Are Your European Surfers Male Or Female?

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

In Europe, the domain of the Web still belongs to the younger generation, with nearly 80% of European surfers under the age of 30. This is not surprising, as Europe is culturally quite different from the US.

The older generation in Europe has typically been slower to adopt new technologies and habits compared to their American counterparts, and we can’t see this trend changing anytime soon. Cultural differences will limit Internet penetration among the older age groups.

Female Internet usage still lags in Europe, with slightly more than 20% of Web users being women. Although this difference is less pronounced in the UK, on the Continent, males still dominate the Web scene.

Our Target Audience

What does this tell us? Well, first of all, it tells us that the European audience is growing more and more each and every day but, we already knew that, what we didn’t know however, until now, was just what percentage of European surfers could be persuaded to buy porn memberships or related goods from one of our sites.

Most paysite owners will tell you that, on average the ages of their members range from 25-30 and, as such, the European market could potentially supply a vast majority of these signups if, they got the overall balance of their sites right.

The Solution

As you should already know by now, the European porn surfer has different expectations to its US counterpart, they wont give out personal information as readily as American surfers, this includes their email address so, this rules out sending them to ‘For Free’ programs, they are also getting really pissed-off at having to download dialer programs to access porn, heck, the average phone bill in Europe is almost double what it is in America, why antagonize these people even more? They know they are overlooked when it comes to porn surfing so we need to stop neglecting these surfers, get a site translated into a foreign language, broaden your horizons, tap into an as yet ‘untamed market’ I feel certain that if you take a few basic steps your bottom line can be increased significantly, it all comes down to this…..

Do you have the balls to try something new?

Article written by Lee.

Mixing Business With Pleasure

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: General | Response: 0

Regardless of your status in the world of web mastering there will come a time when you will want to attend one of the numerous webmaster seminars. However, what should you do to plan for the day you attend your first seminar, are there some things you should aim for and things you shouldn’t? Well in this article we will take a look at planning your conventions.

Before attending the convention of your choice there are a few things that you should prepare these are.

Exercise.

get out for half an hour each day at least two weeks before the day of your journey to the convention. You will be surprised at how much time you will spend walking around the convention floor and, by getting some basic exercise in before hand you wont feel the strain of being on your feet for hours at a time instead of being sat in front of your computer.

Contacts.

Make a list of people that you want to see and arrange with them in advance a time to meet up and have a chat. Most people who attend these conventions are busy for the entire course of the show. You may not get a chance to pop by their booth and talk tot hem if someone has already beaten you by booking a time to chat with the person you want to meet. It is also a good idea to trade hotel and cell phone information before leaving for the show, this way, if anything happens to make you miss a possible appointment you can call or leave a message informing them you will either be late or canceling.

Seminars / Parties.

Take a look at the events and seminars happening at the convention before you go, plan which ones you will want to attend make a list and take it with you. This will save you countless hours of wandering around aimlessly hoping to make all of the seminars and get to as many parties as you can in three days.

Booths.

Look at who is exhibiting at the convention, find out their booth number and make a note of it. List any specific details you may want to speak to the booth owners about. You can guarantee if you go unprepared you will miss out that important question or selling opportunity you wanted to make.

Baggage.

When packing your suitcase for the convention make sure you leave plenty of room for convention give a ways, You will be surprised at what you will be given for free at these shows, t-shirts, toys, books, flyers, you name it, you will be offered it.

So, you have done the pre check, what do you do when you actually arrive at the convention?

Food.

Eat at every opportunity you get. Most people will end up not eating for the entire length of the convention. perhaps even arrange to meet up with someone you want to talk to in a restaurant and grab a bite to eat whilst talking business.

Business Cards.

Take them and lots of them. Everyone and anyone will ask you for your contact details, if you have a bunch of business cards with you at all times, you can just hand them out. Make sure you include your full contact details, your name, nickname, email, icq and, aim contact details. The more ways you give someone to reach you, the more chance you have of them actually attempting to get in touch with you.

Clothing.

Wear comfortable, clothing and shoes. Think casual but, also think business, shorts and t-shirt may be good for comfort but, it doesn’t portray a good business image and, that’s the sole reason you are attending the convention, to do business.

Parties.

