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SMS Marketing To MMS Marketing – WAP Billing Solutions
MMS Billing (Multimedia Message Billing) is going to be one of the next huge leaps forward for the online industry’s, with more and more surfers firing up their cell phones to visit our sites and properties we need to start looking at the ways in which we can ultimately bill these types of customer and this is where MMS Billing comes into play.
MMS Billing – What Is It?
MMS Billing is a method of charging surfers using cell phones for access to your sites and services. Much like how the SMS Billing model works however, rather than solely billing for text or images, you can utilize MMS Billing on a wide range of rich media applications including movies, sound and, flash applications.MMS Billing – What Are The Costs?
The costs for MMS Billing can vary greatly depending on your MMS Billing provider however, as a rough guideline, you can expect to pay anywhere between $0.10 and $0.50 per purchase through the MMS Billing method.MMS Billing – An Overview.
MMS Billing is still in its infancy across the internet however, with more and more sites becoming WAP enabled and, more and more surfers turning their cell phones on to browse our websites this billing model will soon grow to what the current SMS Billing model is today.Article written by Lee
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Direct Debit Payment Explained
Something that is very rarely spoken about as a means of payment is Direct Debit, this is a popular payment method across Europe and, especially in the United Kingdom. Direct Debit can offer your surfers a cost effective, easy way to pay for products and services from your site especially, if they have a ‘recurring’ cost associated with them.
Direct Debit – What Is It?
Direct Debit is quite possibly one of the simplest ways to collect funds from your surfers basically, a form is filled out by the surfer, where they enter their bank payment details, account number, name, sort code. Then, the form is signed either electronically or, in person by the customer, in this case, electronically by the surfer.Once you have the direct form filled in by your surfer, you may continue to deduct funds from the bank account on the Direct Debit form until such a time whereas the surfer cancels the Direct Debit agreement.
At the present time, around 45% of the population in the UK currently choose to pay their utility bills online by Direct Debit and, around 75% of the total population in the UK have used Direct Debit at least once in addition Direct Debit is also an alternative method of payment in the vast majority of European countries and, it is also used (although not as much) in Australia.
Direct Debit – What Are The Cost?
Direct Debit payments cost around $0.5 for you as a merchant to process, however, this charge, rather than happening on the processors side of the transaction, happens when the Direct Debit request hits your banking account.This in itself is god news after all, you now ensure that if a membership or product costs $35 per month, you will get virtually the full cost of that membership until such a time when the surfer cancels the direct debit at their bank.
Direct Debit – An Overview.
All in all, Direct Debit is probably one of the only payment solutions that allow you to collect the full price from your surfer at the point of sale and, furthermore, because the Direct Debit method of payment is trusted, this offers your surfers something that no other form of payment can – Peace of mind. There is however one major drawback to this method of payment, it is very hard to find processors that will allow you to utilize Direct Debit on your sites in fact, to date, the main use for the Direct Debit payment method has been payments of utility bills, Gas, Electricity, Water Supply, etc however, many financial institutes will let you pay for goods and services using Direct Debit on ‘credit’ terms which can vary from 1 day to a year interest free or, not as the case so often is.I strongly feel that within the next 12 months this method of payment could become advantageous to the adult webmaster however, the current online payment processors need to be pushed in order for this to become as widespread as credit and debit card processing is. That said, there are a few online adult companies already accepting Direct Debit as a form of payment so, at least the ‘DD’ revolution has already started.
Article written by Lee
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Designing Your Site With Link Popularity In Mind
To get good traffic, your website needs to be popular, to be popular, your website needs links, to get links, your website needs to be popular. Annoying isn’t it
Almost everyone agrees that link popularity is critical for your website’s visibility, traffic, and thus successfulness. It is something you need to have. As I pondered the ways of establishing and improving one’s “popularity”, eventually all come back to one central issue, your website must be designed to be popular.
