Gay Industry Networking – The Gay Boards

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

Gay Industry Networking – The Gay Boards.

With so many ways for webmasters marketing straight sites in the adult industry to network I started to look at the various alternatives available to those webmasters who market gay sites to network and, although there are a few different ones about, they still seem to be few and far between.

So What Boards Are There For Gay Webmasters?

Presently, to my knowledge there are four dedicated gay boards that webmasters can utilize for networking purposes in the adult industry with several straight orientated resource sites having a gay board also these are as follows:

The Gay Boards:

Rock Me Hard
Triple X Gay
Gay Webmaster Chat
Gay Wide Webmasters

The Straight Sites With Gay Boards:

Ynot Gay Board
Xbiz Gay Board

Obviously my favorite is The Gay Board at Gay Wide Webmasters but i am slightly biased towards that seeing as its one that we own privately however, the other boards are almost certainly worth a visit in addition to the GWW community forums.

So what do these gay boards offer those marketing to the gay surfer that the straight boards cant? Simply put, it can offer you a place to network without fear of ridicule from your colleagues and peers in addition you will find that a lot of these gay boards have a wealth of information about the gay market being posted on them on an almost daily basis.

It is also worth mentioning however that just with the numerous straight orientated message boards, the gay boards do have their own individual feel to them, for example, Rock Me Hard is what I would personally classify as a ‘fun’ board and Shelmal does a great job keeping the spirit of the board going likewise, Gay Webmaster Chat is more a board geared towards webmasters who operate traffic sites such as TGP’s and Link Lists which becomes apparent after reading a few threads. Gay Wide Webmasters is more a board with a wide reach but, primarily, it is a business orientated gay webmaster community and Triple X Gay, because it is fairly new is still, imho, trying to identify the direction it wants to take but non the less, a lot of the forum members posting there also post on GWW.

The Gay Board – An Overview.

When all is said and done, no matter whether you are gay, straight, black, white or any other demographic, focusing your attention to one type of board can become counter productive after a while, I mean how often can you hear from the same people over and over again before being given the same information again and again? Diversify your posting activities to include some of the gay market community forums and at the same time, you will also diversify your business knowledge which, im sure you will agree, is good for everyone, especially you and your bank account.

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.

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

Using Full Page Ad’s

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Promotion, Traffic | Response: 0

Full page ad’s can be used for more than just ‘adverts’ in fact, there is a wide and varied range of uses for them, below I have detailed some of the uses that I have tried in the past and from my experience, they seem to work well enough.
Creating A ‘Hub’ Site – By interlinking FPA’s together in a range of niches and, offering your surfers a money bar linking to other FPA’s in different niches, you can actually get some good rankings in the SE’s and, if you utilize banner exchanges or counters on your FPA ‘hub’ site you can also ensure you get a fair amount of additional traffic. One thing I like to do with my FPA hub is use it as the ‘exit’ page when a surfer leaves one of my sites. This ensures that I am getting optimum traffic for my time spent a) building sites and B) building my hub.

A lot of people I have spoken to about ‘hub’ sites simply forget about them once they have been built, personally, I do not see the point in doing this, if you build something like this why not send your exit, top list, counter, banner exchange traffic to the first page of your ‘hub’?

Doorway Pages.

FPA’s also make exceptional SE doorway pages, by optimizing your image names, meta tags and text on the individual FPA’s you are not only ensuring they WILL get ranked by the SE’s but, if you ‘hub’ them together as explained above you will also get some premium listings from them.

Filter Pages.

What I learnt to do early on is rather than send my surfers directly to the sponsors using the ‘standard’ linking codes is to send them first to an FPA with a money bar (or table ad) on it, this way, if they click the link in error and not realize that they are going to a pay site, you can give them an option, not only to use their ‘back’ button but also, to go to a different niche or, to continue into the sponsors tour. Now that you can link directly to a specific tour page on ARS sites, this method is a good way to give your surfers a ‘fresh’ tour front page.

PPC Listings.

An FPA is an ideal way to get sites listed in the PPC engines, not only do you show the surfers EXACTLY what is in the site they have just clicked on but, you also have the added option of being able to utilize blur consoles and exit consoles on them.

One other thing that I will mention, is that often, you will find that FPA’s that you have made yourself, no matter how ‘amateur’ looking they are will work better than the ‘pretty’ sponsor built FPA’s.

Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas on how you can better utilize FPA’s and not just use them in the same manner as every other adult site on the internet. If you have some good results from using FPA’s in this manner feel free to post about it on the ARSR Support forums and likewise, if you can think of any additional uses that have not been mentioned here let us know on the forums.

Article written by Lee

Bandwidth Explained

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Hosting | Response: 0

Bandwidth is the total amount of data that can be sent in a given time between two computer devices. The more bandwidth that is available, the faster the server.

Any webmaster expecting a decent amount of traffic to their adult site will require a web hosting package that includes a large amount of bandwidth. This is so important, especially with the growth of your online business and, ultimately your sites. The more bandwidth your server has, the larger the number of surfers who will be able to view it at the same time, and the access it quickly will be. If you don’t have enough bandwidth, surfers will not be able to access your site as quickly, and that may turn them off which in turn, will mean they will leave your site.

For this reason alone, it is important to select a hosting company that can offer you a great deal of bandwidth. As an example, larger hosting providers will have T1 lines or fiber-optic relays to access the Internet; these will provide a fair amount bandwidth. Another way is to get a dedicated server which, in turn, gives you exclusive access to your server’s connectivity instead of sharing it with others, as such allowing for maximum hardware performance.

To calculate your bandwidth needs, you must know how large each page on your site is, including the graphics and any script usage you may have. Then, you multiply that by the number of views you expect the site to get every month.

For example, say you have three 5k images on your page and a 2k HTML file – you would have 17k of data on that page. Multiply that by your expected page views (let’s say in this case it is 100,000 per month), and you get 1.7 G of data to be transferred that month for that page alone. Now calculate this for each page, and you will know approximately how much bandwidth your entire site requires.

The best way of using bandwidth efficiently is to keep the size of your html pages low. In other words, ensure your HTML programming is adequate enough to use minimal amounts of coding for the purpose you want and, that your photos and graphics are small. To reduce photo file sizes you should always use JPEG format, which can reduce files up to 5% of its original size. Make sure to use the GIF format for graphics, as opposed to TIFFs or BMPs, which are generally much larger in file size.

If you attach URLs to your IMG SRC that link to another person’s images without their permission, this is known throughout the online industry as hotlinking which, costs the person you are linking the image of money and not yourself. For this reason, hotlinking, is looked upon dimly.

The unfortunate truth is that hotlinking is rife in the online industry. However, lets not let that deter you, by utilizing a file called .htaccess on your server, you can prevent other dishonest webmasters hotlinking your images.

As with most things in this industry, you need to shop around to find the best prices available to you. However, that said, as a general rule of thumb, a gig of transfer can cost between $1 and $5 these are usually thought to be good prices for a gig of bandwidth. You can also get certain hosting packages that have a specific amount of bandwidth included in the price, however, the one draw back of these types of deals is that, if you go over that limit, you will either need to pay and excess bandwidth usage fee or, upgrade your hosting plan.

Article Written By Lee

Traffic Filtering – Country Specific Redirects

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

To some, actually marketing to foreign surfers is a waste of time rather than a business practice. Unfortunately, they are missing out on additional revenue. We are already beginning to see some of the major sponsors in the adult industry embracing these foreign markets and, not just by utilizing dialers.

However, filtering your traffic base is often the hardest part of this money making equation. That is where the following piece of PHP coding can come in handy.

PHP FILTERING CODE

<?
$user_lan = $HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE;

if($user_lan==’de’) {
## German
$redir_url = “http://www.germanlanguagepageurl.com”;

} elseif($user_lan==’fr’) {
## French
$redir_url = “http://www.frenchlanguagepageurl.com”;

} elseif($user_lan==’it’) {
## Italian
$redir_url = “http://www.italianlanguagepageurl.com”;

} elseif($user_lan==’es’) {
## Spain
$redir_url = “http://www.spanishlanguagepageurl.com”;

## US traffic or Rest of world not defined above
} else {
$redir_url = “http://www.yourmainpageurl.com”;

}

header(“Location: $redir_url”);
exit;

?>

So, we know that the above piece of coding can redirect surfers based on their country of origin however, in order for you to maximize this to its full potential you will need to know the country specific codes (Also called ISO 639 codes) for each of the main browser languages. Some of these are as follows.

da | Danish
de | German
en | English
es | Spanish
fi | Finnish
fr | French
it | Italian
jp | Japanese

The problem you now have is finding where to send your filtered country specific surfers to. Of course, there is always the dialer option however, this is not going to be as lucrative to your wallet as what most people will have you believe.

