Online Adult Laws – Privacy Policies

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: General | Response: 0

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

Saving Time Online – Shortcut Keys

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

The one thing that i have started to do just lately is use shortcut keys. These are actually very easy to get used to and, will save you a lot of effort over a period of time.

Below you will find a list of the more common shortcut keys in both Windows and Internet Explorer.

Even if you get used to using one or two of these shortcut keys you will notice the time you start save over a week, hell, i don’t even type the whole domain into my IE address bar anymore!

Here are the shortcuts for Windows along with the description of what they do:

Alt + F – File menu options in current program.
Alt + E – Edit options in current program
F1 – Universal Help.
Ctrl + A – Select all text.
Ctrl + X – Cut selected item.
Shift + Del – Cut selected item.
Ctrl + C – Copy selected item.
Ctrl + Ins – Copy selected item
Ctrl + V – Paste
Shift + Ins – Paste
Home – Goes to beginning of current line.
Ctrl + Home – Goes to beginning of document.
End – Goes to end of current line.
Ctrl + End – Goes to end of document.
Shift + Home – Highlights from current position to beginning of line.
Shift + End – Highlights from current position to end of line.
Ctrl + Left – Moves one word to the left at a time.
Ctrl + Right – Moves one word to the right at a time.
Ctrl + Backspace – Delete word to the left of cursor.
Ctrl + Del – Delete word to the right of cursor.
Alt + Tab – Switch between open applications.
Alt + Shift + Tab – Switch backwards between open applications.
Ctrl + Esc – Bring Up start button.
Alt + Esc – Switch Between open applications on taskbar.
F2 – Renames selected Icon
F3 – Starts find from desktop
F4 – Opens the drive selection when browsing.
F5 – Refresh Contents
Alt + F4 – Closes Current open program.
Ctrl + F4 – Closes Window in Program
Alt + Enter – Opens properties window of Selected icon or program.
Shift + F10 – Simulates right click on selected item.
Shift + Del – Delete programs/files without throwing into the recycle bin.
Holding Shift – Boot safe mode or by pass system files.
Holding Shift – When putting in an audio cd will prevent CD Player from playing.

The following list are shortcut keys when using Internet Explorer:

Alt + Left – Back a page.
Alt + Right – Forward a page.
F5 – Refresh current page / frame.
Esc – Stop page or download from loading.
Ctrl + Enter – Quickly complete an address.
Ctrl + N – Open New browser window.
Ctrl + P – Print current page / frame.

Hopefully this list of shortcut keys will get you saving some time even if its just a few minutes a day. After all, we all know the one thing webmasters need more of is time.

Article written by Lee

Adult Exit Traffic

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

How Do You Use It?

I honestly do not think there is a webmaster working in the adult industry to date who has not seen a warning page for a free or avs site with both an enter and an exit link, the enter link goes to the main body of the site in question whilst the exit link goes to some other link, normally disney.com or google.com or some other url where the webmaster in question is quite literally throwing their traffic and money away.

Instead of wasting your exit link traffic to a site that doesn’t make you a cent why not utilize this traffic to feed additional revenue streams, for example, most of the larger adult sponsors now have penis pill programs or dating sites, you could include your affiliate id in the exit link and send your traffic there, after all, the surfer you have on your site isn’t looking for porn so, offer them an alternative which, can still add to your bank balance.

So What Are The Alternatives?

The alternative types of sponsors you should be using on your exit links can vary widely however, the best type of site to send them to would be a sponsor offering products and services such as penis enlargement programs, online pharmacies, history eraser type products or, even a link to a site like amazon.com if the program you use allows for that.

Basically you should try to maximize all the traffic you get to your site whether that be by using exit consoles or links, make sure that for each and every surfer you send to the front page (warning) of your site that if they decide to back out or click on a link to leave that you send them somewhere to give them the option of spending money and ultimately earning you revenue.

Article written by Lee.

Bandwidth Explained

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Hosting | Response: 0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article Written By Lee

Formatting HTML Text Using Tags

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Formatting HTML Text Using Tags.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article written by Lee

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.

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

The Gay Opinion – Obscenity Laws and the Gay Market

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: General | Response: 0

Let me begin by saying this is not a legal dissertation, but a collection of opinions on the recent comments and events inside the industry.