Link popularity is a basically the measure of links pointing to your website and is meant to be a measure of the best websites. Theoretically those websites that have the most links pointing to them must be important and thus worth the visit. Unfortunately, there are a lot of folks out there that have created programs to “boost” your popularity artificially and all they have done is create Spam and muddy the overall picture. The search engines and directories are keeping a close eye on these programs.
Design: When getting a request or thinking about making one for a link exchange with a website, look thoroughly over the website first. The website’s theme or topic and general layout is the first thing to look at. Sites with themes or topics that are related to or compliment yours should be your main link partners. You do this to get targeted traffic.
Just as you evaluated someone’s website, others will be doing the same to yours. Make sure you know what your theme or topic is and that it clearly encompasses the whole website. Stay focused; do not try to cover everything.
Next, check out the links page or resource area. If they do have one, is it easy to find within the site? Does it seem to be part of the site or just a page off to the side? Are their linking rules available, clear, and easy to follow? Do they accept links from any website or are they choosy? Being part of someone’s well constructed links program, no mater what size, can be a very beneficial thing indeed.
Again, the same goes for your website. You want to let other webmasters know that you want to exchange links and which type of website you will accept requests from. Make it easy for others to link with you.
The last set of questions to ask yourself about any website is:
Is it easy to navigate
Does it have too many graphics (slow loading)
Is it pleasant to the eye
Does the information seem to be organized in a logical fashionWhat has been covered so far deals with what the visitors see; if visiting the website is a pleasant experience then people will stay and look and possibly come back. The final area to cover is what the search engines see.
The underside (the source code) of the website is just as critical when designing or linking with a website. The search engines are the ones that read this and if it is not done properly then the website can not succeed. Below are a few things you need to consider in your source code and any potential site that has asked to be linked by you.
Does the website contain frames
Does it use the headers, titles, meta-tags, and alt tags properly
Do the keyword location(s) and density seem appropriate and “optimized”The latter two issues mentioned above are critical, for they are the backbone to traffic production.
Content: The information you have is just as important as how you set it up on your website. The more popular websites or the ones with good link popularity are those that have valuable information or resource(s) for its audience after all, they fill a niche! People will visit, stay, return, and recommend a website if it has the content they want or need.
“Content is king.” A well-designed and organized website might look good but if it does not deliver anything of value, it will not be successful. Whatever subject matter you have on your site, make sure you have something of interest and importance to add to the subject, if you do and you promote it well, you and your site will be successful. In this context, it (content) does not just refer to images, why not add some stories or interesting links to news articles to improve your sites ‘popularity’.
In addition to information, resources like mailing lists, surveys, polls, classified ads, forums, etc. are all things if used appropriately can add value and fresh content to your website which, in turn will assist you in interacting with your sites visitors.
In conclusion: Take the time to design and optimize your website properly for the search engines. Make sure you have something of value or importance to add to whatever area your website is in. Provide resources and other tools, which your visitors could use and will make them come back. Be proactive and interact with your visitors. Websites that are dynamic and active are the best ones. All of this might take a little more time to get your website up and running, but it will be worth it.
For yours or any website to be popular, it needs the links and to get the links, it needs to show the other webmasters that it is worthy of a link. It seems everyone today has a website, but not everyone has put together a website that adds value to the Internet community. Take a critical look at your website and any website you might link to and ask yourself…………….
Would you bookmark it?
Article written by Lee
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Designing A 404 Error Document
Designing A 404 Error Document.
Now that we know how to use .htaccess let’s get into how exactly to effectively design a 404 error document page. Here are a few tips when building your document:Keep The Design Constant.
That is, whatever design your web site supports, consider keeping that design when building your error document. This is not mandatory, however. If you have a good reason to stray from your design, then do so. Otherwise, keep it constant.
Use Attractive Dialog.
Do not use the word error. Error signifies something is terribly wrong, and while that may be so, you should give that information to your visitor in a very friendly way. Instead, consider writing “Sorry, the page you were looking for is not available at the moment”.
