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How To Claim Back European V.A.T
With the recent legislations requiring US businesses to charge Value Added Tax to EU Member state customers for purchases of digital product / image downloads there are many new questions going around enquiring how companies and small business owners can claim the VAT back this is what we will look at in this brief article – The basics of claiming back your VAT from Europe.
What Is V.A.T?
Value Added Tax (VAT) is a consumption tax levied on goods and services in many countries across the globe. Over the last decade, legislation in the tax systems of Europe, Canada, Japan and South Korea allow for a refund for the majority of non resident entities, worldwide to a refund of VAT in most instances however, especially in the business world, registration must be achieved prior to claiming back your VAT and, preferably before the purchase of Vat able goods takes place.Who Is Entitled To A VAT Refund?
Most businesses will be entitled to receive a VAT refund however, as the laws vary from country to country, the best way for you as a business owner to find out the laws as they affect you is to contact your company accountant who, should be knowledgable enough to inform you of what you need to claim back from each of the EU member states where V.A.T has been charged.What Products Can I Claim V.A.T Refunds For?
Most typically value added tax recoverable expenses can take form as one or more of the following items:Business Property Expenses.
Transportation Costs.
Inter-company Billing.
Marketing + Promotional Services.
Exhibitions, Conferences + Business Meetings.
Importation V.A.T.
Digital Downloads (Business Related).How Do I Register For V.A.T?
When a company inside the domestic US conducts transactions in the EU countries where value added tax registrations may be required the registration for the VAT refund should be done prior to the transaction taking place however, on occasions which vary from individual EU member states this registration process may be done retroactively. By becoming registered to claim your VAT back the company is legally required to d the following:1) Register for the VAT in the EU country where the transaction takes place.
2) Account for VAT on all invoices or receipts issued to your European customers.
3) Deduct the V.A.T incurred from your European suppliers of goods or services.Value Added Tax – An Overview.
When all is said and done, other than the obvious need to increase your pricing structure for certain global markets registering for and, charging value added tax actually has a great deal of benefits. You now get to claim addition refunds from any expenses that you incur from the day to day running of your business, your promotional activities become vat’able so you can now increase the level of global marketing you do and, claim full value back from the EU member states (where applicable). basically, registering in the EU member state will enable your business to grow on a global scale and, at the same time, afford you the luxury of being able to market your goods and services to a greater client base at virtually no cost to yourself this is a good thing especially when you take a look at the growth that international internet usage is making each month.Article written by Lee
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What’s A CHMOD?
CHMOD is another name for setting the permissions of files on your server.
All UNIX based web servers understand the concept of permissions. these are broken down into three distinct areas.
Permissions for the person who OWNS the file.
Permissions for the group (all users are members of one or more groups).
Permissions for everyone else.Permissions are listed one of two ways either using numbers such as 755 or, using letters such as rwx-xr-x however they both mean the same thing.
The first number or first group of three letters stands for the permissions of the owner (IE 7 or rwx).
The second number or second group of letters stands for the permissions of the group (IE 5 or xr).
The third number or third group of letters stands for the permissions of everyone else (IE 5 or x).The way the system works is as follows:
1 = x = you are able to execute (run) this program.
2 = w = you are able to write to this file.
4 = r = you are able to read the contents of this file.so if you add it up rwx = 7.
So, in the example given above (755 or rwx-xr-x) the owner is allowed to read and write the file AND execute it.
The group is allowed to execute and write to the file.
Everyone else can execute the file.We hope this gives you a little more insight to how CHMOD’ing or, setting the permissions on your server can affect how files act.
Article written by Lee
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Online Dating Programs – Working The Adult Angle
As the industry starts to feel the effects over the coming months from the whole Visa situation the one thing that, at present seems to be true of the adult industry is that more and more webmaster/companies are looking to increase their revenues by utilizing mainstream sponsors on their sites. However in addition to this, the adult dating program appears to have been overlooked at least up until now.
Online Dating Sites – The Options.
There are actually a few good online personals sites available for adult webmasters to promote ranging from Love At First Click through the Advertising Revenue Service program to specific dating sites such as Match.com and Date.com. One thing is overwhelmingly consistent however regardless of which sponsor you use for your dating traffic, they all have a relatively low payout when compared to the ‘norm’ in adult sites with payouts ranging from $1 to $5 per signup.Marketing Dating Sites.
