Promoting Safe Sex In The Adult Industry

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

To most webmasters, the only thing that needs to be considered when building and marketing our websites is the layout of the site, the sponsors that they will be using and ultimately, the amount of money they will make from the site however, there is another side of the adult industry that we should also be considering, the moral side.

Safe Sex – Morally Speaking.

We all have our own morals and work ethics however, I think that sometimes most of us push these to the back lines a little when it comes to making a buck which is understandable however, we are in a position of power somewhat over a lot of things that many of us do not even think about, we know that for the vast amount of industry webmasters there are more than 90% of them will actively report child porn sites when they find them however, how much further does this reach and, how much harm could you potentially be doing long term?

Promoting Safe Sex – The Issues At Hand.

Step out of your webmaster persona for a short while now while you read this next paragraph and actually think about what is being said, all of us in our communities realize that sexually transmitted diseases and especially HIV/Aids is on the increase although maybe not reported as much the one thing that you can be certain about whether you go to a gym, a bar or a doctors is that we are constantly shown images promoting safe sex, ask yourself how you feel about that and, furthermore, ask yourself if you would have unprotected sex with someone if the answer to this question is yes then the rest of this article will be of no consequence to you however, if the answer is no, then you may like to read on.

Safe Sex Online.

Now we have ascertained how you feel about safe sex, why do you not promote this more often on your sites and galleries? We are giving surfers a product that will, in all likelihood fulfill their fantasy and, quite possibly, be mimicked by them at some point in the future. With this in mind I would suggest the following to you if I may. When purchasing content, try to purchase photosets where the models are practicing safe sex, if a surfer see’s a famous porn star using a condom then, ultimately, they themselves may use a condom when they next have sex. When building a site or gallery why not promote a condom affiliate program on the site, either through the use of a text link or a button or banner, not only are you being responsible but, you are also still going to make money should your surfer buy something from your condom sponsor. A good sponsor for Condoms is http://www.condomexpress.com.

Promoting Safe Sex – The Bigger Picture.

As mentioned in the opening paragraph of this article, more often than not, webmasters choose to go with bottom line profits over their morals however, thankfully this isn’t always the case. Whether you decide to start promoting safe sex as a method to promote condom sales or, whether you choose to promote safe sex as it is a moral that you believe in, one thing alone will stand true, by showing the surfer that sex can be safe and fun, we are definitely doing our part towards making sure that not every webmaster is seen as morel-less.

Article written by Lee

Sample Adult Model Release Form

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Forms & Contracts | Response: 0

For many webmasters the option of being able to shoot their own content is a wholly viable one as such, you should ensure that the models you are using sign a suitable release form. Below we have set together a pretty industry standard model release form which you may duplicate if you so wish. European Webmasters would however, recommend that you get professional legal advice in respect of this matter and that this is no substitution for proper legal advice.

I, (Please Print) ____________________ (Model), for good and valuable consideration, the receipt of which is acknowledged, give to [INSERT YOUR LEGAL NAME HERE] (Photographer), his legal representatives, successors, and all persons or corporations acting with his permission, unrestricted permission to copyright and/or use, and/or publish photographic portraits or pictures of me, and the negatives, transparencies, prints, or digital information pertaining to them, in still, single, multiple, moving or video format, or in which I may be included in whole or in part, or composite, or distorted in form, or reproductions thereof, in color or otherwise, made through any media in his studio or elsewhere for art, or any other lawful purpose.

I hereby waive any right that I may have to inspect and approve the finished product or copy that may be used in connection with an image that the Photographer has taken of me, or the use to which it may be applied.

I further release the Photographer, or others for whom he is acting, from any claims for remuneration associated with any form of damage, foreseen or unforeseen, associated with the proper commercial or artistic use of these images unless it can be shown that said reproduction was maliciously caused, produced and published for the sole purpose of subjecting me to conspicuous ridicule, scandal, reproach, scorn and indignity.

I acknowledge that the photography session was conducted in a completely proper and highly professional manner, and this release was willingly signed at its termination.

