• The Lost Traffic Source – Picture Posts

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Pic Posts | Response: 0

    Back in the day, pic posts were all the rage, taking less time for webmasters to build for and, less time maintaining however, in recent times we seldom hear of these traffic sources as more and more webmasters turn to the TGP’s in an effort to get traffic ‘quantity’ over ‘quality’ my personal feelings are that the pic posts of the past will soon start to make a comeback.

    The Basics.

    So, we know the history behind the Pic Post but what about the dynamics? How exactly do they work? That’s easy, you take an image, give it a HTML page and add the recip to the PP (Pic Post) you are submitting the page / image too along with a banner leading to your site. At this time, it would be prudent to add that, if you will be submitting to PP’s on a regular basis, you might also like to add the url to your main domain on the image in the lower right or left hand corner.

    One other thing to take into consideration when using PP’s is that softcore is often better. With the readily available hardcore content on TGP’s the chances are, that the surfer has decided to visit the PP because there is not as much widely available hardcore content.

    Cost Balance.

    In addition to the relatively minimal amount of work required to create pages for the PP’s there are several other factors that make them much better then TGP’s and Free Sites the main one is that bandwidth usage is relatively low for a start, not to mention the fact that you can knock out hundreds / thousands of PP pages a day compared to the tens / hundreds of TGP and Free Sites.

    Also, when looking at cost, the one factor people often forget is the submission time and, unlike the TGP model of traffic the vast majority of PP’s will actually encourage or, in some instances, prefer automated submissions, this means that you can target hundreds of PP’s in less time than it takes to submit a TGP or Free Site.

    Marketing Basics.

    Of course, as with any type of site that we build as webmasters, the main reason that surfers will visit our sponsors is the marketing ‘spin’ we give them, this is where the use of Alt Tags and Text can become extremely useful, bearing in mind, the surfer can already see the ‘larger picture’ on your PP page by utilizing Alt Tags and other SEO methods you can actually entice the surfer to click through to your sponsor and, get some very good rankings in the search engines at the same time.

    Housekeeping.

    Now you have started to use Picture Posts, as with any form of traffic you need to ensure you keep ‘accurate’ records of who is and who isn’t accepting your pages along with details stats on the amount of traffic each PP sends you and, you ultimately send off to your sponsors site.

    Adjust everything you can. trial and error plays a MAJOR part in using PP’s just because you use softcore images one day and get 1000 hits to the page you created, that doesn’t mean that by using hardcore images the next day you will receive more or, less traffic, also being niche specific, unlike with the TGP game can have its disadvantages, use images that appear at first glance, to be ‘generalized’ then, over time adjust your advertising methods to reflect the niche of surfer you are targeting.

    In addition to keeping records of the pages you create for the picture posts, you should also be sure to keep a record of where else you have used them, just because you are using them for the PP’s specifically, this doesn’t mean that you can not interlink these pages together and get some traffic of your own to them, does it?

    Hopefully this article has given you some more insight into the world of the Picture Post and, if you try an experiment with this little known source of quality traffic, I feel certain you will be pleasantly surprised with the results you see.

    Article written by Lee

  • Article Writing For Publicity And Credibility

    Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

    If you’re looking for a powerful way to get free publicity and build your credibility at the same time, then writing articles may be your answer.

    If you’ve been on the Internet for a while, you’ve probably subscribed to a few ezines including this one, hopefully. Many ezine publishers will include an article written by a guest author. At the end of the article are a few lines of text about the author referred to as bylines or resource box. These lines of text are basically just an advertisement for the writer. They usually contain a couple of lines about the author and a web address.

    The writer gives the publisher permission to publish their article, free of charge, in exchange for the publisher including the author’s bylines.

    By writing articles and allowing them to be published, your articles will have the potential to be viewed by millions of Internet users. They may be published by several ezines with subscriber bases of a few hundred to several thousand. In addition, they may be displayed in ezine archives or on high traffic websites.

