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Online Billing Alternatives – Token Payment Systems
In this article we will continue our look at the various payment solutions that are available to webmasters for use on a global scale and, this time we will look at the ‘Token’ system of generating income to our sites.
Token Payments – What Are They?
Token payments, as they name suggests is a way by which your surfers can access your members area by using pre-purchased tokens as a cash alternative. These tokens are available in a variety of values ranging from US$1 to US$5 and above.Token Payments – What Are The Costs?
The cost to the surfer (as mentioned above) can vary from solution to solution however, on average the tokens which are redeemed for payment are bought in amounts ranging from US$1 to US$5 and above, these tokens then grant the surfer access to any of the sites that uses the specific token system the surfer purchased ‘credits’ for.Token Payments – Price Comparisons.
Okay so based on our previous articles we will again say that access to your members area costs an average of US$30 for a months access, now, using the token payment method, you are now able to set certain ‘restrictions’ immediately on the level of ‘access’ your new member can have although, the reality of it is, these restrictions are set by the token provider themselves.Lets say a surfer has gained access to your site using a US$5 token, what can they get actually have access too – not a lot. Your surfer only has access to as much of the content in your site that his ‘credits’ or ‘tokens’ will allow him to, in fact, the token system itself is much like the current pay-per-view model only, IMHO, not as satisfying to the surfer.
back to the issue at hand, how much will you make from this surfer with the US$5 token who has just accessed your site, well, if your members area is good and you have enough content to keep the surfer there until their tokens run out of credit, then, you will make upto 95% of the initial US$5 token purchase.
The good thing about this payment solution from a webmasters perspective however, is that YOU can actually set how much time each token will last on your site. Therefore, the reality of it is, you could have a surfer join your site with a US$5 token and only see one movie file whereas, a surfer who joined with a Credit card for 30 days access, could in effect strip your site of its content and move onto the next paysite.
Token Payments – Overview.
All in all, i strongly feel that there is a place in todays adult industry for the token payment solution after all, webmasters have to limit access to the amount of content surfers are able to see for free (or cheaply) and start to ‘educate’ todays sufer that they need to spend some money in order to access ‘the good stuff’.By allowing webmasters to control the content and value of the token payments on their sites this payment solution could, somewhat start this education process for the surfers. Whether this will be a good or, a bad thing however, will depend entirely on the amount of use these relatively new payment solutions get from both webmasters and, ultimately, surfers.
Article written by Lee
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Networking – Not Just For Computers
Networking – Not Just For Computers.
“Networking” is a buzz word today. Everybody talks about it. Everybody hears about it. Everybody wants to do it more effectively. But why? Why do people network, and what do they hope to accomplish?Primarily, networking is the process of meeting new people, either through a contact that you initiate, or through an introduction by a third party.
Networking allows you to meet, and establish a relationship with, people who may not have heard of you and your business through any other method.
For most professionals, networking is done to increase revenues. Sometimes new clients are found, sometimes suppliers and, sometimes new ways of doing things that increase your bottom line are found through networking.
When networking you should work towards these common goals:
To exchange business ideas.
To get better service.
To develop your business skills.
To potentially increase your revenues.
To establish long term friendships.This means that networking is an essential part of building up strong business relationships. We need each other to buy from us, sell to us and, brainstorm with us in order to progress in our fields. In order for us to do these things we must give something back in return, its all about give and take.
we must be willing to hone our relationship building skills. We must be great listeners. We must be willing to give before we receive. We must get into networking mode in our own minds before we ask the same of others. This must be constant.
Through consistent contact with others, you will, instinctively start to put 2 and 2 together. When you begin speaking with someone your mind will automatically start searching the inner most recesses of your brain to remember people, places, even products, that will assist the person you are networking for and, at the same time, you will also be thinking of what they can do for you in return.
This Is Networking.
This is the state of mind you should be in whenever you are talking to someone in your industry, to get your mind in this state takes a while but, once you have focus and determination, you will immediately see how you can help others and, how they can benefit you in return whilst listening to them. this is the first step in getting them to help you.Networking, as its name would suggest is WORK, hard work, the process is also a learned skill, its not something that we are all born with or, can all do. It can often be frustrating when you have a goal in mind but, your networking functions are not achieving that goal. All in all, networking is the building block of many a business venture, it can make and it can break you. Take some time to consider this fact the next time you are posting on a board or go to one of the tradeshows, you might just come away with more than you hoped for.