I certify that I am not a minor under the laws where I live, and am free and able to give such consent.

Model’s signature:_________________________ day___/month___/year_____ Address:___________________________________ City:______________________________________ State/Province:______________________________ Country:___________________________________
Zip/Postal Code:_____________________________
Country area code and home telephone number:(______)____________________________
Witness (non family member):___________________________________
Witness (non family member):___________________________________
This form will be retained with the negatives, transparencies, digital media, and/or contact sheets. day___/month___/year_____ {INSERT YOUR LEGAL NAME HERE}.

The above model release form is to be used as a mere example form and, when entering into any contractual agreement with any model for photographic / video work you should always seek proper legal advice.

Article written by Lee.

Domain Name Registration Services What To Look For

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

Once upon a time, if you wanted to register a domain name, you could only do it by visiting Network Solutions at http://www.networksolutions.com/ and paying them whatever they asked for, about $35.00 per year.

Then ICANN, http://www.icann.org/, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that is the non-profit corporation that was formed to assume responsibility for the IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain name system management, and root server system management functions previously performed under U.S. Government contract by IANA and other entities, decided to change the rules.

The initial testing phase of the new competitive Shared Registry System for the .com, .net, and .org domains quietly began to take place in April of 1999.

It started with five participants who were the first to implement the new system for competition in the market for .com, .net, and .org domain name registration services.

Previously, registration services in the .com, .net, and .org domains were provided by Network Solutions, Inc. under an exclusive contract with the United States government.

In the two years since this program began, things have really changed.

Just this last week, ICANN reported that two of their registrars, Tucows and New York-based Register.com, had recorded more new registrations for Top Level Domains (dot-com, dot-net and dot-org) than VeriSign’s Network Solutions.

This marks the first time ever that VeriSign’s Network Solutions was out-sold by any of the registrars and signals that their past dominance of domain name registration is certainly fading.

Why?

Because besides others being allowed to make domain name registrations, these new registrars are also cutting prices.

The Rules have most certainly changed.

The Shared Registration System (“SRS”), ICANN’s accredited registrars program, allows people to submit application to become a registrar along with a non-refundable $1000 filing fee.

After someone is accepted into the program then they must pay a yearly fee of $5000 to maintain their status as an accredited registrar.

This situation has created a very competitive environment which can only be beneficial to all of us as the price to register a domain name has fallen like a rock from a very tall building.

However, if you plan to register a new domain name using a virtual unknown registrar, make certain they do indeed have the legal accreditation from ICANN by visiting the ICANN web site and viewing their posted list of ALL accredited vendors:
http://www.icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html

It will only take you a few moments to make sure you are dealing with a reputable vendor of domain names. Those few moments will make the entire process legal and worry-free.

Article written by Lee

The Gay Adult Market – Gay Subcultures

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

I thought I would take a break from writing about online adult marketing for a change and instead, give many of the straight webmasters looking to break into the gay market a bit of an insight into what makes a gay man ‘tick’ and, whilst this is going to be different from guy to guy, the one thing that will remain constant throughout is that this article is based on the gay lifestyle and subculture in both society and, the internet.

What Is A Subculture?

Lets start at the beginning shall we? To understand this article you are first of all going to need to understand what a subculture is well, a subculture as defined by http://www.dictionary.com is, ‘A cultural subgroup differentiated by status, ethnic background, residence, religion, or other factors that functionally unify the group and act collectively on each member.’

In layman’s terms, that means, that a subculture is a group of people (or individual) that have something different about them than other people.

In the instance of this article we are going to be looking at the gay subculture and specifically, how this culture is broken down into its own set of subcultures.

The Gay Subculture – Lets Define The Gay Culture.

Gay culture is the heritage of culture, knowledge, and references to which gay people fall heir by the fact of their sexual orientation.

Some individuals argue that there are to many gay people who do not participate in ‘gay culture’ for the concept to be meaningful or that gay culture in itself is placing labels on the stereotype most people think of when they thing about gay people however with this said, there are also those who argue the flip side of the coin. One thing is for sure however, gay culture certainly does exist and, within this culture itself there are many complex facets ranging from sexual preferences through to the types of vacation people take.