    Most ezine publishers prefer short articles between 500 and 750 words. Short “tip” articles of just a couple of paragraphs are also very popular. Articles should be formatted to 65 characters per line or less, including spaces, and written in short paragraph sections.

    When you begin writing your article, avoid using your standard word processing programs, as they do not allow for proper formatting. Instead, use a text editor such as Notepad. It should already be installed on your desktop.

    When you begin typing your article, use a hard carriage return (hit enter) when your text reaches 65 characters, including spaces, and leave a space between your paragraphs. This will enable publishers to easily copy and paste your article into their publication. By taking the time to properly format your article, you will increase your chance of being published significantly.

    Most publishers receive many article submissions each week and only select a few to be published. Here are some basic guidelines to assist you in getting published:

    (1) Make sure you follow the publishers’ submission guidelines. Articles submitted to publishers that don’t follow the submission guidelines will most likely be deleted.

    (2) Make sure your article is properly formatted.
    Publishers won’t take the time to format your article.
    They’ll simply delete it and move on to the next article submission.

    (3) Keep your bylines down to 6 lines or less.
    Publishers will not publish articles that contain excessively long bylines.

    (4) Select a descriptive title to intrigue your readers.
    Use a powerful headline that demands attention and try to keep it all on one line.

    (5) Use proper grammar and spelling.
    Publishers will not take the time to edit your article. Make sure you read your article several times and use spell check.

    (6) Avoid articles that are nothing more than a sales letter.
    Publishers want quality content and will simply delete an article that is written like a sales letter.

    (7) Avoid referring readers to an affiliate URL.
    Articles containing affiliate links may make your article appear to be biased and untrustworthy.

    (8) Write your articles with a sincere desire to teach and inform. Talk to your readers and share your expertise.

    Once you’ve written your article, you’ll need to develop a list of publishers that may be interested in publishing it. The best way to accomplish this is to display your articles on your website. Place a subscription box on each of your article pages to enable your visitors to subscribe. This list should be used to send your new articles to your list of publishers.

    Of course, you are already in one of the right places to start, we are always looking for industry related articles so, if you been given the motivation by reading this article to give it a try why not submit one to us for publication?

    Writing and distributing free articles on the Internet will be one of the best promotional decisions you’ll ever make. Not only will it provide you with free publicity, but if your articles are good, you’ll become a trusted professional in your area of expertise.

    Article written by Lee

  • Organizing Your Hard Drive And Server

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Hosting | Response: 0

    We have probably all done it at some point, we get in such a hurry to upload our new site that we have just spent the last 20 minutes building that we don’t think about maintaining the site at a future date or, worse still, we need to change a site we built 6-8 months ago and can not remember where we uploaded it to.

    By organizing your server from day one of your steps into becoming a webmaster you will, inevitably, save yourselves a lot of time in the long term future of our business model.

    Lets take a look at how we can accomplish this ‘organization’ though.

    On your hard drive you need to have a ‘central’ location for all of your online files and folders, what better place to keep this than in a folder named ‘Online’ of course, this is just an example but it will son become apparent to you that this is probably the most logical folder name to use.

    Now, within this folder you are also going to need to have a few sub folders, i would suggest using a folder for each of the domains that you own so for example, for your first domain, you would name it myfirstdomain.com, your second would be named myseconddomain.com etc.

    Within these domain folders you will also need to have a selection of sub folders again, I would suggest names for these folders such as /html/, /scripts/, /articles/, you are now well on the way to organizing your server.

    In addition to these sub folders you will also need to create sub folders for your images that you will be using on your sites, I would suggest using the names /banners/ and of course, /images/ for these two folders, you now know that the /banners/ folder contains all of the buttons and banners you will use on your sites and the /images/ folder contains all of the .jpg and .gifs you will use. Inside the /images/ folder, it might also be advisable to create a sub folder called /thumbnails/ which, you can store your thumb nailed pictures in if required.

    One other advantage to organizing your folders and sites in this manner is that over time, it will assist you when it comes to dealing with hot linkers. Instead of having to find the paths to all of your individual image directory, you know instantly where you put them, without the need of logging onto your server.

