Adult Webmaster Conventions

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

Networking Overload

Adult Webmaster Conventions – Remember When?

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

Most webmasters who have been working in the adult industry for a year or two have attended an adult webmaster convention of some sort and, those of us who had the privilege of attending our first webmaster show three to four years ago will know one thing that many others don’t, there used to be a time when you could attend a webmaster show for example, the one held at Disney World (how many of you remember that?) when apart from being relaxing, you would also get a lot of business done alas, times have changed.

Fighting, Drug Taking, Getting Drunk, Rape Accusations, Theft and Criminal damage would be the headline in the national press should one of these reporters attend today’s webmaster convention, instead of a relaxing atmosphere in which you can get business done you find a slew of webmasters who, well, lets be honest here, are only attending these shows for one reason, to get drunk (for free) and to have a laugh.

Of late there seems to have been an influx of people (notice I used the word people and not ‘adult webmasters’) joining the adult industry who would appear to think that our business model is one of all night partying, sordid sex sessions and drug taking, whilst, I will be the first to admit this has gone on in the past it would certainly seem that the last 2-3 years has seen more than its fair share of the negative events happening at these conventions.

Take for example the recent Hollywood Internext Expo show, one incident that comes to mind was the fool who decided it would be a good idea to smash the mezzanine canopy above the hotel lobby, to my knowledge the culprit was never found however, I am sure there are those out there who knows who it was and well, lets be honest, they quite possibly you could be reading this article.

So what happened? How did these shows change so drastically? Quite simply I think it was the sudden onslaught of press coverage about how the adult industry makes so much money for everyone and, whilst there is a lot of money to be made in the industry, it takes a lot of work to achieve making the reported figures by the press.

To many people are entering the adult industry thinking that the ‘norm’ is that of what you can find on your average day of visiting GFY and whist, this is perhaps true for the circle of webmasters who do frequent boards such as GFY for the vast majority of hard working webmasters in the industry, the behavior of those webmasters couldn’t be further from the truth.

So where is all the business being done at the shows? It would appear that event after event the open invite list of parties are being cut down to be taken over by more intimate and sociable private parties in fact, as a company we our ourselves holding several smaller invite only parties for those people that we actually want to do business with on both a personal and a professional level.

So what does the future have in hold for the adult industry events, in all honesty I do not know however, one thing is for certain, if things continue on their current route, things are going to become a whole lot worse before they get any better.

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.

Source Code – Eliminating HTML Margins

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Since the inception of the very first HTML document, margins existed that surrounded the document, like in the case with this document.

The margins are there to act as a cushion between the edges of the browser and the contents of the page, so it’s easier to read the content.

As good as margins are, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to eliminate them in some cases, where the design of the page calls for their termination? While most webmasters think it is not possible to “flush out” the default margins of a HTML document, it actually is, although only possible in IE 3+, and NS 4+. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how.

Eliminating The Document Margin In IE 3+

To get rid of the document margin in IE 3 and above, so content presses right against the edges of the browser, use the IE exclusive “leftmargin” and “topmargin” attributes:

<body leftmargin=”0″ topmargin=”0″>

It’s as simple as that!

Eliminating The Document Margin In NS 4+

To get rid of the document margin in NS 4 and above, use the NS 4 exclusive “marginwidth” and “marginheight” attributes instead:

<body marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″>

Putting It All Together.

By putting the two techniques together, we can create a document that flushes out its’ margins in both IE 3+ and NS 4+:

<body leftmargin=”0″ topmargin=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″>

Try out the above coding on your page, and you’ll see what I mean.

Article written by Lee

Cleaning Up The Myths On Scrubbing

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

Time and time again on message boards I see the same old topics regarding scrubbing usually preceded by some company being accused of scrubbing their webmasters surfers to much and the webmasters sales being lower because of the sponsor ‘scrubbing’ their surfers however, the reality of this is, it isn’t the sponsors who control how much or how little the surfers credit card transactions are ‘scrubbed’.