Gay Subcultures – The Facets.

Whether we choose to think about the different subcultures within the gay community or not one thing is for certain, the subcultures in our community are wide and far reaching from your local gay bar to Soho in a city thousands of miles away most of the gay subcultures can be found almost anywhere in the world and, from this aspect, it makes gay individual no different than other person. For example, the BDSM lifestyle is large in the straight culture however, it is also hugely popular in the gay culture to often with groups of individuals who devote their whole way of life to this. In essence however, many of the gay subcultures are no different to that of their straight counterparts the only difference being, the individuals who practice them, are gay.

Gay Subcultures – An Overview.

For many webmasters who currently work in the straight market their first attempt and even their second attempt at marketing to the gay lifestyle may fail however, many do not realize the simplest of rules when it comes to marketing products and services to gay individuals online, you need to be as, if not more, detailed and direct to gay surfers than straight, give them something they can find anywhere at anytime and the chances are they will not buy however, give them something that suits their tastes perfectly and you have a customer for life.

Article written by Lee

Unspoken Secrets

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

here is a belief among new webmasters that there is a set of golden rules among those of us whom have been at this business for many years to making money well guess what, these are those unspoken secrets….

Secret #1.

There are no secrets to becoming an adult webmaster. One of the most common reasons why so many new webmasters give up in this business is because they hear about the money that the big guys make, submit two TGP galleries to The Hun, get a $200 hosting bill and no signups. They then figure that the affiliate they are using is rubbish and then spend the next 2 months surfing the Net looking for the “be all and end all” of affiliate programs which is going to net them $2 million within the next 6 months. The fact of the matter is, that genie in the lamp you are looking for doesn’t exist. It all comes down to hard work, perseverance and common sense this is a business venture you have started like it or not and, it needs to be treated as one.

Secret #2

Don’t give up. You need to treat what your doing as a business. Of course, you can have fun with it but, at the same time you need to be making continual business plans for your development in much the same way as if you were self employed. Which, of course as soon as you start to make some money you will be.

Secret #3

Stay focused. There are a million and one ways to make money in the industry. You could build free sites, TGP galleries, AVS sites, pay sites, search engine pages, the list goes on. There are many different avenues to drive traffic. The key is to try everything. Eventually you will find the one venue that your are very good at. Continue with this until you know this in your sleep – work it so often and well that you master it. One other thing to remember, it wont make you money overnight, if you think it will, your starting out for the wrong reasons, putting it simply, Adult web mastering isn’t for you.

Secret #4

Build it and, it (And they) will come, don’t spend time worrying about your keywords, meta tags, the amount of images you are using, just because someone tells you this is what is required of your sites. Just build a site or gallery submit it, forget about it and get started on building your next, and the next, and the next site after that. Just keep on moving forward, if you forgot to do something on one of your sites don’t worry, add it to the next site that you build.

Secret #5

Start to network. Other webmasters are great for bouncing new ideas off, a group of webmasters who start at the same time all communicating with each other are going to develop more than a sole webmaster on their own. Networking is a big part of any successful webmasters daily routine. Make the most of the people you meet on the boards or aim or icq, it will benefit you long term.

Secret #6

This one you will probably hear day in, day out for the rest of your business life. “It’s too late for newbies to make money” I am sorry to be the one to tell you this but, this is rubbish. As long as you follow the basic rules above and work at it, you can and will make money in this still thriving industry.

Now you have heard the “secrets” you have wanted to know its up to you to put them to good use.

Article written by Lee

Writing A Business Plan – The First Step To Success

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Forms & Contracts, Writing | Response: 0

Regardless of what type of business you want to run be it a bakery, a funeral home or an online marketing empire the one thing that you will require is a business plan however, having never taken any business basics 101 classes what do you need to have and, what is required in your business plan?