Obscenity Laws have always been the “fly in the ointment” for adult. Not knowing when, if or how the government will act toward webmasters or companies.

So what do I think? Every indicator out there says something or someone is coming. Big Brother is on the prowl. But, how will webmasters in the gay market act to ward off the evil?

While discussing this with a number of webmasters, I found that the gay opinion is spread as wide as a gigolo’s legs on payday. The thoughts that have been shared vary from ultra conservative to down right militant. And once again, I find myself stuck dead in the middle.

Here is a sampling of the opinions at large:

I’ve heard from some webmasters who have a “come and get me attitude”. Their approach is the government has done enough damage to the gay community over time.

Their attempts to sanction the gay adult industry will be simply another shot at taking us down – and that attempt will garner a public/media fight of the government acting as a bully. Now does this have anything to do with adult? No matter how I look at it, the one subject isn’t related to the other. Personally, the government’s reaction/treatment to the gay community has little to do with the government’s action towards adult. Yes, I can totally see how they got there, but it’s not enough for me.

There is the “what else is new” set. This is a group of webmasters who own pay and/or free sites, have been doing this for a long time and they have adapted their companies and their marketing to sell memberships to the surfers. They use softcore and stories already on their feeder sites, have webmaster programs and they are happy with the results and will not change a thing. Their methods work – methods are not blatantly sexual but more sensual and the conversions are a testament to that. By the way, this is where I stand (right in the middle). The general thought is nothing has happened yet. Work smart and don’t panic.

The other side of this is the “oh shit’ers”. These webmasters are re working their entire networks of gay porn to follow a well-established method of softcore only. Make them Pay for the Meat! They are reacting by taking down all hardcore images from their sites in order NOT to stir up any government dirt. Well as far as I’m concerned, they should have been doing this to begin with… sell the hardcore to members don’t give it away on a free site. For this, group the panic is on.

Finally I spoke with the “fuck ’ems”. Now their idea isn’t that the government is suppressing the gay community. They look at this totally as a first amendment issue of freedom speech and expression. They use both hardcore and softcore to resell for webmaster programs and frankly, they feel that they will prevail over any government attack simply by way of Bill of Rights. They’re making money and they don’t care who knows about it.

What does this all mean? Well here’s my take…

First, it’s apparent that the opinions are just as varied as webmasters working the straight market.

There is a general feel of, don’t panic – more than I have seen with straight market webmasters. I honestly, think this comes from our years of battle against the government on many other issues. Until the rumors become fact we will move as we always have – then deal with what is concrete rather than the abstract.

Overall, the most resolute business people I have heard from, all said the same thing. If you use common sense, use methods that work and that do not go overboard there will be no need to panic. The hobbyist who is trying to make a million will leave out of fear, the “over the top” websites will be the target and those businesses run with common sense will continue with no major issues. I think my favorite statement to come out of these conversations is, “The government will bite, if you give them the bone. Don’t feed them and they go hungry.”

I see the same “proceed as usual” attitude out there, as I have always seen in the gay community. Deal with the facts and only and not rumors.

Once again, this is totally based on opinion and by no means a legal stance. If you have any doubts, concerns or questions about obscenity laws in your area or in general, please consult your attorney.

Article written by Gary-Alan

Moving To A New Hosting Company

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Hosting | Response: 0

Moving to a new hosting provider does not have to be a frustrating task if done properly.

Adult webmasters usually have to upgrade their hosting services once their respective Web sites become popular, usually because their current host cannot provide an effective level of scalability or technical support or, perhaps even the cost of bandwidth becomes to high.

In order to transfer service efficiently, in the event that it becomes necessary, webmasters should ensure that all their content, including Web pages, databases and scripts, are properly archived.

You should always back up your data at regular intervals in case of unexpected data loss or hardware failure. Ensure that all data is archived recursively. This will ensure that all your data is archived and compressed in its original directories, which is very important if you want to retain the full working integrity of your Web sites.
You may also find that your new hosting company may be able to transfer the files directly from your old server to the new one you are getting with them, ask before hand if this is something that they can do for you as it is generally a lot quicker for them to do it than for you to upload the files yourself for instance, Web Air will do this work for you.