The E-Commerce Dilemma.

Irrespective of whether you are an online bookmaker, bakery or adult pay site owner the fact of the matter remains that only credit card fraud is on the increase and, in addition to the rise of online credit card fraud the methods in which the perpetrators of these crimes carry them out is also changing often combating the methods put in place by the online transaction processors to stop this happening luckily however, this is where ‘scrubbing’ comes into effect.

So What Is Scrubbing?

Scrubbing is a method used by the credit card processor that the companies who’s site you are sending a surfer to uses. Scrubbing is in effect, a method of calculating the probability that any single transaction (or group of transactions) could be fraudulent. That is to say, is being carried out by someone other than the true owner of the credit or debit card.

Scrubbing is probably the single most useful tool provided to our sponsors by the credit card processors to ensure that every transaction that gets sent to them is credible and, once the transaction is allowed (or not) a part of the information contained with the transaction is sent to a central database to help other clients of that processor guard against receiving unlawful transaction purchases.

How Does Scrubbing Affect Me?

As a webmaster, believe it or not, scrubbing is actually a good thing for you. You know that each transaction processed is first of all a legitimate one and, secondly, you know that the sponsor who you are using is not going to go bankrupt due to excessive illegal transaction. This means that the sponsor can improve the services they offer YOU as a webmaster to assist you in making more money.

In essence, the scrubbing of credit card transactions at a sponsors level increases the amount of money you make long term not only with that individual sponsor but, with every other sponsors who uses the same transaction processor.

Article written by Lee.

Hard Hitting – In Your Face – This Is Reality

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

It started on terrestrial television some 5 years ago with the first episode of Big Brother, then it went from a house of captive stars to talent scouts looking to create a new pop sensation. From there we saw a variety of television series with ‘reality’ as the main focus.

It only follows suit that this popular marketing machine should hit the adult internet; and, it hit in a major way. And now, almost every major adult sponsor has one common type of site in their portfolio – a reality site.

However, one thing that many in the adult industry are not aware of is that the ‘reality’ type adult sites have been around for longer than what most realize. Before the live sex up-sells and chat rooms, Brandon Marley, a gay website owner, has had a site catering towards the gay reality niche – the premise of his site, as a gay male on the prowl, he goes to the street looking for straight guys to use as content; once he has them in the studio, he lets them work their magic and, inevitably, gets down to business, sometimes persuading the guys to have sex, sometimes, grossing them out whilst they up and flee the studio, all of this is caught on tape and published online.

Next is the web cam phenomenon. Reality at it’s utmost, watching live guys talk, strip, jerk off and discuss the most intimate desires in a chat room. The gay market flocks to reality like a moth to a flame. And surprisingly, much of the focus of ‘reality’ has been pointed to the straight adult audience, with a limited amount of gay orientated reality sites being launched.

That is until now, more and more programs and providers are coming up with reality to the gay market. The key to the on going success and growth of these sites is the, always allusive, original idea.

From M.I.L.F To D.I.L.F.

One of the popular types of reality site we saw explode was MILF (Moms I Like To Fuck). Spurred not only by the popular teenage movie American Pie, this type of reality hits a spot of desire within some surfers to days gone by where they had a secret crush on someone’s mom. Well if it’s possible that a straight man could have a crush on a mom, what about the young gay man having a crush on a dad?

“Well, if the straight markets can have MILF, why can’t the gay arena have DILF?’ asks Gary-Alan, owner of the new gay reality site DILF.com from http://www.studmoney.com.

The gay markets have been yelling they are looking for something different to sell. So rather than taking DILF to the straight adult reality markets DILF takes it’s unique flavor and gears it toward to gay market.

‘Reality sells! It is one of the freshest and highest converting niches yet. We see this from great sites like Chi Chi La Rue and Brandon Marley – two of my most favorite sites. I have been listening to webmaster for years. They are looking for something different not just in a reality sense but something that features older guys, not your typical young buff stud. I think when the idea to finally launch StudMoney came up, the first thing that was mentioned was DILF. So we’ve brought the two aspects together and given the gay market webmasters the opportunity to promote a reality site that will convert and, convert well on their traffic.” Alan tells us.

