Building Your Own Opt In Mailing List

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Opt-in Mail | Response: 0

Despite the constant launch of ‘new and improved’ email collection programs one of the more popular emails I receive each month ask how webmasters can actually start their own opt-in email list for surfers. Surprisingly enough, this is a fairly simple process and, should only realistically take a webmaster 10-15 minutes to have an opt-in email script installed.

However, the second type of email I get from webmasters who have already installed one of these scripts is asking how they can ensure that surfers sign up to their lists this is what I will approach in this article.

One of the easiest ways to make sure surfers join your opt0in list is to offer them a financial gain by doing so, I don’t mean you should literally pay them for their email address but, why not offer them something for free? A daily picture by email, free porn site access etc etc.

The next biggest mistake I find are that webmasters simply place a collection box saying something like ‘enter your email address here for our newsletter’ and, lets be honest, it isn’t very enticing. Ideally you need to have a ‘headline’ that will catch the surfers attention and actually ‘make’ them want to join your list. Be specific yet be vague (bit hard I know) and you’ll soon see your list grow from one new subscriber a week to hundreds of them!

The next thing you need to take into consideration is how quickly, not only your site, but the page with your collection box loads, if you are using a pop-up console, make sure it is heavy in text not graphics with the first words at the top not saying ‘free porn’ but a similar meaning text, everyone and their dog has seen the words ‘free porn’ on countless other porn sites. Yours NEEDS to stand out!

You should use an effective title if you are going to be using pop-up windows for your email collection. in the title bar don’t have the window called ‘pop-up’ have it named appropriately for the niche you are trying to collect the surfers email address from. Make it relevant, make it concise.

Balance the collection page, any type of page you build for your site should at least be appealing to the eye. Meaning that your fonts, colors and actual text need to contrast together perfectly. If you do use images on this page try to have them prominent yet not overbearing to the surfer.

Offer a way to close a pop-up if this is what you are using to collect the emails after all, they (the surfer) may decide they don’t want to give you their email until they have seen what your site can offer. In the same way, make sure you have a link from your sites to your collection page so, if a surfer decides they do want to give you their email address they can do it without the need of closing your site and reloading it afresh.

Overall however, the best rule you can follow is to keep to the point and keep it simple. This way you will gain the surfers attention quickly and easily and, the surfer will not be distracted from the main purpose of having them on your site – getting to your sponsor.

Hopefully the information above will enable you to start having some more success with your traffic and, once you have the surfers email address make sure you treat it with the respect you would want your own to be treat with, an email address is a sacred thing to most surfers, if you Spam them daily they will leave your opt-in list quickly however, if you send them a ‘newsletter’ once a week / month filled with relevant information you will soon find your list growing exponentially.

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

Everybody’s Going Gay

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General | Response: 0

The past few months in the online adult industry have seen some rather dramatic changes happen from Visa charging additional fees to accept their credit cards online, Paypal no longer processing adult and, several large companies going out of business. However, one thing that also seems to be changing for the better is the amount of webmasters looking at new niches to promote. Surprisingly, the one niche that many webmasters are looking at is that of the gay niche.

Where The Money’s At.

For years, the adult webmaster community has been split amongst themselves, those that are only focused on straight niches and, those that focus on gay niches however. As of late, more and more of those webmasters from the first group are looking to make additional income from the gay niche. With this inevitable surge in gay adult sites coming online, there are bound to be some knock-on effects, and those webmasters just starting to look at the gay niche, will return to what they know. However, for most, i think this is going to be a fruitful encounter with one of the industry less socially accepted markets. Many of the webmasters who have been concentrating solely on the straight market for their income are going to realize just how much money they have been losing out on for all these years. And with this realization, comes its own set of problems for the industry as a whole.

The Gay Market.

Whether you are a straight webmaster or a gay webmaster the one thing that will become apparent is that your sites are going to reflect you in both, how they look and, the marketing techniques you use. More importantly, the attitude you have towards your gay surfers will in fact show through. Many of the straight webmasters whom, perhaps are not as tolerant towards this niche will, almost certainly fail before they can really get going. Marketing gay adult sites is far different than marketing straight adult sites. You have to know the surfer, understand what they want and, more importantly, know the terminology in the gay market. Many times a post can be seen on various message boards belittling those webmasters who are openly gay – often accompanied by terms such as ‘fag’, ‘queer’, ‘homo’, etc along with with images being posted that, quite frankly, would turn most people’s stomach.