Article Written By Lee
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Blogging For Traffic – An Alternate View
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.
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Online Adult Laws – Privacy Policies
To many webmasters and companies working online the fundamental basics of their business is to turn a profit through effective online marketing campaigns and promotions however, within all of this profit making there is a side of business that is so often overlooked or, forgotten entirely, what is this business practice? The law.
In this brief article we will take a look at one such law that comes into effect in California on the 1st July 2004 namely, that all ‘web sites that collect any personal information from consumers to post a privacy policy’. Whilst this in itself is the first law of its kind in the United States it is worth mentioning that this is only a State law that affects California however, that said, where one state starts, others are sure to follow especially considering the huge potential left for the growth of the internet.
Privacy Policies – How Does This Effect You?
The main factor that you must take into consideration with this new law from California is that, because the Internet is truly global, you have no way of telling where one of your surfers are coming from thus, a surfer entering your site from California, may be making you break the law by not displaying a privacy policy should you collect their information. Incidentally, this new privacy policy law does not state what ‘collected’ information requires you to post a policy however, it would seem that personal information such as addresses, phone numbers and email addresses would be the primary target of this new Californian online law.Privacy Policies – The Basics.
So what is a privacy policy, in essence, it is a document informing your site visitors / customers that any information you collect from them, including user submitted information will be used in a specific way, this might be a case of solely being used by yourself or, specifically if you rent out this information you need to tell your surfers / customers exactly who you are renting this information to.Privacy Policies – Overview.
Whether you collect personal information from you site visitors or not the one thing that makes sense is to have a page created ready for the 1st July 2004 so that you can have it online for when you need it, perhaps storing this page on a central domain and linking to that page from all of your other web sites would be the best method to go as far as ensuring you are covered from prosecution or, perhaps creating a keyword rich privacy policy which you can get listed in the search engines is the way to go after all, just because this will become a legal requirement for you it does not mean that you cant profit from the potential traffic going to that page.Article written by Lee
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Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 6
Stage 6 already!
Only 2 more stages to go after this tutorial until you have a fully functional surfer trap!
Ok as promised in the last tutorial, we are going to implement the table pages you hopefully made in our last tutorial.
You now need to signup for ANOTHER counter code. Use the same counter as you did last time and, again, make sure the URL you send the traffic from the counter to is your main Multi-Site FPA surfer trap page.
Ok, you have the new counter code, what you should do with this is place it on every one of the niche table pages we made yesterday. Nowhere else except on these pages.
Once you have the counter code placed you now need to go back to our consoles, what we are going to do is make these HTML table pages into a secondary console from off the first pop up that we get when a surfer visits any of our FPA’s.
What you should do is enter the following coding in between the <head> and </head> tags of the niche pop-ups ensuring that you choose a DIFFERENT niche to the one of your original consoles:
<!—— BEGIN CONSOLE CODE ——->
<SCRIPT language=Javascript>
<!–
var exit=true;
function exitcnsl()
{
if (exit)
open(“http://www.yourdomain.com/tableconsolepage.html”, “tables”,”toolbar=0,location=0,status=0,menubar=0, scrollbars=0,resizable=0, width=800,height=600,top=0,left=0″);
}
//–>
</SCRIPT>
<!—— END CONSOLE CODE ——->You need to edit the figures for width= and height= to reflect the size of your table, ideally the frame of the console should be around 3 or 4 pixels either side of your tables.
Ok now once you have added the above to your existing pop-ups you now need to add the following to the newly created table consoles between the <head> and the </head> tags:
<SCRIPT language=javascript>
self.blur();
</script>What this will do is once the first console loads, it will immediately load a second console but, this second console should be ‘hidden’ behind the main window that is displayed. We have created a blur console.
We now have one last thing to do with this ‘blur console’ that we have just created.
Go to the HTML coding for the table ad console and add the same JavaScript to that page however, this time you DO NOT need to use the self.blur section of the instructions or, change the sizes of the console that pops.