Include Contact Information.
Obviously, you want to fix the error, so give the user every opportunity to e-mail you about the error. Some users will not bother to do so, but you still need to give them the opportunity.
Keep The Visitor Moving.
Often, 404 error pages are like road blocks, or brick walls that the user cannot pass through. You need to break through the barriers and allow the visitor to keep traveling through your web site. If your web site supports a search capability, include a form on your error document to let them search for the information they were originally seeking. At the very least, include a link to your home page.
Give Them A Site Map.
When the user clicks upon a page that is no longer available, or was mistyped by the webmaster, consider adding a link to a site map page, or include your site map right on your 404 error document, so the user can get their bearings within your site, and can locate their desired content quickly and easily.
Give Them Help.
List tips on your error document page to help the visitor diagnose the error. For example, ask them to double check the URL in their browser’s address bar. If it’s correct, politely ask them to e-mail you to report the error. Also suggest that they visit your home page (or search utility) to find the information they are after.
List Some Popular Links.
Provide the user with a few links to your most popular content areas of your web site, as it is more likely they were searching for that content than anything else.
As you have seen, error documents are more important than you may think. Merely having a custom error page shows you have put forth effort on your web site and want to help the user find the information they need. Error documents are easy to create and adds professionalism to any web site.
Article written by Lee
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The Curse Of The Broken Image
At one time or another we have all done it, uploaded a new site only to find out that when we view the page in our browser one of the images are broken because we either didn’t link it properly or the filename wasn’t named correctly on our server.
We may think that this is a bad thing however, recent experimentation on my part has found quite the opposite.
We all search for new ways of getting the surfer to visit our sponsors in order to have them buy a membership and earn us a nice little slice of $$$ in the process but, what methods could we use that quite simply are overlooked?
One such method is that of utilizing broken images, lets be honest here, no-one wants broken image son their site, it makes the site look unprofessional but, lets think about this, on a page full of banners and graphics all nested together neatly on an FPA (Full Page Ad) what’s more likely to grab the surfers attention, a completely loaded heavy bandwidth graphic or a single solitary broken image placed in a such a spot the surfer actually notices it?
Makes you think doesn’t it. Our recent testing of this method has actually shown that our CTR (Click Through Ratio) rose slightly on a couple of sponsors we used this method on all of the sites in question had nice looking text and banners with corresponding thumbnails leading tot he full size image but, upon deliberately leaving an image off the server thus resulting in the ‘appearance’ of an erroneous broken graphic the spot where that image should have been was were a great deal of our click throughs came from.
I am not saying you should immediately go and delete all graphics from you pages but, a single, well placed broken image on a free site can work wonders in getting traffic off your site and to your sponsors pay site tour which ultimately, is what we want to happen at the EARLIEST possible time.
Article written by Lee
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The Next Big Traffic Craze – Thumbnail Link Lists
As adult webmasters are constantly thriving to create the next craze in traffic sources to garner sales from their sites it comes as no surprise that there is already talk amongst the ranks of the next big thing, what is this new idea? The Thumbnail Link List.
Thumbnail Link Lists – Re-Inventing The Wheel.
As the past year and a half have taught us as webmasters, regular TGP’s have almost become a thing of the past with more and more thumbnail TGP’s being created and submitted to daily, why then, has it taken so long for someone to think up the idea of the Thumbnail Link List? Quite simply I think it has been a case of to much has happened over the last 12 months in the adult industry for webmasters to think this idea up.So What Is A Thumbnail Link List?
A thumbnail link list is in effect a way of displaying free sites on your own standard Link List by utilizing small thumbnail samples of the images contained within the free sites galleries, in fact, much the same way that a thumbnail TGP works however, instead of only listing single image galleries your link list will consist of links to individual free sites.Much like the Thumbnail TGP traffic source, the thinking behind the Thumbnail Link List is that by showing your surfers what type of pictures the sites within your link list contain they will be more likely to visit the free site thus improving your CTR to your webmaster submitted sites and, ultimately, your site overall allowing you to manipulate the traffic to garner more sales for yourself as the Thumbnail Link List owner.