The gay niche is much more than just a single online market, it is a whole lifestyle unto itself. While this lifestyle is affluent (having an abundance of readily available money to spend) it will take a lot of work and perseverance to ensure you get your share of this market.

Starting Points.

As I mentioned above, the main thing many webmasters are going to have to learn are the terms of the gay market, what is a twink? A bear? A cub? What products work well on gay sites? Despite what most people think, you cant just throw up some banners with naked men on them and turn a profit. Match your content to a niche and then, match your advertising to your content, what use is it having bears on a site if, the paysite you are promoting features Teens ‘n’ Twinks?

Similarly, your text links, ‘Click Here For Hot Gay Action’ might get you a few clicks but, by targeting your surfers even more, you will see how some of the gay niches can really turn a profit. The trick is this, get the surfer to your site and actually give them something that you think will suit their desires. This may mean making a 10% commission on a sex toy sale as oppose to a $35 commission on a pay site membership. And so be it. Those 10%’ers start to add up after a few sales.

In Summary.

To summarize, the gay niche will make you money however, to make money you will need to invest something that, perhaps isn’t for everyone – a lot of time and understanding. Marketing the gay niche isn’t for everyone, we have seen this too many times. However for those who are, spending time adding a gay market portfolio to there straight, with a little time increase your overall income significantly.

Article written by Le

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

The Death Of The AVS – The Birth Of The AEN (Adult Entertainment Network)

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

Well after a long and tedious few months of speculation, rumors and facts being presented to those of us in the adult industry working on AEN sites (Formerly known as AVS sites) it seems that Visa has put a strain on AEN companies to start re-working and, renaming their sites to fall under the ‘Adult Entertainment Network’ name. What does this mean to us as webmasters and, more importantly to the industry as a whole? This is what we shall address in this article.

A Little Visa History Lesson.

This whole mess started in October of 2002 when, jointly, CCBill, Epoch and, iBill issued a new set of operating guidelines that had been passed onto them by Visa. In effect, this meant that 3rd party credit card processors had to be re-classified as an ‘IPSP’ or ‘Internet Payment Service Provider’ this also in turn meant that webmasters needed to start paying ‘fees’ to Visa (via their IPSP) in order to continue charging their surfers for access to products and services by using Visa issued credit and / or debit cards.

In addition to the initial $750 however, there is also a need to pay an ongoing fee of $375, two thirds of this fee goes directly to Visa and, the remaining balance goes to issuing banks and IPSP’s for administrative charges.

Shortly after this announcement was made the industry then got dealt another blow by the processing companies, this time, in the form of Paypal announcing they would no longer accept any adult orientated payment through their system. This went into effect on May 12th 2003 and, after initial speculations as to what could and could not be charged to Paypal accounts, it seemed to be the final nail in the coffin for some of the smaller webmasters.

However, the adult industry is strong and rallied together getting as much information as possible about alternates to both of the above situations and companies such as Stormpay and off-shore IPSP’s started to see an increase in revenues from adult payments.

As The Waves Settled – The Next Blow.

Given all of the financial troubles of the previous 10 months in respect of online adult payments the industry as a whole started to settle itself again, of course there was the usual posting on forums, conversion ratio and shaving discussions happening on the main forums as there always was but, in addition to these conversations more rumors started, this time, regarding the AVS business model.

Almost as quickly as these rumors started however, they seemed to have fizzled out into nothing but a distant memory but, two months later after the first round of initial conversations on the adult industry message forums, the same AVS business model was dealt another devastating blow.

It seems Visa has its sights set on AVS (Age Verification Service / Systems) with a press release being issued first by Sex Key, then by Free Age Card, which was followed by similar announcements from Global Male Pass and Gay Passport informing adult webmasters that they had 2 days to make their current AVS sites conform to the new requirements set down by Visa.

These requirements were that.

1) Adult webmasters can no longer use the term ‘AVS’ on their sites.
2) Adult webmasters can no longer use the term ‘Adult Verification Service’ or ‘Age Verification Service’ on their sites.
3) Adult webmasters can no longer state that surfers joining up to their AVS will have ‘Access to thousands of other AVS protected sites’.