Instead you need to add the following to the <body> tag:
onUnload=”exitcnsl()” so as an example your body tag may look like this:
<BODY BGCOLOR=#000000 onUnload=”exitcnsl()”>
Now you also need to alter the location for the console that will pop this time, you have a choice, you can send the console directly to the ARS POTD program or, you can send it BACK to your Multi-Site FPA page, at which point the surfer will be able to select another niche or leave your site.
Now remember, this surfer trap IS aggressive however, every time one of your counter codes load both from the FPA’s where we implemented them AND on the newly created table consoles we are gaining extra traffic.
If you have ANY questions at all please do not hesitate to post on the forums and myself or one of our administrators will assist you.
Article written by Lee
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Payment Processors – Advice And Information
For many, the first step in launching a successful pay site is to find a billing processor that can adequately and efficiently handle all levels of the membership payment process. The processor must also have the technical savvy to grow with your site.
One such payment processor, iBill, is currently the premier provider of such solutions worldwide. They handle the payments in real time and all of the back-end services that enable you to run your business.
Of course, there are many issues to consider when deciding on a payment processor apart from their commission rates on your sales, including the following:
How do they handle the billing itself? Is it processed in real time? If your customers do not have immediate access to your site, they may decide not to join.
How do they supply your account reports? You may want to know at 3 a.m. the number of members you have and how they are rebilling. iBill allows you to access detailed, real-time reporting 24 hours a day, so you know exactly who is a member of your site and, more importantly, what their username and passwords are. No one wants to find a member has posted a username and password on a trading site. If this occurs, iBill’s real-time reporting tools give you the ability to stop this immediately.
How comprehensive are the payment options? Do you want to use credit cards, or do dialers or check transactions suit you more? The best way to maximize sales is to accept a full array of payment options. The more options you offer your members, the better the chance you’ll keep them rebilling month after month.
How good is customer service? Does your payment processor offer access to live representatives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? If so, you’ll resolve customer issues quickly and effectively, which reflects well on you and encourages loyalty from your members.
How good is the fraud protection? Internet fraud is a constant threat. Your payment processor should have state-of-the-art fraud protection systems to guarantee the integrity of every transaction.
Are there multilingual features for international members? Due to the global reach of the Internet, you must find solutions for foreign customers. Ideally, your payment processor’s website should be multilingual and easy to navigate in several key languages, such as German, Spanish, French, and Japanese.
Choosing the right payment processor is a long, arduous task that, if done right, will result in a long-lasting working relationship. In turn, your members will feel confident in your site and stay with it. We hope this article has given you insight into finding the right billing party for your membership or online store. If you need any further assistance please feel free to contact us directly using the form on our site (URL below).
Article provided by Internet Billing Company
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Message Boards – Getting The Postings
There are plenty of free scripts available on the web which will enable you to start your own online discussion forum.
However, having the most sophisticated and advanced features in a forum does not mean it will be successful by any means. It is the people who post on the forums that make them good not the scripts used to maintain them. This article is dedicated to getting people posting on your forums.
It can be really quiet on your forum especially at the beginning when there are no real discussions going on, this is because people don’t want to be the first to post. They want to see some topics that interest them already being discussed, they want to be able to read through some posts first before having to post themselves. With this in mind, you should also be aware that just because a forum doesn’t seem busy, it can in fact get thousands of hits a day. Lurkers make message boards what they are, and, for this reason alone you should act professionally and courteously when making posts on any forums, one day, you might have to do business with one of these so-called ‘lurkers’ and, if they have seen you in a bad light on a forum, the chances are they wont want to know you. So what do you do to get your message board off the ground? There are a number of things actually and, some of these are as follows.
First of all, make sure the signup process is as simplistic as possible, even better, ensure if the user doesn’t want to register, they don’t have to! To attract people to post on your boards why not get a few of your friends together and start some discussions of your own, you could even register a couple of different usernames so that your forums look busier than they actually are thus cementing the thought that your forums are active and will have worthwhile discussions taking place.
To find some current topics for your forums why not visit some of the other message boards and see what people are discussing, if a topic is receiving a lot of interest, post about it on your forums. This is especially a good idea if your forums are specific to one area after all, if your competitions forums posters are interested in this topic, your forums users will be too.