So What Are Reality Sites?

Reality sites cater to a specific target audience, those people who don’t want to see the usual porn stars that are found on almost every other site on the web. Instead, these sites offer exclusive real-life models that could next door neighbor’s sister, mother or, in the case of DILF, their father. Reality opens your site offerings, giving you the opportunity to retain surfers with frequent updates and story lines that will peak their interests. You get to set the standard of your entire site to promote not only the content but a familiarity with your core performers.

Starting Reality Site.

So how do you go about setting up a reality niche pay site? In all honesty, there is more involved than putting up a cookie-cutter site online.

First you need a concept. With as many niches available today you need something fresh. Mind you there are ideas to mimic but new sells. Once the ideas are down then you need to find content. This isn’t as easy as buying a standard CD, it has to be fresh and new so finding a good photographer to shoot exclusive custom content. Even if you decide you will shoot your own content, you will need to be sure to schedule fresh new shoots frequently. This is important with any type of site, but none more than reality.

Once you have the content aspect figured out, you need to work on designing your site. You may think that’s easy, but the regular cookie-cutter designs, that are so often seen across multiple sites, simply do not cut it. You should seriously give your site design as much consideration as you do you concept for the site itself. A unique approach to the overall layout and design the site and it the member’s area has an equal impact on your members retention rates as having unique content.

Reality Niche – Overview.

What it all comes down to is reality is here, and here to stay. From market to market, niche to niche the one thing we have seen on and offline is that audiences around the world are looking to satisfy the voyeur, the deviant or the simple curiosity that lurks just beneath the skin. So the next time your driving past the mini-mart or peak inside the dressing room at the department store, remember you’re not only in public places – you are probably walking through the next set for an upcoming reality site.

Article written by Lee

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.

Marketing to Foreign Surfers

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

Marketing to Foreign Surfers.

What would you do if I told you that there are 3 million plus new surfers last year that you did not market too? You probably marketed your product or adult site to those that could read English well enough to be searching with English terms. How about the growing numbers of surfers with English as their second language?

According to Nielsen/Net Ratings, from September 2000 to 2001, Italy’s online population grew by 3,540,970 users: about one new user every ten seconds. Italy is just one of the non-English speaking countries that is coming online at lightening fast speed.

Are you relying on these surfers searching for your English keywords? Are you thinking that every language uses the words “porn and hardcore” and what about the finer niches like “bisexual and titties”? The best conversion is with newbie surfers just online for the first time and wanting to see adult sites and products. Those that have been around a while find out about the plethora of free porn. This means that websites do their best marketing with search engine placements of their main sites or feeder sites. If you are on your money, you are trying to work every engine for every related keyword. Now think of the keywords that you could be going for in all the worlds’ languages!

Do a bit of research in some of the common languages. If I was Italian and new to the net, the first place I would be searching is in an Italian search engine. Go to http://arianna.iol.it/ and search using the word porn and you will find 10 listings come up all in Italian. Not one is English. Even http://it.yahoo.com/ Yahoo Italia does NOT serve up your English porn site in its results.

So how do you get a piece of this pizza pie? You need at least a doorway written in Italian. You need to visit a site like http://www.adult-site-translation.com/ and find out how affordable it is for a doorway page that is put together by a foreign translator. Not only is the text for your doorway sites or even complete tours with the proper keywords but the graphics are redone where necessary. You really cannot rely on a text translator. We all have been on a site where it was obvious that the webmasters first language was NOT English and felt bad for their awkward use of words. This is not how to make a sale.

You need to be careful that you choose a professional service for your translating needs. You need to know that the translators are top notch and can not only translate your existing page/site keeping your marketing angles but they can also advise you on such things as proper wording and what a surfer from that culture would find erotic. Languages do not translate word for word. A service like Adult Site Translation has hired translators who also know how to market adult sites. They will tell you the search terms your page should be listed under and can assist you with foreign search engine optimization.