As usual Adult Webmasters started to question the reasons behind this sudden and apparent change of AVS rules on almost every forum and, whilst most questions went unanswered the one thing that was answered (honestly) was that these new rules had been set down by current AVS IPSP’s who, had had these rules issued tot hem by Visa.

So, webmasters started to change out their tour page text to conform to these new rules and, for the most part, it seemed like that was all that was needed to be ‘safe’ working the AVS business model. Little did they know…

One Last Blow To The AVS Webmasters.

Several days after the initial press releases from some of the top AEN (Formerly AVS) companies was made it seems that in between all of the posting ont he boards yet another issues comes to light – That Visa is aiming to have AVS webmasters now pay a $750 fee for the benefit of being able to keep using this business model as stated by Craig Tant (Sex Key) ‘we believe is that every site will have to be registered and pay the $750.’

This beleif, although somewhat vague tends to draw conclusions that, through no fault of their own, the AVS / AEN business model in the adult industry as we currently know it is changing and, changing for the worse. If webmasters are forced to pay Visa a $750 registeration fee per AEN system or per AEN site then a lot of todays industry leaders are going to come unstuck, especially those that focus solely on the AVS / AEN model for the primary source of income.

Adult Entertainment Networks – What’s Next?

This is the question that is currently being asked by many webmasters and, the truth of the matter is simply that nobody knows – Except for Visa, the next few days, weeks and months are going to be telling on the industry as a whole from what happens to current sites inside the AVS / AEN companies websites to what happens when surfers start to propagate back onto the adult internet looking for their fix of high quality porn, two things however are definitive throughout all of this, Visa is homing in on the adult industry and, every webmaster needs to be concerned about what will happen next.

Article written by Lee

Why Go Adult?

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Hosting | Response: 0

When choosing a hosting company why choose an adult host over a mainstream one?

Simple, They provide above other things, a better quality of service, affordability and, most importantly, reliability.

Adult hosts face a variety of technical and support issues, this coupled with the points mentioned above makes them a far superior choice to standard mainstream hosting providers. This is one of the main factors why more and more mainstream internet based companies are now turning to the adult business forum to provide their hosting solutions.

Mainstream going adult? Yes that’s right, more and more mainstream companies are turning to our industries hosting providers for the fast speeds, security and, reliable infrastructures they can offer after all, adult sites are amongst the most prolific on the internet on average gaining more daily hits to their sites than mainstream websites so, they need to be cost efficient, not only to the hosting companies but, also to their clients, the webmaster.

Our industry strives on the use of heavy graphics, coupled with streaming media files to secure sales and longevity, this is why the adult hosting companies need to be able to provide not just a single, heavily laden server but tens of them, sometimes even hundreds all producing gigabytes of traffic on a daily basis.

Adult hosting companies are constantly upgrading their equipment in order to improve not just their servers, connectivity but also the smaller things that are often overlooked by webmasters, hubs, routers, switches and the likes along side the not so technical aspects of running a host, The staff.

Along with all of this technical equipment they also need to maintain a high level of technical knowledge, after all, not just anyone can install operating systems capable of running multi-million dollar industries. They need the knowledge to maintain, upgrade, repair and sell their services to the best of their capabilities.

What does this mean to you? Well, we all want to make money and, through the use of faster servers, e-commerce solutions and the technical support your hosting provider can give you, you will be fattening your wallet on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.

Adult hosting, quite simply, is the crème de la crème of the hosting world, they offer solid, solutions whether you are starting in the adult industry or, operate a mainstream e-commerce site.

So how do you choose a host that is right for you?

You need to ask some basic questions of the host and, do your homework. Not only should you find out what hosting solutions they can offer you but, you need to find out what their support service is like, how affordable they are in comparison to other companies who can offer similar or the same service. Whilst on the subject of hosting support, before you sign on the dotted line, give your host a call out of office hours, if they answer, then you can almost be certain they are a good hosting provider.

Of course, not all hosts will have 24 hour phone support, however, that said, some offer 24 hour icq support, email support and more.

Another sure fire way to find out if a hosting company is any good is to ask on the heavily traveled webmaster message boards, after all, you are not the only webmaster out there who will have tried this company, if they are no good, someone will know about it and point you in the direction of a reputable host like http://www.webair.com.

Hopefully, this article will have given you some insight into the world of adult hosting companies and, will assist you in making the right choice of host for your site, whatever type of website you might be hosting.