That is what we will touch on in this brief article from the basics to the not-so-basics by using a few simple steps you can be sure your business plan will contain all the information you need to make it up the ladder of success.

Information Summary.

As the name suggest this is a simple summary of what you are hoping to achieve from the name of your business, the goals, the concept and your plans. This should actually be no longer than two pages so that you can fill the needed information out clearly and concisely.

Business Details.

This will be the founding information of your business again you need to mention your business name, what type of business you will be running (Sole Trader, Partnership, Corporation, etc) in addition you will also need to include details of who the company owners are, whether it be yourself alone or a list of your business partners, this information will be invaluable to you at a later date you also need to include a brief history of the business whether you have been running it already for a number of days, weeks, month or, years.

Products And Services.

Basically, you need to write what exactly it is you will be selling. Are you going to be selling baked goods, marketing services or custom solutions. Keep this section simple, if you need to go into depth then do so at the end of your business plan by way of an appendices. Once you have listed several of the products or services you will be selling you should also list the features and benefits (Marketing points) of the products and services in addition, why do you think your business idea will succeed, what do you offer your clients that no-one else currently does? In addition you also need to have a basic pricing structure planned out, this will assist you in the future as, from your initial plans you can see what, if anything needs to be changed.

Marketing.

A business is more than just an idea. You need to have good pricing, affordable suppliers and a great marketing plan. This is what is also needed in your overall business plan. You should include details of your competitors products and how they compare to your own or, if applicable why your product will be a benefit to the market place should it not already be readily available. In addition the marketing section of your business plan should include a list of advantages as well as some of the pitfalls you are likely to see. You also need to include a section detailing your specific marketing strategies regarding your overall and individual products and services.

Industry Economics.

This area should detail some of the more specific areas of the industry you are going to be working in for example, what type of industry are you entering, how does the future for this industry look and, more importantly, how many existing companies work this industry as well as how do you successfully launch yourself into the industry. Parts of this area you may have covered in the marketing and previous section non the less, go over them again here in more detail.

Target Market.

We have detailed the business ideas and products and services but, what about your potential clients? What does your product offer then that they need which no other company does? What is your target client base? How will you reach your customers? All of this and more needs to be addressed in this area of your business plan.

Competing Companies.

What do your competitors do and, more importantly, who are they? Make a list of your potential competitors and address their weaknesses and strengths ensure that you leave no stone unturned when getting this information together often, you will realize that there are things your competition is doing that you can do much better then they.

Don’t forget to address their marketing, what are they doing right and, more importantly to you, what are they doing wrong? How can you capitalize on this and make their errors benefit your long term business plans.

Location, Location, Location.

Location is everything and, this is particularly true in business for example, will you be working from an office, from your home or even your garage, do you require any special permits to operate your business? Can your customers reach you easily? All of these items and more need to be considered when writing this area of your business plan. By addressing any and all of these items you will find yourself with a much clearer picture of what is needed of you and your business.

Stock + Supplies.

Often overlooked in business plans the one thing you NEED to have is a list of potential suppliers and sub-contractors who can provide you with your products and services. What materials (if any) do you need? How much will these cost you? Where will you find your stock and supplies? By getting this information available now you will have a better idea once your business plan is laid out as to what you are able to offer easily and also it will enable you to lay your pricing structure out more concisely.

Labor.

So you have this great business idea all laid out but, who will be running this for you? Do you need additional staff or are you going it alone? Do you need to setup accountants, lawyers, insurance companies, consultants, bank accounts etc etc? All of these aspects of your business need to be laid out here.

Capital.

Money, as they say, makes the world go round. Your business is no different, how much financial outlay do you require to get your business off the ground? Do you need to ask for a loan from your banking facility to help you out? How much income are you planning on making within the next 6 to 12 months? How much of this income needs to be invested back into the business? All of these ‘financial’ question need to be answered in this area of your business plan only then will you begin to see the bigger picture of your business idea.

Hopefully this article has given you some solid advice and information regarding planning for your new business and, once you have all of the above laid out you should be able to see whether you will succeed or fail in your new idea.