If you get offered an invite to a party, take it, plans change so quickly at the conventions, your friends may suddenly feel tired and you have nothing left to do, attend a party, then you have another opportunity to network some more.

Behavior.

Although the conventions are a fun atmosphere, don’t forget that they are in the first instance a place to do business, treat it as such, you may miss out on the ideal business opportunities if you are acting like a drunk ass hole. This will reflect badly on you long term.

You have taken in all the events you can handle, you have made your way back home what next? how exactly do you put this information and your new found contacts to use?

Business Cards.

Go through all the business cards you have been given and send your new found contacts a quick email thanking them for their time. This will be a good way for you to give them another reminder of what you spoke to them about and, I have personally gotten more business from the shows using this follow up method than if I had just waited for them to contact me.

Notes.

If you made any notes at the show, take a few minutes to re-write them, keep them safe in a notepad, you never know when one of these bits of information may come in handy.

Well, that’s pretty much it for the basics of the adult conventions, obviously there is more to it than this but, if you are attending your first convention you will have a bit of insight into the work involved.

Article written by Lee

Online Dating Programs – Working The Adult Angle

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Sponsors | Response: 0

As the industry starts to feel the effects over the coming months from the whole Visa situation the one thing that, at present seems to be true of the adult industry is that more and more webmaster/companies are looking to increase their revenues by utilizing mainstream sponsors on their sites. However in addition to this, the adult dating program appears to have been overlooked at least up until now.

Online Dating Sites – The Options.

There are actually a few good online personals sites available for adult webmasters to promote ranging from Love At First Click through the Advertising Revenue Service program to specific dating sites such as Match.com and Date.com. One thing is overwhelmingly consistent however regardless of which sponsor you use for your dating traffic, they all have a relatively low payout when compared to the ‘norm’ in adult sites with payouts ranging from $1 to $5 per signup.

Marketing Dating Sites.

So how should webmasters market dating sites in conjunction with their current streams of traffic, this is actually a lot easier than you may think for example, almost everyone has an exit link on their free sites, you could utilize this exit link to send traffic to a dating affiliate program in fact, you could also utilize a dating affiliate program on your exit consoles or even on TGP galleries instead of pay sites. The opportunities for you to make money by placing dating affiliate program banners on your web pages are virtually endless.

Online Personals – Sales Techniques.

When selling online dating sites there are, in addition to the abundant methods of generating the traffic, many different methods of generating your marketing speech to the surfers, you should ideally try a selection of methods on your sites to find out exactly which method works best for you. As an example of this, if you are using a dating program on a softcore site, you might want to try a hardcore approach to selling your dating sponsor in much the same way as you would sell a hardcore pay site except not as highly graphic. In comparison, if you have a TGP gallery you may like to tell your surfer that rather than looking at sex, they might actually be able to get sex for a change. The ways in which you can entice your surfers to your dating affiliate program are virtually limitless.

Marketing Dating Sites – An Overview.

Whether you are already using or are planning to use dating sites, the one thing you must do is ensure that you choose wisely not only the words for selling the site to your surfer but also the placement of the promotional material, a well placed text link can have a higher impact on your overall sales than a badly placed banner and well, the same is true in reverse, find out where you are missing out on opportunities to upsell your surfers to an online dating site.

Article written by Lee

Converting French Traffic – The Niche Paysites That Work

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

In our last article we took a look at a three (3) month period of international traffic stats and, what niches worked on German adult traffic. In this article we will do the same again except we will be analyzing what niche paysites worked best on French porn surfers.

French Traffic – Quick Analysis.

It would seem that for many of the surfers we managed to grab and filter from France that their primary interest was in Teen and the Amateur niches although, that said, we did get a few conversion on some fetish paysites, specifically fetish sites that had ‘watersports’ and ‘BDSM’ featured on the paysites tour pages.

French Adult Traffic – The Niches.

As with the German traffic we targeted in the previous article we also filtered our French adult traffic to some niche specific hub sites as well as some general hub sites to better judge which niches converted the best on French surfers the results we experienced are as follows.

Teen.

Our conversions on French teen sites were not as good as what they were for German surfers however, that said, they were good non the less. With a ratio of around 1:192 over the three month period we analyzed the French adult surfers we managed to get to our sponsors sites worked well for us.