Submitting Your Site To A Thumbnail Link List.
Looking at the Thumbnail Link List idea from a webmaster who would be submitting your free sites for listing (and ultimately traffic) how do the rules of the Thumbnail Link List differ to that of the regular link list which we are all used to seeing, well for a start, the main difference will be that you either need to submit a thumbnail yourself or, enter the url to one of your gallery pages in addition to the main entrance to your free site, this will actually be the only significant change in how you operate your link list submissions compared tot he current link list method, however, as each Thumbnail Link List owner will have their own individual rules you should check before submitting as to what is required from you as a submitter.Thumbnail Link Lists – Overview.
The whole Thumbnail Link List idea is one that, in all seriousness should mean more traffic not only for the submitters of the free sites but, also for the Thumbnail Link List owner themselves, by offering the surfers a preview of the content contained within the free sites they will be visiting they can simply reduce the amount of sites that do not appeal to them and focus more on the sites that do meaning that the webmasters who submit highly niched free sites to the links lists will now be able to benefit from a larger traffic base and ultimately, more sales.Article written by Lee
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Traffic Filtering – Country Specific Redirects
To some, actually marketing to foreign surfers is a waste of time rather than a business practice. Unfortunately, they are missing out on additional revenue. We are already beginning to see some of the major sponsors in the adult industry embracing these foreign markets and, not just by utilizing dialers.
However, filtering your traffic base is often the hardest part of this money making equation. That is where the following piece of PHP coding can come in handy.
PHP FILTERING CODE
<?
$user_lan = $HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE;if($user_lan==’de’) {
## German
$redir_url = “http://www.germanlanguagepageurl.com”;} elseif($user_lan==’fr’) {
## French
$redir_url = “http://www.frenchlanguagepageurl.com”;} elseif($user_lan==’it’) {
## Italian
$redir_url = “http://www.italianlanguagepageurl.com”;} elseif($user_lan==’es’) {
## Spain
$redir_url = “http://www.spanishlanguagepageurl.com”;## US traffic or Rest of world not defined above
} else {
$redir_url = “http://www.yourmainpageurl.com”;}
header(“Location: $redir_url”);
exit;?>
So, we know that the above piece of coding can redirect surfers based on their country of origin however, in order for you to maximize this to its full potential you will need to know the country specific codes (Also called ISO 639 codes) for each of the main browser languages. Some of these are as follows.
da | Danish
de | German
en | English
es | Spanish
fi | Finnish
fr | French
it | Italian
jp | JapaneseThe problem you now have is finding where to send your filtered country specific surfers to. Of course, there is always the dialer option however, this is not going to be as lucrative to your wallet as what most people will have you believe.
In fact, I very rarely use a dialer on my foreign traffic instead, I tend to send them to a language specific tour page from one of the big sponsors and, if they do not sign up to that sponsors site, this is the point where I throw a dialer at them and, if the dialer still doesn’t make any money off the surfer I then recycle the surfer for a fresh one through a toplist or banner exchange heavy page.
In doing this I find it is often more productive than ‘regular’ English speaking traffic as, if you give the surfer something they are looking for, they will be more inclined to buy.
Hopefully this article has given you some insight into filtering and using your foreign traffic as oppose to just sending them off to a dialer program.
Article written by Lee
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Everything You Need To Know About Meta Tags And More!
Everything You Need To Know About Meta Tags And More!
There’s a plethora of different META Tags that you can make use of on your site. Because there are so many, it’s impossible for me to cover all of them in this article. However, I will describe the most common ones. But let’s start from the beginning, shall we?What Are META Tags?