Article Written By Lee

Robots.txt – Control The Robots That Crawl Your Sites

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

By writing a structured text file you can indicate to robots that certain parts of your server are off-limits to some or all robots. It is best explained with an example:

# robots.txt file for general use on web servers.

User-agent: webcrawler
Disallow:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /logs
The first line, starting with ‘#’, specifies a comment.

The first paragraph specifies that the robot called ‘webcrawler’ has nothing disallowed: it may go anywhere.

The second paragraph indicates that the robot called ‘googlebot’ has all relative URLs starting with ‘/’ disallowed. Because all relative URL’s on a server start with ‘/’, this means the entire site is closed off.

The third paragraph indicates that all other robots should not visit URLs starting with /cgi-bin or /log. Note the ‘*’ is a special token, meaning “any other User-agent”; you cannot use wildcard patterns or regular expressions in either User-agent or Disallow lines.

Two common errors:

Wildcards are not supported: instead of ‘Disallow: /tmp/*’ just say ‘Disallow: /tmp’.
You shouldn’t put more than one path on a Disallow line (this may change in a future version of the spec)
Ultimately, without the use of robots.txt files on your servers/domains, you are risking a variety of potential problems including, unauthorized access to your cgi directory, unauthorized viewing of your site stats, possible spamming of the search engines by accidental crawling of doorway pages.

One distinct advantage however of having a robots.txt file on your server is that, quite simply, you will be able to tell when and where your site has been indexed or potentially indexed as, all robots will automatically call for the robots.txt file BEFORE any other page on your server so, as long as you keep an eye open for any calls of this file, you can see who is knocking at your site for indexing purposes.

Below is a robots.txt example that you can copy and paste into a text document to use on your own server:

<!–Start Copy Below This Line–>

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /logs

<!–End Copy Above This Line–>

The above will allow all spiders to crawl all of your site except the subdirectory’s ‘cgi-bin’ and ‘logs’ which, may be altered to suit any subdirectory’s you do not wish the spiders to crawl on your server.

Article written by Lee

Guaranteed Marketing – Power Words

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

How many webmasters do you think actually pay attention to what they are writing so far as their sales copy go? Furthermore, if you actually think about it, how much time do you put into choosing the words in which you use on your websites? With the help of this brief article hopefully, you will start to choose the words in which you use a little more carefully, let me explain.

Power Words – What Are They?

Power words are a set of roughly 10 words that can invoke interest in a person, object or, in our case, a product which we would like to sell however, they are also much more than that. When used in the correct manner power words can become a webmasters greatest selling tool. However, everyone has their own unique set of power words that will appeal to them over everybody else, the good thing is, for the most part there are at least 25 words which almost everybody will look positively towards.

Power Words – The List.

The following list is compiled from research at Yale University consisting of the most popular power words amongst a demographic of 1000 individuals of mixed sex. The words are, Discover, Easy, Guaranteed, Health, Love, Money, New, Proven, Results, Safety, Save and, You. By using these words in a variety of ways when writing our sales text we can almost be certain that we will keep the surfers attention and enable us to put the power of our marketing to good use.

Power Words – Uses.

As already mentioned, the best use for the most common power words on our sites is to use them within our text links either at the start of the sentence or, the absolute end. Take a look at the following example to see what i mean.

1) High Converting Affiliate Program.
2) Guaranteed To Convert Your Traffic.
3) Turn Your Traffic In To Cash – Guaranteed.

You can see from the three examples above the the first example doesn’t really catch your attention whilst examples number 2 and 3 somehow seem to pull you into the ‘spirit’ of the site itself without even knowing what affiliate program it is.

By using this power word marketing technique as often as possible on your text links you can not only give your site visitor information but, compel them to click on your link.

Power Words – An Overview.

Hopefully you have seen from this brief article the ways in which power words can improve not only your text links pulling power but also how with the right marketing combination you can also use them to increase your sales.

Article written by Lee

Adult Webmaster Conventions – Remember When?

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

Most webmasters who have been working in the adult industry for a year or two have attended an adult webmaster convention of some sort and, those of us who had the privilege of attending our first webmaster show three to four years ago will know one thing that many others don’t, there used to be a time when you could attend a webmaster show for example, the one held at Disney World (how many of you remember that?) when apart from being relaxing, you would also get a lot of business done alas, times have changed.