So how should webmasters market dating sites in conjunction with their current streams of traffic, this is actually a lot easier than you may think for example, almost everyone has an exit link on their free sites, you could utilize this exit link to send traffic to a dating affiliate program in fact, you could also utilize a dating affiliate program on your exit consoles or even on TGP galleries instead of pay sites. The opportunities for you to make money by placing dating affiliate program banners on your web pages are virtually endless.Online Personals – Sales Techniques.
When selling online dating sites there are, in addition to the abundant methods of generating the traffic, many different methods of generating your marketing speech to the surfers, you should ideally try a selection of methods on your sites to find out exactly which method works best for you. As an example of this, if you are using a dating program on a softcore site, you might want to try a hardcore approach to selling your dating sponsor in much the same way as you would sell a hardcore pay site except not as highly graphic. In comparison, if you have a TGP gallery you may like to tell your surfer that rather than looking at sex, they might actually be able to get sex for a change. The ways in which you can entice your surfers to your dating affiliate program are virtually limitless.Marketing Dating Sites – An Overview.
Whether you are already using or are planning to use dating sites, the one thing you must do is ensure that you choose wisely not only the words for selling the site to your surfer but also the placement of the promotional material, a well placed text link can have a higher impact on your overall sales than a badly placed banner and well, the same is true in reverse, find out where you are missing out on opportunities to upsell your surfers to an online dating site.Article written by Lee
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Search Engine Themes!
It’s safe to say that the ‘pay-per-inclusion’ model is rapidly catching on with today’s search engines and directories as they are forced to become profitable in a hurry. But there’s also another trend that’s come to the fore.
‘Theme indexing’ is a process used by search engines to determine an entire site’s primary theme. In other words, your complete set of Web pages is indexed as one, and defined as one.
This is why sites with multiple product lines and subject content often get poor rankings today. To learn how to combat this, let’s first look at the theme indexing process from the search engine’s point of view.
According to Search Engine World, the theme indexing search engine follows this basic 5-step progression as it ‘weighs’ what a particular site is about:
1. Page Titles
2. Meta Tags
3. Page Headings
4. Page Content
5. LinksThis is a general overview of the approach – each search engine is unique, and no one has the ultimate read on every search site. But to date this has proven to be true of AltaVista, Google, Excite, Lycos and WebCrawler.
All of these belong on the ‘Who’s Who’ list of major search sites today. If it’s important that your Web business be found among them, today you must write your site with theme indexing in mind. Here’s how:
The concept itself is simple. Focus your entire site like a laser beam on a single, potent theme.
The process is ruthless. Get rid of the deadwood. Set up additional sites as needed for each individual product and service ‘family’.
In the same way that you must now invest to get indexed on Yahoo, LookSmart, Inktomi and other top directories, you need to invest in separating your activities by theme into multiple Web sites. Kick out unrelated content, links and affiliate programs that don’t relate to your market niche. Build new sites as needed, with each focusing on its own unique selling proposition. This is the first step to take in the optimization copywriting process.
Having done this, here’s how to write each site to get the best possible positioning on theme indexing search engines.
Focus Your Key Phrase.
Determine what key phrase your entire site is about – a key phrase people use often on the search engines. To pick heavily searched, popular key phrases, try Word Tracker: http://www.wordtracker.com/.Write Your Copy. Throughout your site play variations on your key phrase theme. Every element counts: page titles, meta tags, page headings, page content, links. Remember to write for people first. Search engines are robotic, but people always want to know what’s in your site for them. Tell them what qualifies you to help, and what you have to offer. Balance using your key phrase with the benefits you deliver.
Once you’ve written your copy, search your text for generic phrases like ‘our product’ and substitute your key phrase. Use long copy where you can. Not only does it outsell shorter copy – it also makes it easier for you to write keyword-rich text.
Format Your Text.
Use key phrase bullets. They break up text copy and serve you as mini headlines with an entirely different look and feel.Use multiple headlines to create immediate context when a visitor explores your site. Make these headlines specific by using your key phrase. Tag headlines in your source code – <H1>, <H2> or <H3> – to highlight your theme.