Another great way to get people to start talking on your discussion forums is to use a contest. For example, currently on European Webmasters we have a content giveaway whereby for each post you make you gain a point and, once you have reached a certain level of points you will be able to download exclusive content sets. If you are going to start a competition then make sure people are aware of it, post some information about it online and get something to giveaway that everyone wants.
One other method to get additional posts is to put up subject lines and links to the topic threads from your main website page. Again, if you publish articles on your site create a link to your discussion forums and invite people to openly discuss the articles in question, not only will you get people posting on your message board but, you will also gain invaluable information from your user as to what they look for and want in articles you write.
If you publish a newsletter, again, this is another great way to build interest in your message board. Simply ask them to post, tell them you are building up a great resource and, you need their help as much as you need theirs to make this happen. If you have provided them with high quality information in your newsletter the chances are they will repay you by posting on your message board.
In conclusion, you should basically try and plug your message board wherever you can by doing the above, create banners for it and display them on your website, place a note in your signature file encouraging people to visit and post if they require assistance with anything. Its hard work but, once you have a few regular posters it will take off.
Article Written By Lee
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The Adult Internet – More Than Just Porn
So you have several adult websites up and running and, if you are one of the lucky few in this day and age you have already started to make money from your adult sponsor programs however, there are so many other ways that webmasters can make money in the adult industry in addition to their regular ‘porn site’ sponsors yet, many webmasters do not realize there are vast opportunities awaiting them.
Lets spend a few moments to look at the alternative sources of income that we can use in the adult industry and also take a look at the basics of each type of affiliate system.
Email Collection.
Opt in email is big business, there is no denying this fact so why not jump on the opt in email collecting bandwagon? Most email collection sponsors will offer you anywhere from $0.50 per email collected to $2.00 per email collected and, better still, to start making money from your existing traffic base all you need to do is include a small email collection box.Software Programs.
Many of the larger adult affiliate programs now offer their webmasters a range of software products to generate additional income, many of these products are good for use not only in adult but, also in mainstream. For instance, Anonymous browsing software, history deletion software, IE Toolbars and even submission programs are all good ways to generate additional income either on a per download or, per sale basis. Best of all, you only need to add a new banner to the sites you currently have in order to get a share of this lucrative market.Herbal Products.
Penis Pills, Breast Enlargement, Vitamin Supplements, you name it you can sell it on adult traffic. Whether you run a TGP, Link List or your own collection of free sites, these herbal products can often sell much better than ‘porn sites’ and, for the most part, the payout levels are the same, if not higher than what your regular ‘porn site’ trial will make you. Again to get started with this type of sales all you need to do is add a text link or banner to your existing sites.Casino Sites.
Gambling makes BIG money, just look at Vegas for the example, millions of people a year visit Nevada to gamble and millions more simply can’t get there for a range of reasons however, almost every home in the United States has a computer and internet connection so why not start using this to your advantage? Many of the larger casino affiliate programs will pay based on the amount of funds credited to a new users account and, to get started making money from casino sites it is quite literally as easy as adding a banner or text link to your existing sites again.Pre Paid Services.
Such as Credit Cards and the likes, selling these types of products to your adult surfers not only offers then ‘anonymity’ on the web when they do make online purchases but at the same time when your surfers sign up or one of these pre-paid credit cards you will be making some money in the process. Often however you will find that these types of affiliate program do not payout as much ‘long term’ as they are pretty much a first time deal as far as, once the surfer spends money to initially ‘charge’ their pre paid card with funds, that is when you will make money and not again. Still, even if you can make $50 by selling one of these cards, its still an additional $50 you wouldn’t have made otherwise.Adding To Your Profits.
As you can see from the above, there are a wide range of products and services you can offer your surfers and, as we all know, the more things we can offer our ‘customers’ the more chance we have at one of them buying something. Of course, as with anything, the more effort we put into marketing these products and services the more chance e have at making a sale however, unless we try to sell the surfer something other than porn, how will we know whether they will buy or not?Article written by Lee
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Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 1
The last 2 weeks I have had a LOT of webmasters email and ICQ me regarding traffic and, not getting any sales.
So, I thought it would be a good idea to make a step by step tutorial on building your own surfer trap.
