young of the two can be a twink, cub or teen – makes no difference. This term is based on the visual couple. For our non-gay friends think of this as an example: the businessman who goes away for the weekend with his NEICE. See the comparison? LOL
• Transvestite – is a man who dresses as a woman. Whether it is simple underwear or all our female attire. A lot of webmasters confuse this with Transsexual.
• Transsexual – is a person who has decided to make the complete change and have a sex change.
• Trans Gender – this is a more general term for people who live life as the opposite sex. They are in the process of, or have completed, a sex change.

So know go have some fun. Try to classify your friends and lovers in these terms! I enjoy it when a webmistress comes up to me and says, “I heard your interview and I think my husband is a bear. But he’s a little twink-ish. What do you think?” This just makes my day! I have to laugh at the look on their husband’s face when they think I’m going to ask to examine them or something. “Turn you head and cough – OH! You’re a Twink…”

Along with what works, I have to offer some terms that DO NOT work. If used incorrectly or out of context, then your attempt at marketing to gay men can be dreadful.

• Faggot – I hate this word, personally. This is a word that is as derogatory to the Gay Community as other words are to a race.
• Nancy boy – a typically non-US term that basically is used as a derogatory manner.
• Lil Boys – a derogatory term used primarily in the Southern and Mid-Western US. It’s derived from the negative connotation that gay men are pedophiles.
• Gay Owned and Operated. Allow me to be blunt – If it is not true, do not say it. This is probably the most OVER used phrase in the gay adult market. So much so, it is relatively meaningless today.

We all need to remember from time to time, the key to success in any business is knowledge. Whether you are up selling to a sponsor or designing sites, knowing some of the more common terminology in the gay community can only help your ventures in the gay adult market. And remember, do not be afraid to try and NEVER be afraid to ask.

As always, good luck!

Article written by Gary-Alan

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

Undeveloped Domains – Put Them To Use

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Domain Names | Response: 0

Often when searching for new domain names, i come across what should, in theory be a golden opportunity only to find, the domain itself has already been registered and, whilst this in itself is annoying, what is even more annoying is that the domain 404’s when typed into the browser window.

The mere fact that someone else, a webmaster no less, has thought about purchasing the same domain as what you may have means there is already value in that domain and, more importantly, you have potentially lost a sale.

So how can we capitalize on this potential lost traffic from the off-set? That is what we will look at in this brief article.

The first thing we need to do in order to start making some additional potential profit from our domain is to create a ‘generic’ holding page until such time that we have the time or, funding, to develop the site we had intended to place on our new domain name.

This holding page can take many forms depending on the type of traffic you are hoping to target with the domain itself. Ideally, you will want to have as much choice for the surfer (or webmaster) on this holding page as you can so, you need to assess the nest types of sites to use, the best use of the traffic no matter how small it could be and, more importantly, the best way to maximize your sales potential.

One good way of doing this is to split the page into three sections, two equal sized sections at the top portion of the page and, one smaller portion towards the very base of the page designed, almost like a footer.

In the two top portions you should equally distribute both surfer orientated and, webmaster orientated links both of which need to be clearly separated.

For example, the left side of the page take all of your top converting paysites and list them by niche, they don’t have to have fancy or heavy graphics, text links will suffice for now as this is only a ‘temporary’ page.

On the right hand side of the page place some of your webmaster referral linking codes with a brief description, remembering that not only surfers could hit this page but webmasters themselves.

On the ‘footer’ portion of the page, the most important section, you should put your contact details, ideally an email address and, if the domain warrants, details of how you can be reached by instant messenger. The reason for the email and instant messenger details is a simple one, if a webmaster REALLY wants the domain that you have, he, or she, might just make you an offer on it and, if they have no way to get in touch with you then, you have just lost an offer on a domain that you might not get around to using for months.

of course, in addition to utilizing the traffic you have on the domain you can also use this holding page to generate more traffic, for example, placing a banner or button exchange code on the site or, perhaps a counter. The possibilities to generate traffic to these pages are limitless depending on how you use the holding page itself.

Well, that’s the basics of domain holding pages explained and, hopefully you will have realized that no matter what you plan on doing with your new domains, after your host has added them to your server, the next thing you should do is to create a generic holding page that you can upload into the rot of the domain name and, who knows, you might end up making some money a little sooner from that unused domain name.

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