Write your links as mini-headlines. Often people scan pages by jumping from one link to another. Link words look very much like headlines, or highlighted words, and should deliver your primary message and key phrase.
Measure and Test.
Conventional wisdom tells us that the ideal keyword density is somewhere between 3-7%. To check this before you submit, try the free Keyword Density Analyzer: http://www.keyworddensity.com/. For a more accurate read on individual search engines, do a search under your key phrase, then take the top 3 returns, enter their URLs and try to match their percentages before you submit. Track your placement and adjust accordingly.This is the initial approach to optimization copywriting for theme indexing search engines. Keep it simple: start here.
Article written by Lee
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Adult Webmaster Conventions
Networking Overload
Adult Webmaster Conventions – Networking Overload.
As the industry changes more and more another thing that has been overdone to the extreme in recent times is that of the webmaster convention, there used to be two or three of these webmaster conventions a year with the biggest being the Internext Expo – Las Vegas. Now however it seems there isn’t a month that goes by without a new webmaster convention being announced.Webmaster Networking.
Adult Webmaster Conventions however offer all types of webmaster (for the most part) something useful, interaction with other webmasters in a relaxing and friendly atmosphere however, with so many of these conventions to choose from how do you judge which of the monthly shows you should attend and, which of the shows you should not?Webmaster Shows – The Top Three.
In all honesty and, remember these are my own feelings based on attendance at a variety of shows over the last four years I would say if you stick to the main shows then you cant really go wrong, so the must attend shows list from me would include the following.Internext Expo – Las Vegas – January.
Phoenix Forum – Arizona – April.
Internext Expo – Florida – August.By attending all three of these shows you will get the opportunity to not only meet the people and companies you have been doing business with but, also get to meet new webmasters to further develop your business from a range of levels including new webmasters right up to the industry old timers.
Webmaster Conventions Advice.
When you consider attending your first adult webmaster convention you should keep one thing in mind, the shows themselves can often be costly so far as airfares and hotel accommodations so, you should book early to enable you to plan your budget for the shows and, also to ensure that you get the best deals available.Many of the larger shows are held in hotels such as The Venetian in Las Vegas which is directly next door to the convention center itself as is the Doubletree La Posada at the Phoenix Forum and the Westin Diplomat at the Florida show however, don’t be afraid of booking a hotel down the block from the one where the show is actually being held, often you will find people staying at hotels outside of the convention location and this means you can often relax with them away from the hustle and bustle of the show itself.
Webmaster Conventions Overview.
With so many webmaster conventions being held each year one thing is for certain, webmaster want to network at new places and often, these conventions can yield more business by themselves than a simple phone call or email however, be careful of the conventions or parties you choose to attend, just because a lot of people appear to be going to a specific party, it dos not mean you will get any business done there, choose your webmaster show attendance wisely and more importantly, make sure you have a set list of goals to achieve once you actually get to the convention itself.Article written by Lee.
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Seasons Greetings For The Adult Surfer
How do the national and, international holidays affect our sponsors sales? More than you would think especially if you can offer your surfers something ‘seasonal’ when they hit your site. However, that said, when should you start planning for these holidays and, more importantly, how can you ensure that once you have implemented your seasonal marketing campaigns that they actually work?
Seasonal Marketing – The Basics.
Seasonal marketing is, in effect a method of changing your marketing approach around different times of the year to affect both the volume of sales you make and, more importantly, the uniqueness of the product you are offering your surfers. A good example of this is at Christmas time, many of the sponsors will provide their webmasters with banner with a holiday feel to them, perhaps using scantily clad men in Santa outfits or half naked women in elves costumes. By offering a seasonal marketing approach to your site surfers you actually increase the chances of making a sale.Holiday Porn.
One of the best ways to offer your surfers a fresh marketing angle is to ensure that you plan for all of the major holidays throughout the year in advance so for example, as mentioned above, Christmas is a big holiday as are, New Years, Easter, Thanksgiving (US), Independence Day (US) and, Halloween. By building sites specifically for these holidays you are increasing the chances not only of building your sales but, of gaining additional traffic that you might otherwise lose out on. It has been said certainly over the last four years i have worked in the adult industry that many webmasters experience an increase in search engine traffic searching on keywords such as ‘Christmas Porn’ and, ‘Ghost Porn’ around the various holidays, build now for next year and, when the holiday season arrives, you will be one step ahead of your competition.Seasonal Marketing Overview.