Also, by planning now for the future of your business you should hopefully be able to avoid any hidden costs which can often push a company to the edge.

Article written by Lee

Mirroring Adult Sites – Stage Four

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

We are now going to take our basic template and start to make some pages for the link lists for this you will need to open up your original warning page. Once you have this page open you need to visit a couple of the link lists that you use. Go to the submissions page of the link list and download their reciprocal buttons.

In the same way that we did with the TGP pages we created you now need to edit the warning page you have open and insert the recip links on your warning page, ideally and, as most link lists will require this, the recip links should be placed above the enter and exit links.

Once you have done this, you now need to save your newly edited page as linklist1.html in the /FreeSite/LinkList/ folder, do this for as many of the link lists that you wish to submit to, each time saving the new page in the /FreeSite/LinkList/ folder.

Also at this stage, we should add a console to our link list page, ideally a blur console with links going to your surfer trap FPA’s. You can find the Java coding to create a blur console on the tutorial about building a surfer trap.

Once we have done this, we now have some more sites created. However, this time, the page/s we have just created are designed to build the traffic we have to our site/s.

Once you have these pages saved you now need to re-open your original warning page once more.

This time, we are going to optimize the page for the search engines, again, in the same way we added our ALT tags on the surfer trap we are going to add them to the warning page however, we are also going to optimize our keywords, description and, site title.

Once we have optimized our original warning page we should now save this as se1.html in the /FreeSite/Engine/ folder we created at the start of this tutorial. Once one SE page has been created, you need to create a selection of others making sure that you swap around the meta tags to ensure they are all different to each other, I would suggest making three variations of these SE pages each time saving them in the /FreeSite/Engine/ folder.

The next thing we are going to do is to ‘dirty’ these SE pages up some more, pretty much in the same manner as we did with the surfer trap tutorial. What we need to do is add a small pop up console to the three SE pages along with a blur console, these consoles can be the same ones that we used for our surfer trap or, we can create new ones however, I think the smart thing to do would be if we used the ones we currently have online. So once we have added these consoles we need to save the pages.

Also, to these SE pages we should add our Banner exchange code, as these will be going into the search engines there are no rules as to what we can and can not do on these SE pages so we should make sure that even if they just get one hit, we get additional traffic from them. By adding a banner exchange code as we did on the surfer tutorial we can drive additional traffic either to our sites or to our surfer trap, where you send this traffic is your choice. If you want to sign up for our new banner exchange you can find it at http://www.pornclient.com.

Now we have the completed site template built. We need to submit the pages and sites we have just completed to the TGP’s, AVS’s, Link Lists and, the Search Engines.

Once we have submitted these sites all that we need to do to create a new set of sites is to find another set of 50 images, rename the images as we did at the start of this tutorial, pic1.jpg, thumb1.jpg etc and simply upload the site to our server without the full size images and the thumbnails. Once the HTML pages are online, we now have to upload the full size images and the thumbnails and we have a set of sites using different content to our original one built in less than 5 minutes.

The best thing with these sites is that if a any time we want to alter the layout, all we need to do is edit the HTML of the version we have saved on our HD and we have a new template ready to use.

I hope you have found some use out of this tutorial and, I am sure you can think of other ways in which we can use templates of this style, this tutorial was just detailing some of the basics however, we can make the template as simple or as complicated as we like. Our only limits are what we make for ourselves.

Article written by Lee

Building Your Brand – Business Basics

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Branding | Response: 0

Many online businesses have a good solid brand name attached to them already for example, ARS (http://www.adultrevenueservice.com), Webair (http://www.webair.com) and, WEG (http://www.wegcash.com). These companies have worked long and hard to build up their own brand name on the internet and, specifically, in the adult industry where, it almost seems that everyone is out to make a name for themselves so, how do you as a small business owner get a piece of this branding pie?

Branding Basics.