Now these are some of the arguments I have heard why people haven’t already built one over the last few weeks…
* To complicated to follow.
* I want surfers returning to my site.
* Don’t have the time.The first two however seem to be the ones that I hear over and over again.
First of all, a surfer trap IS NOT complicated, in fact, it is probably one of, if not THE easiest type of site to build.
Secondly, Why get a surfer visiting your site over and over again if they are not paying for trial memberships? All you are doing is wasting your bandwidth.
Thirdly, A surfer trap can be built over a period of time, my very first trap was built within 1 hour my next was built in a day and my next one was built in a week.
So onto the start of building our surfer trap…
The first thing that I want you to do is to look at the Multi-Site FPA’s that ARS in the marketing section and choose ONE of them.
Download it, optimize the keywords on the FPA, make sure you add meta tags, titles descriptions and Alt tags on all images.
Once you have done this, you now need to search through ALL of the single site FPA’s and download and optimize one for each of the ARS sites that you have on your Multi-Site FPA. (Even the gay sites!)
This should take you 2-5 minutes for EACH FPA, any longer than that and you are doing TOO much work!
Once you have all of the single FPA’s downloaded, optimized and uploaded onto your server that is the first stage completed.
Article written by Lee
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Pay Per Click Or Search Engine Optimization
What would you choose to run your business? Well each has their own benefits and drawbacks over one another.
PPC or SEO The Breakdown.
Pay Per Click or, PPC as it is most often referred to looks to the novice to be the better option for ‘immediate’ traffic results, you enter your desired keywords, place your minimum / maximum bid amount and you are set for top PPC engine listings for as long as you can maintain the balance in your engine account.Search Engine Optimization or, SEO on the other hand, is the more traditional way of attaining high ranking search engine pages. Either you or an SEO expert optimizes your websites pages and random other elements of your website and hopefully within a month or two, you achieve high rankings in the major search engines.
So Which One? PPC or SEO?
Generally speaking, SEO work is most commonly more cost effective to your business than utilizing PPC results to gain your traffic, you could pay an SEO expert anywhere from $500 plus to optimize your site and get high rankings indefinitely or, you could put that $500 into a PPC engine account and get high rankings until such time as your account balance runs dry.But lets look at this in terms of actual traffic…
Say you get 1000 visitors to your SEO based website which you paid $500 for, each visitor has cost you $0.50c now lets say your site remains at the top of the engines for a few months perhaps even years each month you receive another 1000 visitors to your site, you have basically cut the cost of each surfer hitting your site down to less than a penny per hit (not taking into account bandwidth costs obviously).
Now, on the other hand, you want to attract 1000 visitors from your chosen keywords via the PPC engines, most Pay Per Click search engines have a minimum bid amount of $0.05c per hit so right away in your first month, you could receive a potential 10k hits however, as most of you who have already tried your hand at the PPC engines will know, getting 10k hits for one or more keyword at a cost of $0.05 is hard to do, in fact, some would say almost impossible. Non the less let us keep going with this minimum bid amount for the time being.
Immediately, you can see that you are already restricted to the actual amount of traffic you can receive from the PPC results to 10k hits however, this isn’t the case with the SEO traffic, you could potentially hit your top chosen keyword and stay there until another site out-optimizes you or, your site needs to be optimized again.
Ultimately, the reasons you will choose over one or the other will be for either ease of traffic generation, PPC will allow you to gain almost instantaneous targeted traffic form the second you open your PPC account up until the point when your account funds empty whilst, SEO work will give you long term targeted traffic over time and, in most instances, this SEO traffic can last for years making the cost of the initial SEO work minimal.
In Closing..
Search Engine Optimization can last you years and years whilst Pay Per Click results can diminish in a relatively short amount of time depending on the amount of bid needed to achieve top listings.However lets look at a third option, using both PPC results and SEO results in conjunction with each other to minimize the traffic you lose from your SEO work and, to minimize the traffic you lose from your PPC results this will afford you the time to see what works with your Search Engine Optimized sites whilst being able to play with the targeting of keywords on your PPC traffic, once you have both types of search engine figured out, you can put them both together and use them to increase the traffic to your site for years to come.
Article written by Lee
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