In fact, I very rarely use a dialer on my foreign traffic instead, I tend to send them to a language specific tour page from one of the big sponsors and, if they do not sign up to that sponsors site, this is the point where I throw a dialer at them and, if the dialer still doesn’t make any money off the surfer I then recycle the surfer for a fresh one through a toplist or banner exchange heavy page.

In doing this I find it is often more productive than ‘regular’ English speaking traffic as, if you give the surfer something they are looking for, they will be more inclined to buy.

Hopefully this article has given you some insight into filtering and using your foreign traffic as oppose to just sending them off to a dialer program.

Article written by Lee

Using Email Auto Responders To Build Traffic And Sales

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Opt-in Mail | Response: 0

Auto responder programs are just that, they are set up to respond automatically with a pre determined email when a blank email is sent to a specific email address.

For example, have you ever seen something along the lines of:

‘For A Free Guide To ** Whatever** send a blank email to somename@somedomain.com’

The email address in that address belongs to an auto responder script and when someone sends an email to the script, they receive a pre written email back within seconds that has information pertaining to a specific topic or selection of topics.

Basically, autoresponder programs are email on demand scripts which makes any information you want available to your surfers 24/7 and, furthermore, not only can they drastically increase your traffic but, they WILL also benefit your sales income.

Email Auto Responders are extremely important tools when you need to automate your marketing. You can easily manage in excess of 10k email requests on a daily basis without ANY effort on your part at all.

Auto responders are used primarily for three main purposes these are:

Sales Letters.

Suppose you post to a selection of forums and newsgroups on a daily basis, you could offer free information about a specific topic and, in the same email, you can also promote your site and, better still, you didn’t have to do a thing.

Customer Support.

The use of auto responders for customer support is beneficial to sites that have a lot of queries from its visitors, autoresponders allow you to set up predefined answers to the most likely questions and, this can cut your service requirements by upto 50% in some cases. For example, most hosts will have some form of autoresponder set up to answer your basic questions or tell you about a support issue you have mailed them about even if its just to let you know that your email arrived and has been placed in the queue for completion. This saves the host a lot of time enabling them to work on things that actually need to be done and not spend countless hours each day sending emails to hundreds / thousands of webmasters on a personal basis.

Email Gathering.

This is by far the best feature of an autoresponder, everyone who sends you an email to the auto respond address will have their email address stored in a database, which, in turn, will enable you to follow up with the interest they have in your site and, some auto responders can even be configured to send out emails on a weekly basis to the email addresses in this database from again, pre determined messages that you have already set up.

Autoresponders are truly amazing programs, not only will they enable you to be more productive with your time but, they will assist you in helping your site visitors and, furthermore should increase both your sites traffic and sales figures.

Article written by Lee

Turning Opt In Mailings Into Pure Spam

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Opt-in Mail | Response: 0

Spam is frowned upon net wide and even more so than usual in the online adult industry especially unsolicited email Spam however, many webmasters do not seem to grasp the essential basics about what Spam is and more importantly, the point in which they themselves become Spammers, this is what we will take a look at in this brief article.

Double And Single Opt In Mailings.

By themselves single and double opt-in mailing lists can be a very effective method of promoting your or, your sponsors sites however, many webmasters forget the one fundamental rule when mailing their opt in subscribers, send them what they actually opted in for otherwise, you are spamming the list and ultimately, the recipients.

The line between opt in mailings and Spam is a very finely drawn one at best however in the adult industry it seems the edges of this line are more blurred than almost anywhere else. Quite often you see webmasters on a variety of message boards selling their ‘opt in mailing list’ to one or two other webmasters however, when does the opt in to Spam equation fit in? This is what we will look at next.

Turning Opt-In Mailings In To Spam Emails.

So you have collected opt in email addresses diligently for the last god knows how long and, you have successfully emailed those lists numerous times with some good results to show for it and you want to let others profit from your lists whilst making some money for yourself at the same time. Time to sell the emails you have collected. This is your first mistake, the email addresses which you have collected for your subscriber mail outs have been opted into YOUR list not another webmasters and well, the second that another webmaster buys this list from you the list itself becomes pure unadulterated Spam, nothing more, nothing less.

Of course, you don’t have to sell the list, you could offer the list up for trades however, the same thing applies, the second your mailing list changes hands that list not only becomes worthless to the person who has purchased it but, in effect, the list has now become worthless to you.

Adult Opt In Email Lists.