    Ok so you now have a semi-organized folder structure on your HD, so far we hopefully have a folder structure that looks somewhat like this:

    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/

    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/html/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/scripts/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/

    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/html/Banners/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/html/Images/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/scripts/Banners/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/scripts/Images/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/Banners/
    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/Images/

    So, hypothetically, if you created a article called ‘Article One’ you would find this in the following place on your HD:

    C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/articleone.html

    See how easy that was to find on your hard drive?

    Of course, on your server the folder structure will be no different so, your structure will be mirrored EXACTLY from your HD to your SERVER I.E.:

    /usr/www/sites/myfirstdomain.com/articles/articleone.html

    Not only will you make your server layout a lot easier to navigate but, it should, in theory, save you time when submitting your sites to the search engines, free for all’s etc as, in your head, you will already know the location to any single page.

    Try this as an example…

    You have created an article site called ‘Online Marketing’ on your third domain, where is it located?

    That’s right, you will find it at http://www.mythirddomain.com/articles/onlinemarketing.html

    How much time would you have usually spent logging into your server trying to find this page?

    One other MAJOR advantage to keeping your server and HD structure the same is backing up your data now becomes easy as pie. you simply have to download your folders into the /online/ directory on your HD, then simply burn that entire directory to Cdrom.

    Hopefully this article has given you some insight into how proper organization can be of use to you on your HD and on your server. If you are just starting out in the adult industry hopefully you will see that spending a little time to make a structuring system such as this can save you a lot of time long term.

    One last question for you however, where would you find your article called ‘Marketing Shoes’ on your 56th domain name?

    Article written by Lee

  • Displaying Special Characters On Your HTML Pag

    Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

    In order to display certain characters within your HTML pages, you must use a special code. The codes below display the HTML code and the character when displayed on your web page. To use any of the characters displayed within the chart, copy & paste the HTML code to the left of the character you would like to use.