Fighting, Drug Taking, Getting Drunk, Rape Accusations, Theft and Criminal damage would be the headline in the national press should one of these reporters attend today’s webmaster convention, instead of a relaxing atmosphere in which you can get business done you find a slew of webmasters who, well, lets be honest here, are only attending these shows for one reason, to get drunk (for free) and to have a laugh.

Of late there seems to have been an influx of people (notice I used the word people and not ‘adult webmasters’) joining the adult industry who would appear to think that our business model is one of all night partying, sordid sex sessions and drug taking, whilst, I will be the first to admit this has gone on in the past it would certainly seem that the last 2-3 years has seen more than its fair share of the negative events happening at these conventions.

Take for example the recent Hollywood Internext Expo show, one incident that comes to mind was the fool who decided it would be a good idea to smash the mezzanine canopy above the hotel lobby, to my knowledge the culprit was never found however, I am sure there are those out there who knows who it was and well, lets be honest, they quite possibly you could be reading this article.

So what happened? How did these shows change so drastically? Quite simply I think it was the sudden onslaught of press coverage about how the adult industry makes so much money for everyone and, whilst there is a lot of money to be made in the industry, it takes a lot of work to achieve making the reported figures by the press.

To many people are entering the adult industry thinking that the ‘norm’ is that of what you can find on your average day of visiting GFY and whist, this is perhaps true for the circle of webmasters who do frequent boards such as GFY for the vast majority of hard working webmasters in the industry, the behavior of those webmasters couldn’t be further from the truth.

So where is all the business being done at the shows? It would appear that event after event the open invite list of parties are being cut down to be taken over by more intimate and sociable private parties in fact, as a company we our ourselves holding several smaller invite only parties for those people that we actually want to do business with on both a personal and a professional level.

So what does the future have in hold for the adult industry events, in all honesty I do not know however, one thing is for certain, if things continue on their current route, things are going to become a whole lot worse before they get any better.

Article written by Lee.

Billing Solutions For International Surfers

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

We all know the lifeblood of the webmaster is to be able to accept credit cards for site access however, with the global markets emerging more and more, many webmasters still do not realize that they can accept credit cards from international countries at little or no extra cost to themselves or, their business.

Presuming you already have your sites translated into a selection of global formats you need to make sure you can process foreign transactions and, these should be handled differently than regular US based credit card users however. This is what we will approach upon in this article.

The main reason we own our businesses is to turn a profit and, from a profit making point of view is just how the details below will enable you to benefit your long term global business.

The first step you need to take in order to correctly ‘charge’ your international customers is to ensure that you are sending them to the right language, after all, over 70% of internet users can not speak English, let alone read it. This is where having some geo-scripting comes in handy on your join page, the second the surfer hits this page he (or she) will be directed to a localized version of your join page.

Now that you have the surfer on your join page you also need to ensure they have a variety of options available to them to actually finalize the purchase however, you should also ensure that, if they want to view your join page in another language, that they have this as an option too.

Some alternate payment methods for your international customs could include one or more of the following, PayPal, JCB, Mastercard, Discover, Maestro, EuroDebit, Checks and, of course, a dialer.

I would however use the dialer as a last minute option should their chosen method of payment not be accepted.

Even though you may run a ‘recurring’ based site, you might not want to have your foreign surfers recur and risk having their card declined when it comes to authorizing your charge next, for this reason you may like to add the option of a 3 month membership or perhaps a 6 month membership however, make sure you lower the cost of this membership in relation to buying a monthly membership, this might just be the clincher you need to close the international sale.

As with any purchase the after sales support is also needed, especially if you are wanting your international customer to rebill for several months and, trust me, they WILL rebill, often for in excess of 6 months. They pulled their credit or debit card out for a reason and, they will stay if you can give them more reason too.

With any type of sale a follow up is always good, many sponsors and processors send out an email automatically upon sign up, however, how many of these emails are written in the surfers native tongue?

In conclusion, when dealing with international customers you should cater to them NOT make them cater to YOU by doing this you will ensure the longevity of your international business.

Finally, if you have any type of online business you should carefully consider the global market place as it is growing a rapid rate with millions of new international surfers coming online each year this would be a bad business choice on your part if you were not to cater for them.

Article written by Lee.