Once you have recursively archived your site, make arrangements to purchase your new hosting services. Make sure that any new solution you select includes basic services that approximate and excel the service that you where obtaining with your previous hosting provider. It makes no sense to replace your present hosting service with another Web hosting solution that equally cannot fulfill your technical or financial requirements.

The best resource to use to find a better hosting firm specific to the adult hosting industry is Adult Hosting Companies, the largest adult Web hosting resource directory with currently over 250 hosts listed.

Once your new solution is activated, upload your archived Web pages, database and scripts to the new host. You will be allocated an IP number from the new hosting company. Take time to debug and test the new site from the individual IP number, not forgetting things like your cgi scripts may need altering.

Once your site is entirely debugged and you verify that all site functionality is operative, then transfer your domain name service (DNS) servers over from your old server to your new server.

During this DNS transition period, which is referred to as the “propagation period,” your Web site will be resolved by both your new and old host, as the new DNS information about your Web site filters through the Internet globally. It typically takes about 10 days for the transfer to fully propagate around the Internet; so keep your old site running in case you get visitors whose ISP’s have cached your site on the old server.

It is important however that you retain both your old and new hosting services during your propagation period of 10 days. You will need to check your e-mail from both hosting providers since different regions of the Internet will remit e-mail to your original host while other regions will remit mail to the new server during this time.

Once a week or two have elapsed, cancel the account with the previous hosting company. Only cancel your old account when e-mail stops arriving from your old hosting provider.

If you follow these steps carefully, then your host change should be easy and stress free.

Article written by Lee

Resource Forums – The Changing Face Of The Adult Industry

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

Online adult webmaster resource sites are becoming a thing of the past instead, we have witnessed a new breed of resource site being birthed in the adult industry, the resource forum. It seems like almost every major adult sponsor and webmaster has their own resource forum as of the current time however, what is making these forums stand out from one another and, more importantly, can you actually learn anything valuable from them.

Webmaster Resource Forums.

Back in the day there were only a handful of resource forums made available for adult webmasters to educate themselves further, these included such sites as Ynot Masters, Netpond (then The Condom Chronicles) and Porn Resource, however, to date there are no less than 200 webmaster resource forums floating around the internet for adult webmasters to post on.

With this amount of resource forums available to webmasters it seem impossible that many webmasters cant be making a profit however, upon closer inspection a disturbing trend seems to be taking place.

Resource Forums – Webmasters Posts.

With the sudden surge of webmaster resource forums in the last 6-12 months there is one thing that is apparent, most of, if not all of the resource forums to have spawned during this time have one thing in common, the webmasters who post on them, often, these webmasters are posting for a single reason, to get other webmasters to click on their signatures, nothing more, nothing less.

It would appear that the adult industry is heading towards a meltdown of the adult resource forums, with more and more webmasters grabbing free scripts such as phpbb to load onto their domain and launch their own resource forum it would appear at first glance as if the industry is a thriving community of webmasters all willingly helping each other out however, this is not the case, instead, we find post after post duplicated across multiple resource forums in the effort of making the longest thread, getting the most page views and, ultimately, getting the most signature clicks.

Webmaster Resources.

So with all of this going on what’s happening to the actual resource sites? Well they are still around and, they are still being used however, these have now become second place to the message forum, often as mentioned above, webmasters will post the same message on several message boards and get several replies of exactly the same answer from exactly the same people. Whilst this in itself is a good thing (the exchange of information) my personal feelings are that we are heading towards an excess of resource forums and, whilst communication is needed, there also becomes a point at which you can get an information overload, new webmasters entering the adult industry will see the variety of forums made available to them and start posting however, in doing so they forget the one thing that they actually should be doing, working.

Webmaster Resource Forums – Overview.

I think within the next 12 months we are going to see one of two things start to happen, either the resource forum phenomenon will continue as it is doing now or, the resource forum will become a thing of the past whilst a new medium takes its place, one thing is certain though all these webmasters posting on forums to get sig views and post counts are not doing the one thing they should be, making money and, this becomes all to apparent after watching the same old posts, make the rounds to the same old forums time and time again.

Resource forums can be great help to the adult webmaster however, at the same time, they can also become a webmasters biggest downfall, remember why resource forums are there, to help you when you need it and to socialize when you have to, at what point to do you stop getting help and start becoming a post whore? Well only you can answer that question.

Article written by Lee