    HTML Code Browser View HTML Code Browser View HTML Code Browser View HTML Code Browser View
    © © ! ! _ _  
    ® ® " ` ` ž ž
      # ` a a Ÿ Ÿ
    " $ $ b b  
    & & % % c c ¡ ¡
    &lt; < &#38; & &#100; d &#162; ¢
    &gt; > &#39; &#101; e &#163; £
    &Agrave; À &#40; ( &#102; f &#164; ¤
    &Aacute; Á &#41; ) &#103; g &#165; ¥
    &Acirc; Â &#42; * &#104; h &#166; ¦
    &Atilde; Ã &#43; + &#105; i &#167; §
    &Auml; Ä &#44; , &#106; j &#168; ¨
    &Aring; Å &#45; &#107; k &#169; ©
    &AElig; Æ &#46; . &#108; l &#170; ª
    &Ccedil; Ç &#47; / &#109; m &#171; «
    &Egrave; È &#48; 0 &#110; n &#172; ¬
    &Eacute; É &#49; 1 &#111; o &#173; ­
    &Ecirc; Ê &#50; 2 &#112; p &#174; ®
    &Euml; Ë &#51; 3 &#113; q &#175; ¯
    &Igrave; Ì &#52; 4 &#114; r &#176; °
    &Iacute; Í &#53; 5 &#115; s &#177; ±
    &Icirc; Î &#54; 6 &#116; t &#178; ²
    &Iuml; Ï &#55; 7 &#117; u &#179; ³
    &ETH; Ð &#56; 8 &#118; v &#180; ´
    &Ntilde; Ñ &#57; 9 &#119; w &#181; µ
    &Otilde; Õ &#58; : &#120; x &#182;
    &Ouml; Ö &#59; ; &#121; y &#183; ·
    &Oslash; Ø &#60; < &#122; z &#184; ¸
    &Ugrave; Ù &#61; = &#123; { &#185; ¹
    &Uacute; Ú &#62; > &#124; | &#186; º
    &Ucirc; Û &#63; ? &#125; } &#187; »
    &Uuml; Ü &#64; @ &#126; ~ &#188; ¼
    &Yacute; Ý &#65; A &#127; ? &#189; ½
    &THORN; Þ &#66; B &#128; &#190; ¾
    &szlig; ß &#67; C &#129;  &#191; ¿
    &agrave; à &#68; D &#130; &#192; À
    &aacute; á &#69; E &#131; ƒ &#193; Á
    &aring; å &#70; F &#132; &#194; Â
    &aelig; æ &#71; G &#133; &#195; Ã
    &ccedil; ç &#72; H &#134; &#196; Ä
    &egrave; è &#73; I &#135; &#197; Å
    &eacute; é &#74; J &#136; ˆ &#198; Æ
    &ecirc; ê &#75; K &#137; &#199; Ç
    &euml; ë &#76; L &#138; Š &#200; È
    &igrave; ì &#77; M &#139; &#201; É
    &iacute; í &#78; N &#140; Œ &#202; ?
    &icirc; î &#79; O &#141;  &#203; Ë
    &iuml; ï &#80; P &#142; Ž &#204; Ì
    &eth; ð &#81; Q &#143;  &#205; Í
    &ntilde; ñ &#82; R &#144;  &#206; Î
    &ograve; ò &#83; S &#145; &#207; Ï
    &oacute; ó &#84; T &#146; &#208; Ð
    &ocirc; ô &#85; U &#147; &#209; Ñ
    &otilde; õ &#86; V &#148; &#210; Ò
    &ouml; ö &#87; W &#149; &#211; Ó
    &oslash; ø &#88; X &#150; &#212; Ô
    &ugrave; ù &#89; Y &#151; &#213; Õ
    &uacute; ú &#90; Z &#152; ˜ &#214; Ö
    &ucirc; û &#91; [ &#153; &#215; ×
    &yacute; ý &#92; \ &#154; š &#216; Ø
    &thorn; þ &#93; ] &#155; &#217; Ù
    &yuml; ÿ &#94; ^ &#156; œ &#218; Ú

    Whilst the above list is by no means complete, it should contain the most useful characters and codes for you to build your sites using the special characters with ease.

    Article written by Lee

  • Adult Search Engine Optimization

    Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Promotion, Search Engine Optimization | Response: 0

    Gone are the days when adult webmasters could Spam the search engines and get highly trafficked sites within a month of the search engines updating many of the search engines caught onto the adult industry very early on and started changing the way in which they indexed sites they went from meta tag optimized listings to theme indexing to almost every type of search engine optimization method in between.

    Search Engine Optimization Techniques.

    It would seem with the changing times of search engine optimization that there is no longer a single solitary way to get your adult sites listed highly in the search engines but rather a mixture of different adult seo methods being used on a single site ranging from increasing your pagerank, including relevant meta tags and page content to standard adult search engine optimization methods such as getting other popular websites linking to yours but with this comes a new challenge of its own webmasters need to get back to the basics to figure out what worked then and, what will work now so far as adult search engine optimization goes.

    Adult Search Engine Optimization Companies.

    There are many companies currently online that can offer adult webmasters their search engine optimization services however, how do you choose an SEO company that will not only work for you but, is cost effective for your needs, the simple answer is to ask around, there are sites online presently that offer monthly memberships to gain access to their adult seo techniques in the form of articles and tutorials just as their are sites that offer no information whatsoever or, information that, while it worked three years ago, it no longer works in today’s adult seo marketplace. You need to ask for advice from customers who have used adult optimization companies in the past and see how their results improved as well as making sure that what you are actually purchasing is a service that doesn’t just guarantee you improved site rankings but actually guarantees you will see a profit from the money you spent on the optimization services.

    Adult SEO Breakdown.