META tags are similar to standard HTML tags. However, there is one big difference: You have to insert all META tags between the <head> </head> tags on your page(s). META tags are used primarily to include information about a document. The META tags will be invisible to your site’s visitors, but will be seen by browsers and search engines.For The Search Engines.
Several of the major search engines make use of the META Keyword tag, and virtually all of them make use of the Description tag. These tags help the search engine spider determine the content of your web site so that it can be indexed properly.This is what they look like:
<META name=”keywords” content=”Webmaster Resource Site”>
<META name=”description” content=”Online Webmaster Resource Site”>You can also instruct the search engine robot/spider how to index your site using the robots META Tag. This is what it looks like:
<META name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
What the tag above does is tell the spider not to index the page that it appears on, and not to follow the links on that page. Here’s a complete list of attributes for the robots tag:
index – the default, the page is added to the search engine database
noindex – the page is not added to the search engine database
nofollow – the spider doesn’t follow the links on that page
none – same as “noindex, no follow”
To use any of these attributes simply replace the “noindex,nofollow” text in the example above with whatever you want to use. If you need to use more than one attribute, separate them with a comma.
Client Pull.
Have you ever seen a page that automatically refreshes to another URL after a few seconds? Did you ever wondered how it was done? I’ll tell you. The page made use of one of the http-equiv META Tags to automatically “pull” you to a different page after a few seconds. Here’s what the code looks like:<META http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1; url=newpage.htm”>
The value of content denotes how many seconds will pass before the new page is called for. If you want it to happen as soon as a person hits that page, then set the value to “0”.
Prevent Caching.
If you want to prevent a page being saved in your visitor’s cache you can do so by inserting the following three tags:<META HTTP-EQUIV=”expires” CONTENT=”0″>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Pragma” CONTENT=”no-cache”>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Cache-Control” CONTENT=”no-cache”>Why would you want a page not to be cached? If your site is updated frequently and you always want your visitors to see the newest content/changes, or if you want to ensure that a new banner is loaded each time from your server when a page is accessed, you’ll want to use the tags above.
A quick note here on banner caching: In addition to using the tags above, you’ll want to append random numbers at the end of the tag calling the image.
Rating Your Content.
By using the rating META tag on your site, you can specify the appropriateness of your web site for kids. The tag looks like this:<META name=”rating” content=”general”>
In addition to the general rating, you can use three others. They are:mature
restricted
14 years
Misc. Tags
Below I’ve listed several other popular tags that you may have seen around the web.
The generator META tag is used to specify what program was used to create your web site. Many HTML editing tools automatically insert this so that a company can gauge their market penetration. The tag looks like this:
<META name=”generator” content=”program name and version”>
The author tag is used to identify the author of a page. Simply replace “author’s name” with your name or email address.
<META name=”author” content=”author’s name”>
The copyright tag identifies the individual or company that holds the copyright to a particular page. This is what it looks like:<META name=”copyright” content=”This page and all its contents are copyright 2003 by Lee Windsor. All Rights Reserved.”>
I hope this article gave you some insight into the usage of Meta Tags and how they can benefit your day to day business.
Article written by Lee
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Outsourcing – Becoming More Profitable Online
As webmasters we already do a lot of outsourcing from hosting our sites to design and marketing to getting traffic which we send to our sponsors. However, many of us are missing out on opportunities to outsource even more of our work and, by missing these opportunities, we are losing money.
Outsourcing work can consist of anything from translations, design, scripting, marketing, seo, site submissions and pretty much anything and everything in between.
However, before we outsource some work to others there are several factors that need to be taken into consideration these are what will be addressed in this article.
Cost.
Ensuring we work ‘cost-effectively’ is one thing we all want to do, we need to make a profit whilst still being able to develop our business further. One good way to find out if the costs of outsourcing outweighs the cost of keeping the work in house to make a simple list of both the time and financial involvements both in and out of house. For example, in house you may have employees that need paying to do the work, you will almost certainly need to spend a lot of your own time on the project and, more likely than not you will need to research the work you want to undertake, all of this can become costly when looked at in detail a good reason to outsource your work to another company or individual.Benefits.
