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

AVS Changes – Is The Proverbial Sky Falling?

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

With the announcement yesterday from several of the large AVS systems, Free Age Card, Sex Key and, Gay Passport (also speculation on and off the forums state that Mass Pass were aware of this happening) that they will no longer allow webmasters to use the terms; AVS, Adult Verification Service, AGE Verification Service and, Access to thousands of other sites what does this hold in store long term for AVS webmasters?

Quite simply, it looks at first glance as if these changes have something to do with the speculation surrounding VISA and AVS systems from a few months ago.

In fact, these changes have been on the horizon for some time now however, until yesterday webmasters seemed to be unsure as to what, if anything will be changing. Even though the speculation has been circulating for some time, one of the first AVS systems to envoke these new rules, Sex key, came out with the following statement; ‘While we knew changes were coming, we just now found out what we believe are the new requirements. With this new information, we are trying to comply as quickly as humanly possible.’ quickly followed by; ‘We felt it was better to give people a chance to modify their sites this weekend rather than to not be in compliance Monday.’- Craig Tant.

One thing is certain, come Monday, there WILL be a lot of unhappy webmasters

So apart from the added workload for webmasters what other issues is this likely to bring up in the immediate future, well, again, based on the rumors and, i should stress that is all they are up to this point in time, from a few months ago we could expect one or more of the following items to happen to the AVS model as we know it.

1) Visa starts to charge the AVS companies the $750 fee just to process memberships.
2) Visa starts to charge individual webmasters the $750 fee to use an AVS service.
3) AVS Systems cease to exist.

So, lets break each of the above items down and see how it will have a long term effect on both AVS webmasters and, the adult industry as a whole.

AVS Companies Charged $750 Visa Fee’s.

In itself this isn’t a big issue that we should be immediately worried about, after all the AVS company will be the one footing this bill and, with the amount of traffic and sales that these programs get $750 is a relatively small pebble at the foot of a mountain. That said however, some of the smaller AVS systems might end up having to close because they cant afford the fees in much the same way that some Amateur paysite owners had to close their aff programs.

Webmasters Charged $750 Visa Fee’s.

This is the option that i am most concerned with, after all, with thousands of AVS sites being built each day and being submitted to literally hundreds of AVS companies the potential cost of this could run into thousands for individual webmasters.

Of course, with this expense there also comes some benefits. The immediate benefit that comes to mind is that a lot of the dishonest webmasters will refuse to or, be unable to pay this fee that in itself will lighten the strain for the rest of the industry.

There is also the possibility that webmaster may need to pay this fee for each and every AVS that they submit to which, in itself will not only harm the individual webmasters but, it will also see the rise and, dare i say it, fall of some of the smaller or less profitable (from a webmasters point of view) AVS companies. No doubt if this did ever happen the likes of Cyberage, UGAS, Global Male Pass et al will be unaffected as, they have enough of a webmaster following and traffic base to ride this potential storm out.

AVS Systems Cease To Exist.

This is potentially the worst case scenario and, whilst i will be the first to admit that this is VERY unlikely to happen, the possibility needs to be looked at.

What happens to all of your sites you have in the AVS systems? What happens to all of your potential rebills? What happens to all of that AVS traffic?

Well i would say for the most part, changing your sites from AVS to the free model wont be such a big deal for webmasters however, the financial losses to individual webmasters and companies could run into hundreds of thousands a month. With these financial losses will more webmasters leave the industry or, will more of the AVS webmasters start running TGP’s and dilute the traffic quality even further?

Speaking of traffic, we all know by now that AVS traffic is qualified potent traffic but, what will happen when this traffic, should the AVS be closed down, hit the adult web again? Quite simply long term the effects of such a force could have positive and negative effects ranging from paysite memberships sales rising to the onslaught and proliferation of free porn being searched for again – good news for TGP owners.

As you can see from the above, all of the speculation, rumors and, facts speak for themselves in so much as, if you are an AVS webmaster, you NEED to start diversifying your business model to ensure that even if the worst doesn’t happen, you are still able to be profitable online.

Article written by Lee

Redirecting To A Different Page Using JavaScrip

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Scripts | Response: 0

There are times when a simple JavaScript redirection from one page to another can come in handy and, the following JavaScripting will enable you to do this.

When a page contains this javascript, it will be redirected to another page that you specify in the “window.location=”. You can change the number of refresh seconds by changing the “move()’,1000 to the number of seconds you’d like.

Example:

1000 = 1 second
2000 = 2 seconds
3000 = 3 seconds

Place this JavaScript code between the <head> and </head> tags

<script language=”JavaScript”>
<!–hide from old browsers
var time = null
function move() {
window.location = ‘http://www.yourdomain.com’
}
//–>
</script>

Place this JavaScript code in your <body> tag

<body onload=”timer=setTimeout(‘move()’,1000)”>

You should now have a page that will redirect to a new url when it loads in the surfers browser window.

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.

Geo Targeting – What Exactly Is It?