The word ‘Brand’ or ‘Branding’ can refer to several items when used as a noun to describe a company name, product, service or, trademark. Branding started centuries ago when cattle ranch owners used to place their unique insignia on their cattle so that surrounding ranch owners knew who the cattle belonged to and, so that the owners of the brand knew if their cattle were being stolen by others.

Starting The Branding Process.

From the very first site you build you should start working on your own inimitable brand name or logo, perhaps it will consist of a small logo on top of every page you build or even a simple text link for your sites domains, either way, the one thing that is important in recognizing a brand is being able to place it to a product instantly.

Building Your Brand Name.

Now that you have started the branding process how can you continue to grow your businesses brand name or product even further? This is what we will take a look at next.

Domain Name Registration.

Buy the domain name that is representative of your ‘brand name’ if your brand is going to be 123pornosex then go and register 123pornosex.com be cautious though, just because you think of a brand name, you should ensure the domain is available to register BEFORE you start using that brand in detail.

Getting The Word Out.

This may seem like the hardest of tasks at first but, once you make a start in branding your site or, yourself this is relatively easy to keep up on an ongoing basis.

Visit the boards, use your tagline as often as possible and, either mention your brand name in the tagline or, link to your brand names website. This is especially easy to do if you run a TGP or some other site that needs to attract webmaster traffic in order for it to succeed.

Start your own newsletter, this may seem an odd way to build your brand up but, if you name your newsletter the same as your brand name for example you might have a text link saying:

Join the BRANDNAME Newsletter.

This keeps the branding process alive and well. The next step you should take it to ensure that the sender address of the email is something like brandname@brandname.com again, even though you have collected the email addresses by sending out mailings from an address like the one above you have more of a chance of your brand name actually staying in the mind of the newsletter recipient.

In addition to a newsletter, you might also like to consider having a designer make you a logo or button you can use on your site/s this will come in handy for several uses for example, if you own a traffic site you can use this logo as a reciprocal link, you can use it in your signature on message forums and, you can even include it on sites you build.

You might also like to consider writing articles for other sites to use, usually the sites that publish your articles will place a link or a small bio to you or your site, this is another way to increase the ‘exposure’ of your brand.

Branding Overview.

All in all, building a brand name for yourself or your business need not be a hard and tedious task in fact, if you start off almost immediately building up name recognition for you and your sites. Regardless of what type of product, service or site you operate getting your brand name recognized by both webmasters and surfers can lead to a lot of money long term, start now and reap the benefits later in your career.

Article written by Lee.

Writing Your Sales Text – Some Facts

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

Do you know the difference between writing sales text for print advertising i.e. magazines and, writing sales talk for websites?

Well some of these differences will go against your intuition however, these differences are based on how people read specific items.

Where Do Eyes Go First When Your Page Loads?

Contrary to what most webmasters think it may not always be towards the thumbnails and banners on your page instead, surfers eyes will more than likely go to the first few lines of text on the page therefore, your first chance at making a sale before the surfer starts to burn your bandwidth is to have some enticing text on any site or page you build. Another reason why learning to write good text links can benefit you long term.

Also, as most surfers will only look at a page for between three and fifteen seconds before they decide whether they want to stay on the site they are at or close it this now starts to question webmasters use of heavy graphics on their sites, if a graphic takes three to four seconds to load you have just lost valuable sales time on your site.

How Much Of Your Copy Do Users Actually Read?

On average surfers will read about 75% of the length of any given page. Again, this is good news because it now means we can draw our surfers attention tot he ‘important’ sections of our sites by using headlines and bullet points to make them stand out. Also, this means that, given surfers will read only the first 75% of any page that the bottom half of your pages may not be as important as what was first believed.

Why Do Most Banner Ads Produce Poor Click-Through Rates?

Again as with any advertising media there is only a specific time frame that anyone will look at something, in this case it has been found that the vast majority of surfer will spend a mere 1.25 seconds looking at a banner which, is about enough time to read say 5 words based on the average college students reading time of 350 words a minute.

Therefore, banners which are animated and can take up to 5 seconds to get all the information across may in effect be completely worthless on our sites. More bad news for webmasters who have fancy animations and the likes on our pages.