    Adult search engine optimization companies have only really become apparent in the adult industry over the last 6-12 months however, many well known and respected webmasters have been working on optimizing their adult sites for years and, whilst doing so, they have also achieved a vast knowledge base on how to optimize your adult sites for the search engines, again, ask around on the message forums to find the solution that will best suit your needs and budget and you wont go far wrong, the adult search engine optimization business model is one that in all actuality should change on a regular basis however, as mentioned above some companies are still using the same optimization methods they used three or four years ago, make sure you do your background checks before parting with any money and, most importantly, use the search engines to find their sites in search terms where, if they were any good at all, they would already have first page listings.

    Article written by Lee.

  • Designing A 404 Error Document

    Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

    Designing A 404 Error Document.

    Now that we know how to use .htaccess let’s get into how exactly to effectively design a 404 error document page. Here are a few tips when building your document:

    Keep The Design Constant.

    That is, whatever design your web site supports, consider keeping that design when building your error document. This is not mandatory, however. If you have a good reason to stray from your design, then do so. Otherwise, keep it constant.

    Use Attractive Dialog.

    Do not use the word error. Error signifies something is terribly wrong, and while that may be so, you should give that information to your visitor in a very friendly way. Instead, consider writing “Sorry, the page you were looking for is not available at the moment”.

    Include Contact Information.

    Obviously, you want to fix the error, so give the user every opportunity to e-mail you about the error. Some users will not bother to do so, but you still need to give them the opportunity.

    Keep The Visitor Moving.

    Often, 404 error pages are like road blocks, or brick walls that the user cannot pass through. You need to break through the barriers and allow the visitor to keep traveling through your web site. If your web site supports a search capability, include a form on your error document to let them search for the information they were originally seeking. At the very least, include a link to your home page.

    Give Them A Site Map.

    When the user clicks upon a page that is no longer available, or was mistyped by the webmaster, consider adding a link to a site map page, or include your site map right on your 404 error document, so the user can get their bearings within your site, and can locate their desired content quickly and easily.

    Give Them Help.

    List tips on your error document page to help the visitor diagnose the error. For example, ask them to double check the URL in their browser’s address bar. If it’s correct, politely ask them to e-mail you to report the error. Also suggest that they visit your home page (or search utility) to find the information they are after.

    List Some Popular Links.

    Provide the user with a few links to your most popular content areas of your web site, as it is more likely they were searching for that content than anything else.

    As you have seen, error documents are more important than you may think. Merely having a custom error page shows you have put forth effort on your web site and want to help the user find the information they need. Error documents are easy to create and adds professionalism to any web site.

    Article written by Lee

  • How To Use ALT Tags On Your Sites

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

    One simple technique can improve your search engine rank, make site navigation easier, and increase the accessibility of your site to disabled visitors. Yet, as many as 78% of sites don’t use it! Boost your site’s profile with human visitors and search engine spiders with the <ALT> tag.

    Inserting ALT Text

    Adding <ALT> descriptions to your <IMG> tags is quick and easy. You don’t have to do any complex HTML coding. If you can describe your image or link, then you can add ALT tags to your code.

    We’ve used some examples below:

    <img src="thumbnails/porn.jpg" 
      width="100" height="78" ALT="Explicit Teenage Sex Pictures">

    You can also include an ALT tag when your image is a link:

    <a href="porn.html"> 
    <img src="thumbnails/porn.jpg" 
    width="100" height="78" ALT="Explicit Teenage Sex Pictures"></a>

    Ideally, your ALT text descriptions should be complete sentences, rather than a list of keywords or obscure phrase like “company logo small 2.” Remember that all visitors are likely to see (or hear) some version of your ALT text so be sure that it’s meaningful.

    Optimize ALT Descriptions For Search Engines

    Besides helping human visitors, ALT descriptions help you rank higher in some search engines. AltaVista and Google are two of the search engines that use ALT descriptive text when they rank Web sites. The growth of search engine/directory partnerships means that a high rank in one engine can often translate into an improved rank on its partner sites.

    Search engine algorithms calculate the number of times keywords are repeated and give higher rank to pages that use them often. Keywords in the ALT descriptive text help you increase their frequency on the page. Search engines assume the terms are more relevant and important if they’re used in the page content, not just listed in the META tag.