Remember the days where you were the only site in a category or niche? It was like being a pioneer and it was very lucrative. Do you want to be first to market to these growing pockets of millions of new surfers? There are new frontiers out there and finally sites like Adult Site Translation can assist you to conquer them successfully!

Article written by Susanna

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

Mirroring Adult Sites – Stage One.

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

In this next series of tutorials I will be exploring the benefits of utilizing your existing content to build more sites in the least amount of time possible, in fact, after you have completed the steps in this tutorial series you should be able to build over 20 types of site within 5 minutes using a single set of 50 pictures.

So, onto the start of our tutorial.

Stage one in this tutorial is something we have ALL done before, so what you need to do is this…

Build a 50 pic free site, this is using a lot more content than a ‘standard’ free site however, what we are actually going to be making is a set of AVS sites and several TGP galleries, along with some SE pages and also some links list mirrored pages using this set of 50 images by building just ONE site! Sounds impossible? It isn’t… read on….

Your site should have the following on it:

1) Warning Page (index.html)
2) Menu Page (menu.html)
3) Gallery Pages (5 galleries of ten pictures called gallery1.html, gallery2.html etc)
4) HTML Large image pages x 50 (picpage1.html, picpage2.html, etc.)
5) Multi Site FPA (fpa.html)

Now lets break these individual pages down into sets of instructions for each:

Warning Page.

This should have your standard warning text placed on it, along with an enter AND an exit link. The ‘enter’ link should link to your Multi Site FPA and the ‘exit’ link should go to a program such as the ARS Discreet Browser tour page.

Menu Page.

This should be a page containing an odd sized banner, links to your 5 gallery pages, plus text links at the bottom of the page ideally, these text links should be in the same style as the niche tables we created for the surfer trap except they should only contain 4 cells instead of 8. These links should go to a different ‘niche’ as the one you are building your current site for and, link to the existing FPA’s of your surfer trap.

Gallery Pages.

On your gallery pages, ALL of the thumbnails should be linked to the relevant HTML page with a text link at the top and at the bottom of the HTML page (No Banners are to be used on the gallery pages!) Also, the file names of the images should be pic1.jpg, pic2.jpg, etc for the full sized images and, thumb1.jpg, thumb2.jpg etc for the thumb nailed images. your images MUST be named this way!!

Multi Site FPA.

This should link to the individual FPA’s that you should already have on your server if you followed the surfer trap tutorial series (If you did not create this surfer trap the tutorials can be found at this link) as well as linking to the Single Site FPA’s this should also have a ‘no thank you’ link which goes to your Menu Page.

Images.

You need to have 50 images, you also need to have 50 thumbnails for the content you will be using on this site. I usually select my content by the niche I am building for, rename the images using The Rename then, once renamed I use Thumbnailer from Smaller Animal to create the thumbnails for each of the renamed images. This will give you 50 full sized pictures with 50 thumbnails named respectively for the larger image.

They are the basics, now onto the good stuff…

Once you have created these pages you need to create some folders on your Hard Drive which will be the SAME structure you will have on your server. This folder structure should look somewhat like this once you have saved each of the pages we have just created into their respective sub folders:

FreeSite/index.html
FreeSite/AVS/
FreeSite/FPA/fpa.html
FreeSite/Galleries/gallery1.html, gallery2.html, gallery3.html, etc, etc.
FreeSite/Images/pic1.jpg, etc.
FreeSite/Images/Thumbs/thumb1.jpg, etc.
FreeSite/LinkList/
FreeSite/Menu/menu.html
FreeSite/PicPage/picpage1.html, picpage2.html, etc.
FreeSite/Recips/
FreeSite/Engine/
FreeSite/TGP/

This will give you 5 folders with HTML pages in them, one folder with the full sized images, one with thumbnails in it and five empty folders.

At this point we will end the first stage in this tutorial as this should take you a couple of hours to complete.

Article written by Le