Why Is Reading Online More Frustrating Than Reading Print?

Did you know that reading text on a computer screen can cause your reading ability to slow by up to 25% in some cases? This means that over inflating pages with text heavy content may actually aggravate the surfer instead of draw there attention! But, how can we stop this from potentially losing us a sale? Simple here are a few suggestions.

Rather than having one long continuous stream of text have several smaller one or two line paragraphs of text.

Use headlines to summarize what you are telling the surfer for example, if you sponsor has free trials tell them in bold lettering ‘Free Trials’ you get the point across and, you may draw their attention to click on the text.

Are Your Web Page Users Not Getting The Whole Picture?

Can surfers ‘scan’ your website? Lets look back at the above figures, 75% of the page gets read, banners have an attention span of only 1.25 seconds on average, that’s not much time for a surfer to look at your pages.

I think that would probably explain the reason why surfers tend to ‘scan’ our sites and only concentrate on the free images, how many of us actually take the time to read word for word EVERYTHING on a page?

I know I hardly do I just sit there and scan the page for things that draw me into the text or site. This is true again for surfers in fact, estimated figures show that roughly 21% of surfers actually spend the time to read every single word on any site meaning the other 79% only scan through our sites this again, cuts down our marketing capabilities dramatically making it more important to have headlines and well laid out pages highlighting the part we want our surfer to look at, namely, our sponsor links.

If we do not do this we are in effect only making 21% of our marketing efforts count again, taking away from our profits. That’s a huge chunk of our surfers we are losing out on gleaming a sale from.

What do all of the above figures tell us? Simple, we need to keep our pages quick loading, concise and more importantly unique, we need to draw our surfers to the specific areas that we want them to go to first and, in the process we should start to make more money from each of our sites.

Article written by Lee

Using SSI For Auto Updates

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

We all realize the benefits of being able to save time when building sites so, I got into thinking, how can I make my sites look as if they are continually updated without the need to go in and update them manually? Enter the world of SSI.

SSI is actually a nifty little tool, not only can you include files from a central location but, you can include them at specific times of the day, days of the week or even months of the year, very handy indeed if you are building any type of site that needs updating periodically.

Once the main burst of work has been completed you can pretty much use the same files over and over again to help you out.

So onto the auto updating SSI, the following SSI coding will enable you to update a page or pages based on which day of the month it is. It will check the day the page has been accessed and display the relevant information again, this is a handy thing to have should your sponsor be running a promotion over several days, all you need to do is update a selection of SSI files and all of your sites are updated instantly.

<!–#config timefmt=”%d”–>
<!–#include virtual=”/yourdirectory/$DATE_LOCAL.txt”–>

What you need to do is create 31 text files named 01.txt right the way through to 31.txt take the SSI call above and edit the location of the SSI files on your server, you may like to have a central folder named /SSI/ for this purpose so the location would be changed to /domain.com/SSI/$DATE_LOCAL.txt

I the 31 files you created you could have a table ad with eight of your sponsors links, an article in each one or even just a simple text link, anything that you may want to update can be included in these files.

As I mentioned above you can base the time, date and even month of rotation to whatever you like to alter how the files are rotated and ultimately viewed on the web you should change the %d in the timefmt field to one of the following:

%d : Day of the month requires 31 files named 01.txt to 31.txt
%w : Day of the week requires 7 files named 0.txt to 6.txt
%j : Day of the year requires 365 files named 001.txt to 365.txt
%u : The week of the year requires 52 files named 00.txt to 53.txt
%m : The month of the year requires 12 files named 01.txt to 12.txt
%H : Hour of the day requires 24 files named 00.txt to 23.txt
%M : Minute of the hour requires 60 files named 00.txt to 59.txt

As you can see from the above there really are no limitations to the uses of updating using SSI and, apart fro the relative ease of use and the time saved using them should one sponsor not be converting for you all you need to do to swap sponsors is alter your central set of SSI files and you have instantly changed sponsors over all of your sites.

Article written by Lee