    For instance, the descriptive text in the example code uses keywords and keyword phrases from the META keyword tag: Explicit Teenage Sex Pictures. Since these are relevant to the site’s content, they’re easy to include as descriptive text.

    If you’re having problems choosing relevant, targeted keywords, refer to this article, How To Pick Your Keywords. It provides helpful tips about selecting keywords and using them to improve your search engine ranking.

    Make Your Web Site Sticky

    ALT tags help you promote your site in another way too: they help make it “sticky.” Sticky means that visitors stay at your site longer so they see your advertising and purchase your memberships. Visitors who feel comfortable at a site will stay longer – and hopefully return more often to make further purchases.

    Disabled visitors who use text-only or spoken word browsers rely on the ALT text for clues about the image’s content and function. This can be a lucrative audience: they represent a worldwide audience of 750 million and spend twice as much time online as the average user. But it isn’t just a disability issue: ALT tags make your site more accessible to everyone.

    Visitors see your ALT text while the images are downloading or when they mouse over images. The descriptive text helps them decide if they want to wait for an image to download or move on to a different page. If your image is also a link, then visitors can read the explanatory text and quickly jump to the section they want.

    Site navigation is easier, so impatient visitors are less likely to leave the site.

    Don’t Follow The Crowd

    ALT tags are a small addition to your HTML code that can make a big impact on your site. Since many of your competitors don’t use them, give your site and edge and include them on all images.

    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.

  • Now They Signed Up – Learn How To Keep Them

    Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General | Response: 0

    Member retention is going to have a large effect on the adult industry over the next few months, with Visa chargeback rates being lowered and, many affiliate programs lowering their payout model something has to give and, hopefully, the thing that does give will be that affiliate programs start to realize that once they have your surfer, it becomes their responsibility to make that member retain.

    With that in mind this article will look at a few things that we have been doing on some of our paysites for the last few months and, instead of having to provide an excess of plug in content we have started updating our sites regularly within the niche confines of what our members are actually looking for, also, despite this increase in content, we have started doing something unique so far as member retention goes – actually communicating with the member directly.

    Communication Pays.

    Actually spending the time to listen to what your members want can be beneficial on many levels for example, how many of the big sponsors offer the member a chance to become involved in a ‘community’ inside their paysites, i can only think of 3 paysites that i have personally visited that do this.

    Often, offering your members a way to communicate to YOU what they want inside the site can, and usually will increase the value of their membership to you in the long run. offer your members weekly polls, offer them incentives to keep an active membership, perhaps some kind of loyalty program, in addition to a method of your paysite members being able to communicate to each other inside your site.

    Content Updates.

    We all know that paysites need to update however, how many paysite owners spend the time to ask their member what they are looking for? As mention in the previous section, offer your members polls on the next updates you will be doing, ask them what sections of the site need improving and, more importantly, ask them if they are happy with how your site looks and feels overall.

    Renewal Time.

    So you have managed to keep hold of your paysite member for a few days without them canceling and, their trial period is ending what now? Well, more often than not, communicating to the member that they are about to get rebilled can have a positive effect, send them an email prior to the rebill informing them of what your next set of updates will be, let them know they are a valued member of the site and, more importantly than this, that you are there to help them and listen to their suggestions. This is also an ideal time to remind them of why they joined your site in the first place, you have a lot of exclusive content that, simply put, no other paysite can offer them, you listen to their feedback and, again, value their feedback, all of these things will ensure that your member base retains well over the trial period.

    Second Month Renewals.

    So you have managed to keep your member for a month, and, again they are due a rebill, as with the first rebill you gave them, re-iterate the points of your site and, tell them what has changed over the past month, give them some sales speak about how your site is doing and, more importantly, what you have coming next month, by communicating these updates to your members a day or so before they have to renew, you should, in all honesty, keep their interest in your paysite and, more importantly, make more money from your members.

    So Your Member Cancels.