As already mentioned the holiday season especially Christmas time, can be a great way to gain additional traffic, not only from those surfers specifically looking for Christmas Porn but, also the newbie adult surfers who have perhaps only just got their first computer on Christmas day, by adding to your collection of seasonal porn sites year after year you will not only learn a lot about the way the various holidays and seasons affect your sales but, you will also be able to profit from your surfers in a way that not many other webmasters do.Article written by Lee
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Gay Industry Networking – The Gay Boards
Gay Industry Networking – The Gay Boards.
With so many ways for webmasters marketing straight sites in the adult industry to network I started to look at the various alternatives available to those webmasters who market gay sites to network and, although there are a few different ones about, they still seem to be few and far between.So What Boards Are There For Gay Webmasters?
Presently, to my knowledge there are four dedicated gay boards that webmasters can utilize for networking purposes in the adult industry with several straight orientated resource sites having a gay board also these are as follows:The Gay Boards:
Rock Me Hard
Triple X Gay
Gay Webmaster Chat
Gay Wide WebmastersThe Straight Sites With Gay Boards:
Obviously my favorite is The Gay Board at Gay Wide Webmasters but i am slightly biased towards that seeing as its one that we own privately however, the other boards are almost certainly worth a visit in addition to the GWW community forums.
So what do these gay boards offer those marketing to the gay surfer that the straight boards cant? Simply put, it can offer you a place to network without fear of ridicule from your colleagues and peers in addition you will find that a lot of these gay boards have a wealth of information about the gay market being posted on them on an almost daily basis.
It is also worth mentioning however that just with the numerous straight orientated message boards, the gay boards do have their own individual feel to them, for example, Rock Me Hard is what I would personally classify as a ‘fun’ board and Shelmal does a great job keeping the spirit of the board going likewise, Gay Webmaster Chat is more a board geared towards webmasters who operate traffic sites such as TGP’s and Link Lists which becomes apparent after reading a few threads. Gay Wide Webmasters is more a board with a wide reach but, primarily, it is a business orientated gay webmaster community and Triple X Gay, because it is fairly new is still, imho, trying to identify the direction it wants to take but non the less, a lot of the forum members posting there also post on GWW.
The Gay Board – An Overview.
When all is said and done, no matter whether you are gay, straight, black, white or any other demographic, focusing your attention to one type of board can become counter productive after a while, I mean how often can you hear from the same people over and over again before being given the same information again and again? Diversify your posting activities to include some of the gay market community forums and at the same time, you will also diversify your business knowledge which, im sure you will agree, is good for everyone, especially you and your bank account.Article written by Lee
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Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 5
So we hit stage 5 in this surfer trap tutorial.
It was brought to my attention this morning that we never added any ALT tags to our single FPA link so, in a change to the planned tutorial I am going to touch on this stage as, once the search engines get to our surfer traps this is going to be a crucial aspect on how highly we get ranked.
So what’s next?
Ok, now what you have to do is go back to manually editing the FPA’s (All of them!)
What you need to do is this…
Take the Multi-Site FPA first then, on ALL of the links that lead to the single site FPA’s you need to add the ALT tag. Again, in the same way as we did originally however, instead of using this tag on the images we will use this on the actual TEXT of the link so, for example the link which may be:
‘Voyeur Porn’ leading to the FPA you have for the Voyeur niche in the HTML coding will already look like this:
<a href=”mydomain.com”>Voyeur Porn</a>
Will get turned into:
<a href=”mydomain.com” ALT=”More Niche Related Keywords”>Voyeur Porn</a>
The reason we are going back over these links now and not earlier on is because you should hopefully have started to get a small amount of traffic from your counter impressions. These counters are virtually ALWAYS being crawled by the search engines due to the amount of people linking to them so, by optimizing our site at this stage, it makes it less work in getting into the search engines.
One other thing that we can now start to do (as we did a couple of stages back) is to create some more HTML pages with some tables on them, however, these will be HTML pages on their own with no images on them. Again however, you should make them 4 columns across and two rows high.