Amateur.

With our amateur conversions the one thing we noticed was that tours that featured teens as the main focus were the ones which converted consistently, with this in mind, we did change a couple of the Amateur tours we used to see how that would affect sales towards the end of the 3 month period and, sales did drop slightly, this would backup the statements in the Teen niche made above in that, French surfers are looking primarily for Teen orientated paysites.

Asian.

The two Asian niche paysites we used didn’t have many sales overall however, we did notice that the little traffic that we sent to them converted well, as above, Asian niche sites that featured teens were again the better converters on the French traffic we received.

Ebony.

I think it is worth mentioning the ebony niche, especially when you take into account we sent less than 100 hits to French ebony paysites and, managed to get 2 sales from those hits. Unfortunately, we did not anticipate the amount of traffic that wouldn’t choose the ebony niche so we have no solid figures that are worth mentioning here or, any explanation behind how we made the sales.

Fetish.

Our French fetish traffic seemed to like the more niche specific type of tours, making us sales on Watersports, BDSM and even general fetish paysites that said, the figures we achieved with the fetish pay sites we used were disappointing as we had thought this would be the ideal niche for the French markets.

Gay.

The sales we achieved with our gay French traffic were reasonable overall, the surfers chose to signup to gay sites that featured ‘twink’ like models on the tours again, this would lend favor to the fact that overall French surfers seem to be interested in the younger generation to get their kicks.

French Traffic – The Results.

Overall we were happy with the majority of the results we received on our French adult traffic with the exception of a few bad choices on our part trying to concentrate on the Fetish side of the industry. We certainly learnt that it would appear French adult surfers are looking for Teen orientated sites over the other niches.

Article written by Lee

Foreign Search Engines

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

‘Suchmaschine’ | ‘Moteurs de Recherche’ | ‘Motores de Busqueda’ ? Or, to you and I ‘Search Engines’.

Well what if I told you there was a huge chunk of the market (again I know) that your missing out on because, frankly, you haven’t attempted to get into it?

What is this wondrous market? Simple.. Foreign search engines.

I would say that AT least 80% of my traffic comes from the search engines, Google, AltaVista, etc, etc however a large portion of this se traffic is from countries whose language even some of my translators don’t know.

So, how do you get the foreign search engine traffic? again that’s simple, there are several ways to get it, you can:

1) Submit to your favorite search engine and wait, and wait, and wait… or 2) You can submit to your favorite search engine then, instead of leaving the page, go to the foreign equivalent of that same search engine!

Guess what, if you submit to Google in English then go to google.de the submit form asks you exactly the same information as your submission on the English form would do…so, ya don’t even have to speak German to submit to google.de, isn’t that handy?

In my previous article a few weeks ago I mentioned what countries were top of the ranks for surfers in Europe, well, this week I want to run some figures past you again about which search engines ‘seem’ to be sending a decent amount of foreign traffic.

So here goes, we have the top 6 search engine referrals for December 2001:

http://www.crawler.de/

http://www.lycos.de/

http://www.infoseek.com/Home?pg=Home.html&sv=ES

http://search.yahoo.co.jp

http://www.excite.co.uk/

http://www.infoseek.com/Home?pg=Home.html&sv=FR

As you can see infoseek (which has an English version) sends me lots of foreign traffic although, in reality, this is only for English pages, don’t ask me why but I guess the Spanish and French surfers love surfing for porn in English..

On a separate note, for those of you who are either to stubborn, lazy or, stupid to try submitting to the foreign search engines we will shortly be releasing a foreign search engine submission chart on European Webmasters which will tell you step by step what to put in each of the boxes on the submission form, so even you have no excuse!

Of course, the foreign traffic is going to mean you will need to pay more attention to your sites, perhaps offering these surfers a site in their language to sign up to or, before sending them off to a dialer, trade these foreign surfers off for some ‘English speaking ones via the use of a toplist. Admittedly, I haven’t found sending them to a toplist productive myself however, you might get different results to me.

Basically, if you start to get the traffic, hell, the chances are your getting foreign traffic now and don’t even know about it… USE IT!