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General, Promotion | Response: 0

As the adult industry reaches further and further across the online global community we are beginning to realize the importance of our foreign surfers, gone are the days of shifting them off to a dialer site instead, we find more and more companies actually using geo-targeting techniques to filter and monetize this profitable traffic more but, how does geotargeting work and, more importantly, is it any good? They are the questions we will look at in this article.

GEO::IP – The Basics.

The Geo::ip module is a relatively simplistic database of IP addresses and, the matching country to which the IP address belongs. This means that the GEO::IP module can be used for a variety of purposes including automatically selecting the language and countries of your visitors, for credit card fraud detection, and for software export controls.

Geo Targeting – The Basics.

As described above, the GEO::IP module is what drives any and all forms of geographical location targeting system (geo targeting). Geo targeting is the method most commonly used in the adult industry to either send a surfer to a localized version of a paysite or, send them off to a dialer in an attempt to monetize them it works by checking either the surfers browser language, country ip address or, both of these.

Putting Geo Targeting To Work.

Despite what most webmasters may think about the complexities of geo targeting and the GEO::IP Module for Perl they are easy to use and implement and, furthermore, there are cost free and highly effective ways of using geo targeting on your sites to monetize your international traffic. Lets look at two easy free solutions for webmasters to geo target their traffic.

JavaScript.

Using JavaScript you could add the following code between your HTML <head> and </head> tags to redirect international traffic to a specific url on your server:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript1.2″>
<!– Begin
if (navigator.appName == ‘Netscape’)
var language = navigator.language;
else
var language = navigator.browserLanguage;

if (language.indexOf(‘en’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘english.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘nl’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘dutch.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘fr’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘french.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘de’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘german.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘ja’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘japanese.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘it’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘italian.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘pt’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘portuguese.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘es’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘Spanish.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘sv’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘swedish.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘zh’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘chinese.shtml';
else
document.location.href = ‘english.shtml';
// End –>
</script>

Php.

Using .php you can add the following to your sites pages to redirect traffic based on their browser language.

<?
$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;

?>

As you can see from the above two examples, monetizing your international foreign traffic is a relatively easy step and, with the right sponsors to send this traffic to you will be able to reap the profits of countries that other webmasters are not targeting yet.

Geo Targeting – Overview.

When all is said and done geo targeting can be a cost effective way to increase your bottom line profits, whether using a free method as described above or, using one of the many filtering services available on the net you should start to monetize your global surfers. One thing you should also consider however is that far from sending your international traffic to a dialer you should search around and find a good mix of adult affiliate programs with a variety of localized paysites, this in itself will enable you to see just how much traffic you have been wasting by using dialers in the past and, it will also allow you to realize the full potential of your new found geo targeted adult traffic.

Article written by Lee

Promoting Safe Sex In The Adult Industry

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

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

Safe Sex – Morally Speaking.

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

Promoting Safe Sex – The Issues At Hand.

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

Safe Sex Online.

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

Promoting Safe Sex – The Bigger Picture.

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

Article written by Lee

Gay Online Dating – Offering Your Surfers An Alternative

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General | Response: 0

Whilst adult websites remain the most highly concentrated method of making money for affiliate programs we have slowly started to see a trend over the past few months of affiliate programs adding a new kind of site to their regular lineup, online dating sites however, as webmasters working in the adult industry how can we successfully market these sites on our existing traffic base? This is what we are going to look at in this article.

Gay Online Dating – Some Facts And Figures.

As mentioned above many affiliate programs now offer some form of online dating site whether it is for gay men and women or for their straight counterparts there is very little mentioned about the target audience these types of site attract so, with that said lets look at some figures from a recent Nielsen report in respect of online dating sites.

The online dating market is expected to grow to become an estimated $642 Million dollar industry by 2008.

On average, a user on a dating site will spend 1hour 45 minutes on the dating network itself.

The highest ranked age group (27.64%) for online dating sites is between the ages of 35 and 44 years old.

Men are more likely to a) Browse online dating profiles, b) Post a profile on a dating site, c) Respond to a dating profile and, d) Pay for access to a dating site than women.

So what does this mean for us marketing our sites to gay men and women well, straight off the bat you can see that there is going to be a considerable boom in the online dating world and, with that boom will come a rather satisfying chunk of change also, the age group that spends most time on a dating site as mentioned above is also within the demographical group for the ages of gay online surfers. In addition, males as mentioned, are also more likely to respond to, post, browse or, more importantly here, pay for access to an online dating site making this an ideal opportunity for those of us who actively promote a gay site lineup to start supplementing our income by offering our surfers access to dating sites too.

Gay Adult Dating – Affiliate Programs.

So now we have the figures where do we go to find a gay adult dating affiliate program? Well, there are a couple of options for us, there is the highly recognized outpersonals.com as well as the gay.com dating area however, surprisingly enough, the more ‘mainstream’ dating sites such as date.com, match.com and even adultfriendfinder.com all have sections within their sites for gay men and women as well as gay specific tour pages and promotional materials.

Gay Online Dating – Where To Market Our Sponsor.