How will outsourcing benefit you and your business? As with the cost example above make a list of things that will benefit you from the time saved on the project to the monetary benefits of outsourcing the work and the completion times often, by outsourcing your work you can have it done in much less time than if you handled it yourself ‘in-house’ so to speak.Flexibility.
What are the indirect benefits of you outsourcing your work? Not necessarily the money saved but more along the lines of time management. if you give a designer a list of ideas and suggestions you WANT your work to have, chances are, they will get it right the first time whereas, if you amble along experimenting with what you actually create you may, in effect, take much longer to complete the task in hand. By saving yourself time what else can you get done, whether it is building more sites or marketing your existing sites further the indirect benefits all weigh up more often than not, these benefits will be favorable to outsourcing the work.Risk.
This is probably THE most important thing to take into account when considering outsourcing your work, what happens if, you pay for the outsourcing and, overnight the company who is doing the work for you goes out of business? What happens if someone you have in your employ decides that they would rather be doing the work rather than you outsourcing it? Financially can you afford to outsource the work? All of these factors need to be considered before undertaking any form of outsourcing.Basically, what I am trying to tell you is that, if you spend a few moments actually running the numbers as oppose to the ideas you have in respect of your workload you will see that outsourcing can be come a valuable asset to your business and, more importantly, your bottom line profits.
Article written by Lee
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Unspoken Secrets
here is a belief among new webmasters that there is a set of golden rules among those of us whom have been at this business for many years to making money well guess what, these are those unspoken secrets….
Secret #1.
There are no secrets to becoming an adult webmaster. One of the most common reasons why so many new webmasters give up in this business is because they hear about the money that the big guys make, submit two TGP galleries to The Hun, get a $200 hosting bill and no signups. They then figure that the affiliate they are using is rubbish and then spend the next 2 months surfing the Net looking for the “be all and end all” of affiliate programs which is going to net them $2 million within the next 6 months. The fact of the matter is, that genie in the lamp you are looking for doesn’t exist. It all comes down to hard work, perseverance and common sense this is a business venture you have started like it or not and, it needs to be treated as one.
Secret #2
Don’t give up. You need to treat what your doing as a business. Of course, you can have fun with it but, at the same time you need to be making continual business plans for your development in much the same way as if you were self employed. Which, of course as soon as you start to make some money you will be.
Secret #3
Stay focused. There are a million and one ways to make money in the industry. You could build free sites, TGP galleries, AVS sites, pay sites, search engine pages, the list goes on. There are many different avenues to drive traffic. The key is to try everything. Eventually you will find the one venue that your are very good at. Continue with this until you know this in your sleep – work it so often and well that you master it. One other thing to remember, it wont make you money overnight, if you think it will, your starting out for the wrong reasons, putting it simply, Adult web mastering isn’t for you.
Secret #4
Build it and, it (And they) will come, don’t spend time worrying about your keywords, meta tags, the amount of images you are using, just because someone tells you this is what is required of your sites. Just build a site or gallery submit it, forget about it and get started on building your next, and the next, and the next site after that. Just keep on moving forward, if you forgot to do something on one of your sites don’t worry, add it to the next site that you build.
Secret #5
Start to network. Other webmasters are great for bouncing new ideas off, a group of webmasters who start at the same time all communicating with each other are going to develop more than a sole webmaster on their own. Networking is a big part of any successful webmasters daily routine. Make the most of the people you meet on the boards or aim or icq, it will benefit you long term.
Secret #6
This one you will probably hear day in, day out for the rest of your business life. “It’s too late for newbies to make money” I am sorry to be the one to tell you this but, this is rubbish. As long as you follow the basic rules above and work at it, you can and will make money in this still thriving industry.
Now you have heard the “secrets” you have wanted to know its up to you to put them to good use.
Article written by Lee
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