    Okay, so perhaps you managed to rebill your member for a few month or, perhaps they left after the trial period, what now? Simple, send them a follow up email, find out the reasons they cancelled their membership to your site and, see if you can offer them an alternative to stay, perhaps a reduced cost membership or, maybe even an alternative site altogether, if they entered your teen pay site and, were looking for amateur teen pics, even though you know you don’t have them yet, you will probably know of a site that does, tell this cancelled membership about this site and, get them to try it out, if you can match what the surfer is looking for to a site you own then you have a second chance at keeping their membership and, making money.

    Retention Overview.

    When all is said and done the one thing that is apparent so far as pay sites go is that a lot of them do not communicate with their members and build the sites they operate around what their members are looking for, we can all say we actually do this constantly but, how many of us really, hand on heart, can prove that they ask, listen and, more importantly, implement the feedback from their members base?

    Article written by Lee

  • What On Earth Is CGI?

    Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

    Let’s unlock a little bit of the mystery about something called CGI. If it helps any, CGI means Common Gateway Interface.

    This is a method which is used to swap data between the server (the hardware and software that actually allows you to get to your web site) and a web client (your browser). CGI is actually a set of standards where a program or script (a series of commands) can send data back to the web server where it can be processed.

    Typically, you use standard HTML tags to get data from a person, then pass that data to a CGI routine. The CGI routine then performs some action with the data.

    Some of the more common uses of CGI include:

    Guest books – The CGI routine is responsible for accepting the data, ensuring it is valid, sending an email acknowledgement back to the writer, perhaps sending an email to the webmaster, and creating the guest book entry itself.

    Email Forms – A simple CGI forms routine just formats the data into an email and sends it back to the webmaster. More complicated routines can maintain a database, send an acknowledgement and validate data.

    Mailing List Maintenance – These routines allow visitors to subscribe and unsubscribe from a mailing list. In this case, the CGI routine maintains a database of email addresses, and the better ones send acknowledgements back to the visitor and webmaster.

    A CGI routine can be anything which understands the CGI standard. A popular CGI language is called PERL, which is simple to understand and use (well, compared to other languages). PERL is a scripting language, which means each time a PERL routine is executed the web server must examine the PERL commands to determine what to do. In contrast, a compiled language such as C++ or Visual Basic can be directly executed, which is faster and more efficient.

    Okay, in a nutshell (and greatly simplified), here’s how it works:

    1) You (the webmaster) specify a form tag which includes the name of the CGI routine.

    2) You create HTML tags which retrieves data from your visitors.

    3) Each of the input tags includes a variable name. The data which is retrieved from the visitor (or directly set if the tag includes the “hidden” qualifier) is placed in the variable name.

    4) When the visitor presses the “submit” button, the CGI routine which was specified in the form tag is executed. At this time, the CGI routine “takes control”, meaning the browser essentially is waiting for it to complete.

    5) This CGI routine can get data from variable names. It retrieves the data and does whatever action is required.

    6) When the CGI routine finishes, it returns control back to the browser.

    Some important things to remember about CGI routines:

    You can install CGI routines on your own site if your host allows it http://www.webair.com is an example of a web host which allows for CGI routines. Some web hosts do not allow you to install your own routines but do provide some pre-written ones to you. If these are not sufficient for your needs, you can find a remote hosting service to provide the necessary functions.

    Generally, if you install your own routines they must be installed in the cgi-bin directory of your site. This is a special location which allows scripts and programs to be executed.

    CGI routines work best on Apache-style servers. Windows NT and Windows 2000 does support CGI, but it tends to be slow and problematic.

    If you use a remote hosting service, you must remember that although they appear to be giving you this for free, you are actually paying a price. Usually they want to display advertisements, although some of them actually take visitors away from your site.

    When you write a CGI routine, you have the choice of a scripting language like PERL or a compiled language such as C++ or Visual Basic. Anything which can execute on the web server is acceptable.

    I hope this short introduction to CGI has cleared up some of the mystery.

    Article written by Lee

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