If you want to ask questions specific to the foreign market that’s what our forums on EW are there for, we would gladly spend all day everyday answering your foreign traffic questions however, as yet, very few US based webmasters are taking the initiative to investigate further this GREAT source of revenue so, I guess ill just have to go back to my foreign search engines and get a bigger chunk of the ever increasing foreign porn surfer for myself.

Article written by Lee

Using TITLE Tags effectively

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Search Engine Optimization, WebDesign | Response: 0

Microsoft Internet Explorer has supported the TITLE attribute for links since version 4.0. Netscape began supporting it in version 6.0

The TITLE attribute allows you to enter descriptive text about a link that’s displayed when the mouse moves over the link. For an example, move your mouse over the link below:

The HTML source code for this link is shown below:

<a href="http://www.europeanwebmasters.com"
  title="Click Here To Learn Foreign Adult Marketing">European Webmasters</a>

If your browser supports the TITLE attribute you should see a small popup box appear, similar to the way alternate text for images is displayed when you move your mouse over the image.

This attribute is similar to the ALT attribute for the IMG tag, both in its appearance and its limitations. The value of the attribute must be inside quotation marks, and it can only contain plain text (no HTML tags). You can include carriage returns in the title, and these will be displayed in the text. The maximum length of the TITLE text for Internet Explorer is very large; we’ve tested it with over 500 characters. Try to keep your descriptions below 25 words, though; any more than this can be hard to read and, because the search engine spiders can read this text you may be considered as spamming the engines.

The TITLE attribute is useful in places where your HTML design limits the length of your link text. That’s often the case for links in a navigation bar, especially if your page has a multi-column layout. Try using the TITLE attribute to give your visitors extra navigation information.

In addition you can also use the TITLE tag on standard text for extra information where you just don’t have the space to be as affluent as you would like. An example of this is shown below:

Use of the TITLE tag on plain text

The HTML code for this is also shown below:

This attribute is part of the HTML 4.0 standard. Internet Explorer, Netscape 6.x and Opera (Version 3.0 or higher) support it. However, the attribute degrades gracefully, visitors with non-supporting browsers (like Netscape 4.x) would see the link as if you hadn’t used the attribute.

As you can see from the above examples by using the TITLE tags effectively you can double, if not treble your use of keywords however, caution should be paid when using these features of the tag so that you don’t inadvertently spam the search engines.

Article Written By Lee

Google – Manipulate Your Listings For More Traffic

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Search Engine Optimization | Response: 0

Google seems to be the Search Engine that everyone talks about almost on a daily basis however, far from being about search engine optimization and specifically about Google related SEO i wanted to touch on something new that, perhaps you would not have already thought about.

Manipulating Google Traffic.

So your site is already listed in Google but you want to increase the amount of traffic you receive, one way that we as a company have been successfully using for the last 18 months is that of manipulating the display of our clickable links in Google, how are we doing this? Simple, using ASCII character codes in your meta tags.

ASCII In Your Meta Tags.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) it has been proven, when used in your HTML page Meta Tags will actually display not only letters and numbers but, symbols as well, as a webmaster this can give you a great advantage over how much traffic you can pull from your Google listings and, not only Google, a few of the other search engines also read ASCII code when it is found in your Meta Tags.

Putting This To Use Practically.

A good method of putting this to use would be utilizing in your Meta Tags as follows.

<title>Site Name <ascii code here> page title</title>
<meta name=”Description” content=”normal page description”>
<meta name=”Keywords” content=”normal keywords”>

This will display a search engine listing that not only has your site name on it as well as a description but, in the position where the ASCII code will appear you will also have an attention grabbing symbol enuring that your site stands out from all the others listed on the same search engine results page as yours.

ASCII Meta Tags – An Overview.

Hopefully you have seen how adapting your current HTML page Meta Tags by placing an ASCII character code within them can benefit you for gleeming further search engine traffic to your sites and, with this new found knowledge you may well place both your sites traffic and your bottom line profits ahead of other webmasters.

Article written by Lee

The Next Big Traffic Craze – Thumbnail Link Lists

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Link Lists | Response: 0

As adult webmasters are constantly thriving to create the next craze in traffic sources to garner sales from their sites it comes as no surprise that there is already talk amongst the ranks of the next big thing, what is this new idea? The Thumbnail Link List.