As with any type of new affiliate program the best way to start marketing them is to place a link on a less prominent page of your site so as to not send your high converting traffic off to a sponsor that may not work for you however, if you have a good network of sites then you might like to try adding your newly found dating affiliate program on your sites ‘exit’ links or even create a TGP gallery specifically for your dating sponsor utilizing softcore content. Also, one thing that I have personally found is that using text links always garners more clicks thru to the dating site than a regular button or banner so again, this may be something you would like to try. In essence though, first test your gay dating sponsor on a minimal traffic source to see what effect it has on your overall site then, once you have ran a test period you can adjust your marketing efforts appropriately.

Gay Adult Dating – Recap.

As we have seen above the marketplace for online dating is going to grow to a multimillion dollar industry and, whilst we already know that gay surfers are more affluent and willing to spend money if we can match our sponsors to the type of site they are looking for, why not also offer them an alternative to porn? Many webmasters often overlook the basic principles of marketing that is to say, don’t just give a potential buyer one option but rather, give them several options, by utilizing dating affiliate programs on our sites we are not only giving the surfer an option but, are also giving us a potential opportunity to make more money.

Article written by Le

10 Killer Advertising Sentences

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

10 Killer Advertising Sentences.

Tell your readers what they are probably thinking, feeling or doing as they read your ad copy. This strategy will usually trigger their own subconscious mind to bring out these feelings or actions.

You can add these sentences into any ad copy. You may have to change one or two words so it relates more to the product or service you’re selling.

1. As you keep reading this ad copy, you are feeling more and more compelled to experience all the benefits of our product.

2. The more you understand just how valuable our product could be to your life, the less you think about delaying this important purchase.

3. After you read this short ad you will feel like your problems are almost completely solved, all you will have to do is order.

4. As you’re skimming through this, you’re beginning to think you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying out our product.

5. As you’re scanning over this ad copy, you are beginning to imagine using our product and enjoying all the benefits it brings.

6. The more you keep reading our ad the more you feel it would be a waste to let this opportunity slip by.

7. The more you review our ad the more you begin to find yourself getting very excited about our product and starting to feel the urge to buy now.

8. You don’t know it yet but, at the conclusion of this ad, you will feel driven to order and experience all the benefits of our product.

9. You don’t realize it yet but, in a few short minutes you’ll realize that you can’t put off this vital purchase and then you’ll be yanking out your credit card.

10. As every word you read travels from this ad to your brain, you start to understand just how much our product could benefit your life.

I hope this article has given you some insight as to how we, as webmasters, can actually ‘manipulate’ the surfer into doing what we want them to and, ultimately, into making us money.

Article written by Lee.

Adult Webmaster Conventions

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

Networking Overload

HTML Page Load Times – Making Them Quicker

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Surfers on the web are here for one thing and one thing only, they want information, they want it to be correct and, more importantly, they want it now. We cant always help when it comes to getting the information however we can help them so far as making sure that when one of the surfers clicks on our pages they load quickly.

Taking Control Of Speed.

For many webmasters hand coding their HTML pages is an often timely and costly method and, because of this they turned to the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You get) editors such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage to create their pages for them however, even this in itself requires some manually intermission on the webmaster part. Many of the older style WYSIWYG Editors added a fair amount of un-needed code to the HTML so, spending a few minutes after you have your pages created to physically go through the HTML code and clean up the junk html can in effect, cut down your page size by up to 25% in some instances.

HTML Quotations And Hyphens.

In addition to un-needed HTML tags you may also want to consider removing any quotation marks or hyphens from your HTML code, both of these can quickly clutter up a page and laden it down with more code than is actually required.

For example, ‘HTML Coding’ makes just as much sense as me telling you HTML Coding when read in sequence. The trick with using quotations and hyphens is actually knowing at what point in your text you can ‘get away’ with removing them and, this is only something you will know yourself after proofing your completed page.

Hyperlinks.

If you are only going to provide links from one page of your site to another then, why use absolute paths? http://www.domain.com/linking.html is the same as /linking.html when you use it in a link from one page on your site to another and, well, in all honesty you have increased the load time of your page by only linking to the relative url instead of the absolute and that’s what we are trying to do here right? Make our pages load faster.

White Space.

White space on a web page can be a good marketing tool however, white space in your HTML code is a bad thing, placing spaces between certain parts of your HTML code can quickly bog down your load times instead, try to use the tab key to separate certain parts of code likewise, keep the use of &nbsp to a minimum, this can quickly become the most relevant term on your page if used in excess.

One other benefit of making your pages as small as possible is that a webmaster wanting to steal your HTML code is going to have a harder time finding the exact piece of coding if the HTML is all on a single line than they would if the code was laid out nicely however, this in itself is only a deterrent and it wont stop those webmasters determined to steal your HTML code.

Page Load Time Overview.

Hopefully this brief article has given you some idea of ways in which you can practically reduce the load time of your pages without affecting the overall look and feel of your site and, who knows, if your page loads quicker, then you have a better chance of your surfer getting to your sponsor quicker.

Article written by Lee