What you want to add into these tables are NICHE links so for example, taking the TEEN niche we would make eight links like:
Teen Sex
College Girls
Erotic Teens
Teen Porn
Etc
Etc
Etc
Etc…You should do this for each of the MAIN niches so you would have a table for Teen, Gay, Mature, Asian, Ebony, Fetish and one for General and again, these should link to the NICHE FPA’s that you already have created.
These tables will be used for another console on our surfer trap however, before we implement this console we are going to have some fun with them.
Article written by Lee
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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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Adding Images To Your Web Pages
The Basics
Adding Images To Your Web Pages – The Basics.
So you have just got into the online adult business but don’t know your ass from your elbow, you have the simplistic stuff relating to HTML down but, you want to find out how you can start adding banners and images to your pages here is a quick guide to help you on your way.
What Is An Image?
The answer, is, believe it or not simple, An image is a picture on a page of your website. There are however, many way to display images on your site from the size of it to the overall effect you want the image to have on your HTML page and from borders around the image and many other things.
However, I don’t want to blind you with information at the moment considering you need to actually know the basics of adding images before you can start using fancy styles and the likes.
Adding A Basic Image.
The HTML code to add an image on any HTML based page is a straight forward one however, before you can use this HTML tag you need to know where on your page you want the image to appear.Now that you have decided where you want your image to display you need to use the image tag, the HTML coding to place an image on your page should be IMG. Also, you will need to tell your page where you want the image to come from or, in other words, you need to tell it the source of the image you want to use the HTML tag to do this is SRC.
For example, lets say you have an image called porn.gif (you need to include the extension in your SRC coding) you would display this image on your page using the following code:
<IMG SRC=”porn.gif”>
Simple huh?
Well, actually, maybe not, for example, what do you put if the images you are linking to is NOT in the same location as the page you want it to appear on? That’s not a problem, all you need to do is use the FULL location of the image in your IMG HTML tag like this:
<IMG SRC=”http://www.domain.com/images/porn.gif”>
You should now be able to include images on your pages without any problems.
Image Sizes.
Ok we can now include an image on our pages but, what if we want to make this image fit the feel of the rest of our page / site, how do you manipulate the graphic to ‘look’ right?There are a number of ways images can be manipulated for example, if you want the image to be 100 pixels wide by 100 pixels high you can add the WIDTH and the HEIGHT tag to your HTML coding like this:
<IMG SRC=”http://www.domain.com/images/porn.gif” WIDTH=”100″ HEIGHT=”100″>
That will now resize your image into a square that is 100 pixels wide and high.
Now we have the image on our page in the right size we require what else can we do with it? Read on..
Borders + Colors.
In addition to placing the image and resizing the image on our pages we can also add a border and, a border color to the mage to make it stand out if needed for example:<IMG SRC=”http://www.domain.com/images/porn.gif” WIDTH=”100″ HEIGHT=”100″ BORDER=”2″ BORDERCOLOR=”FF0000″>
As you can see we have now added the two tags ‘BORDER’ and ‘BORDERCOLOR’. The first ‘BORDER’ tag tells your HTML what size of border you want around your image and, this can be any size you want to make the image stand out on your page. The second ‘BORDERCOLOR’ tag tells your HTML code what color you want the border to be again, this can be any color you like to match the rest of your sites pages.
Linking An Image.
In addition to resizing, adding borders and colors we can also link our image to a specific URL (the most common form of this is with banner advertising) and, if you want to link your image to a URL you would use the following coding:<A HREF=”http://www.sponsorsurl.com”><IMG SRC=”http://www.domain.com/images/porn.gif” BORDER=”2″ WIDTH=”100″ HEIGHT=”100″ BORDERCOLOR=”FF0000″>
This will create an image that is 100×100 pixels in size, with a border size of 2 pixels in the color FF0000 that is linked to http://www.sponsorsurl.com
Also, the order of the HTML tags we use is not important however, you should try to get used to arranging them in a certain way to make your work easier if it ever comes to editing your images.
Hopefully this has been of use to you and you can now see that adding banners and images to your sites isn’t as daunting as you first thought.
Article written by Lee.
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