Thumbnail Link Lists – Re-Inventing The Wheel.

As the past year and a half have taught us as webmasters, regular TGP’s have almost become a thing of the past with more and more thumbnail TGP’s being created and submitted to daily, why then, has it taken so long for someone to think up the idea of the Thumbnail Link List? Quite simply I think it has been a case of to much has happened over the last 12 months in the adult industry for webmasters to think this idea up.

So What Is A Thumbnail Link List?

A thumbnail link list is in effect a way of displaying free sites on your own standard Link List by utilizing small thumbnail samples of the images contained within the free sites galleries, in fact, much the same way that a thumbnail TGP works however, instead of only listing single image galleries your link list will consist of links to individual free sites.

Much like the Thumbnail TGP traffic source, the thinking behind the Thumbnail Link List is that by showing your surfers what type of pictures the sites within your link list contain they will be more likely to visit the free site thus improving your CTR to your webmaster submitted sites and, ultimately, your site overall allowing you to manipulate the traffic to garner more sales for yourself as the Thumbnail Link List owner.

Submitting Your Site To A Thumbnail Link List.

Looking at the Thumbnail Link List idea from a webmaster who would be submitting your free sites for listing (and ultimately traffic) how do the rules of the Thumbnail Link List differ to that of the regular link list which we are all used to seeing, well for a start, the main difference will be that you either need to submit a thumbnail yourself or, enter the url to one of your gallery pages in addition to the main entrance to your free site, this will actually be the only significant change in how you operate your link list submissions compared tot he current link list method, however, as each Thumbnail Link List owner will have their own individual rules you should check before submitting as to what is required from you as a submitter.

Thumbnail Link Lists – Overview.

The whole Thumbnail Link List idea is one that, in all seriousness should mean more traffic not only for the submitters of the free sites but, also for the Thumbnail Link List owner themselves, by offering the surfers a preview of the content contained within the free sites they will be visiting they can simply reduce the amount of sites that do not appeal to them and focus more on the sites that do meaning that the webmasters who submit highly niched free sites to the links lists will now be able to benefit from a larger traffic base and ultimately, more sales.

Article written by Lee

Gay Adult Marketing 101

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

There is a myth out there that gay traffic is hard to convert because a gay surfer is reluctant to buy. This isn’t so. Conversions come down to two things:

• The gay surfer is discriminating; a membership to a site that has exactly what we want
• The gay surfer is loyal; I, believe, this comes from our experience as a community. When a Gay surfer decides to purchase a membership, it’s typically for a longer period of time.

This is evident with the better Gay Pay Sites; conversions may be lower than a straight hardcore site however, membership tend to be longer than the industry average. The gay surfer is discriminating; we look for a long-term membership with a site that has we want whether it’s teens, bears, amateurs, etc.

With that idea, I always advocate that age-old niche free site philosophy use a variety of sponsor programs on your sites. Typically, my free sites will have one main sponsor (I use Quality Males) then I’ll break my other banner slots down one Teen site, a Twink site and maybe a product like Viagra. But this will vary depending on the “flavor” or “personality” of your site – if you have a gay leather site, my main sponsor will be a Leather sponsor or product, with a variety of other sponsors (one mega site, a teen site, and maybe an adult toy store).

One marketing option, I tend to see working well is the full-page ad vs. only banners. I, honestly, do not know whether it’s a quality issue, a larger ad or the surfer’s disgust with banner ads, but it works well in our market.

One thing that experience has proven to me, it makes no difference whether you’re a webmaster to gay or straight traffic, you need to analyze your traffic. If you’re sending traffic out to sponsors and your not seeing the conversions, maybe you need to really look who your surfers are. If you’re lucky enough to know who your surfers are, then look for a specialty sponsor (whether partnership or click-thru program). It’s all a matter of finding the right sponsor programs and tweaking your site (and we all know how that can be). Don’t be afraid to experiment. It’s the long term that we need to be looking at. Remember that this isn’t “Who wants to be a Millionaire is 30 days or less”.

Gay traffic isn’t difficult to manage as many people think. It’s a matter of patience and understanding your market. And the best way to understand that market, is to ask a successful webmaster in the gay adult market..

Article written by Gary-Alan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article written by Lee