To make a long term profit from your opt in mailing lists the one thing that you should ensure is that the list you have remains clean and, more importantly than that, remains private, if you have spent several years collecting these email addresses why would you turn the revenue potential of them in to nothing less than worthless overnight? Keep the lists as clean and as private as possible, the next time a sponsor opens a paysite that is on the same topic as your mailing list you can send your opt in mailer to your database and profit from the unexposed site.

Adult Opt In Mailing Lists Overview.

When all is said and done, as mentioned above opt in adult mailing lists are a very hard to find commodity and, if you have a list for a specific niche or market the list becomes even harder to find, keep your list as clean as possible and ensure that you and only you use the opt in mailing list. By keeping the email addresses you have collected out of the grasp of other webmasters you have the potential to make revenue from that list for as long as you maintain it however, all of your hard work can be undone overnight if you sell the list to the wrong webmaster. In short, if someone opts in to a mailing list owned by you, make sure you are the only person who mails them from that list otherwise, you have indirectly spammed that email address.

Article written by Lee

What Is The Golden Ratio?

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Sponsors | Response: 0

Its a little known marketing technique that say that, as long as the longest side on any oblong is 1.6 times the length of the shortest side of the same oblong people will be more likely to prefer that shape over any other shape.

Why do they prefer this size? Because it occurs naturally and, subconsciously EVERY LIVING PERSON is attracted to this trait.

An example of this is as follows:

1) Stand Up
2) Measure the distance from your head to your feet and write this measurement down
3) Measure the distance from your Navel write this figure down.

The length of your ENTIRE body is 1.6 times longer than from your Navel to your feet!!

The same is also true for the length of your arm from shoulder to finger tip, then from elbow to finger tip.

The same is true for credit cards, the longest side is 1.6 times longer than than the shorter side!

Think about this for a second, banner ads, what shape are they? Oblong except, they don’t employ the ‘golden ratio’ what if, just what if, you used some banner ads that employed this ‘golden ratio’ who says banners have to be 468×60 in size?

Why not try making some ‘basic’ banners in paint or a decent graphics program utilizing the 1.6 rule and see if your click thru’s increase, personally, I will bet my earnings last month that they will.

On the same way of thinking towards marketing, table ads, money bars, etc, why not incorporate this idea into them also? It cant hurt and who knows it may just work.

the math to work this ‘golden ratio’ out is as follows for Image a above:

shortest side (60) x 1.6 = (90) Longest side

You don’t even need to be a genius to make your own ads using this method as the people at Microsoft supplied you with a calculator.

Article written by Lee

Formatting HTML Text Using Tags

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Formatting HTML Text Using Tags.

As we know there are many elements to a website from graphics to text. In this article we are going to have a closer look at text and, more importantly how we format the text to look like we want it to.

The text of the HTML pages we create, as you already know goes inside the <body> tag of our HTML pages but, unless you are using a WYSIWYG editor you can not just click a button and make it appear bold or italic therefore we need to get to know some of the text property tags that can be used to enhance our HTML text. Lets take a look at some of these now.

<b> Any text inside these two tags will appear bold on our page</b>
<i> Any text inside these two tags will appear in italic on our page</i>
<u> Any text inside these two tags will appear to be underlined on our page</u>
<big> Any text inside these two tags will appear BIG on our page</big>
<small> Any text inside these two tags will appear small on our page</small>
_{Any text inside these two tags will appear subscript on our page}
^{Any text inside these two tags will appear as superscript on our page}

There are also things called ‘heading tags’ these will work the same as the formatting tags mentioned above however there are only six of them and they look like this <hx> with the x being replaced by a number from 1-6 the lower this number is in the tag the LARGER our text will become so for example:

<h1> Will be the largest heading text</h1>
<h2> Will be the next smallest heading tag</h2>
<h3> Will be smaller again </h3>
<h4> Will be one size smaller again</h4>
<h5> Will be the second to smallest heading size</h5>
<h6> Is the smallest of the heading tags</h6>

Also, you should remember that it *IS* possible to use more than one of the text tags in any single line of portion of text on our web page so for example, if i wanted to have bold underlined italic text my tags for the text would look like this:

<b><i><u>This text is bold, in italics, and underlined</u></i></b>

You will notice from the above example that the tags were opened and closed in the same order they were created this doesn’t have to be done like this but, in the long run, it is easier for you as a webmaster to code your pages this way.

Hopefully this article has given you a further understanding on how we can format out text and you will be bale to put this into practice on the next site you build.

Article written by Lee

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.