Using TITLE Tags effectively

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

Microsoft Internet Explorer has supported the TITLE attribute for links since version 4.0. Netscape began supporting it in version 6.0

The TITLE attribute allows you to enter descriptive text about a link that’s displayed when the mouse moves over the link. For an example, move your mouse over the link below:

The HTML source code for this link is shown below:

<a href="http://www.europeanwebmasters.com"
  title="Click Here To Learn Foreign Adult Marketing">European Webmasters</a>

If your browser supports the TITLE attribute you should see a small popup box appear, similar to the way alternate text for images is displayed when you move your mouse over the image.

This attribute is similar to the ALT attribute for the IMG tag, both in its appearance and its limitations. The value of the attribute must be inside quotation marks, and it can only contain plain text (no HTML tags). You can include carriage returns in the title, and these will be displayed in the text. The maximum length of the TITLE text for Internet Explorer is very large; we’ve tested it with over 500 characters. Try to keep your descriptions below 25 words, though; any more than this can be hard to read and, because the search engine spiders can read this text you may be considered as spamming the engines.

The TITLE attribute is useful in places where your HTML design limits the length of your link text. That’s often the case for links in a navigation bar, especially if your page has a multi-column layout. Try using the TITLE attribute to give your visitors extra navigation information.

In addition you can also use the TITLE tag on standard text for extra information where you just don’t have the space to be as affluent as you would like. An example of this is shown below:

Use of the TITLE tag on plain text

The HTML code for this is also shown below:

This attribute is part of the HTML 4.0 standard. Internet Explorer, Netscape 6.x and Opera (Version 3.0 or higher) support it. However, the attribute degrades gracefully, visitors with non-supporting browsers (like Netscape 4.x) would see the link as if you hadn’t used the attribute.

As you can see from the above examples by using the TITLE tags effectively you can double, if not treble your use of keywords however, caution should be paid when using these features of the tag so that you don’t inadvertently spam the search engines.

Article Written By Lee

Mirroring Adult Sites – Stage Three

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Promotion, Tutorials | Response: 0

So we hit stage three of our tutorial in this stage we are going to make some pages for our top 5 AVS systems. However, as we did in the last tutorial with the new TGP galleries we created we are going to use the same content and same pages that we have already built. On with the tutorial…

Anyone who build AVS sites will know that you need to have a standard site layout. This usually consists of an entry page (or a warning page), a navigational page (or in our case our menu.html page) and some gallery pages.

So the first thing we need to do is open up the warning page. Once this page has been opened we now need to do some editing of the page, what I would suggest is moving the warning text to the lower half of the page and at the top making some ‘juicy’ sales text, depending on the niche you are targeting with this site you may also like to add a couple of the original thumbnail images at the VERY top of your page however, these should NOT be linked to the full size image.

Once you have edited your page to a reasonable standard for the AVS you now need to save this page in the /FreeSite/AVS/ folder that you originally created on your HD. I would suggest saving the page as something like avs1.html or the name of the AVS you will be using this page for.

Once you have done this you now need to duplicate this page but save it as a different name in again, in the /FreeSite/AVS/ folder so you will end up with avs1.html, avs2.html, etc.

At the moment these AVS pages have no AVS script on them so, we need to visit the AVS system we are going to be using and fill out the details to have the AVS generate an AVS signup page script for us. Once we have the coding that the AVS provides we now have to place this on our avs1.html page. You should repeat this for each of the AVS’s you wish to use and save each instance of the generated AVS script to a separate AVS*.html page.

be aware, that when you are putting your information into the AVS to generate the script, you should enter the ‘members area url’ as the page we created for our navigation so, the AVS script location will be /FreeSite/AVS/avs1.html and, the members area page will be, /FreeSite/Menu/menu.html.

Once you have placed the script on our avs.html pages you should now have the following sites ready:

1) 50 Pic Free Site With Pics On HTML Pages.
2) 5 TGP Galleries With Pics On HTML Pages.
3) 5 AVS Entry Pages.

Now we are starting to see how using one set of content can amount to a mass of sites all of which can be sending traffic to our sponsors and, to our surfer trap.

This is where stage three of our tutorial ends however, in our next tutorial we will continue to make some more sites and in an effort to get some traffic we start to play with the ones we have currently created.

Article written by Lee

Adult Industry Standards – What Are They Exactly?

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

For some, the term ‘industry standards’ might seem like an oxymoron and, in such a wide spread global industry this might just be the case, the adult industry is not regulated in any way shape or form however, this term is thrown around with the best of them.

In this article we will take a quick look at some of the ‘standards’ which have been set and, for the most part, seem to be accepted across the online adult industry as a whole.

Industry Standards – The Basics.

‘Industry Standards’ are, in effect a set of guidelines or rules by which any person operating a business in a specific sector operate by. These may range fro charging a standard price for a product, operating in a certain way or something else. Most industries have their own set of specific ‘standards’ which are usually upheld regardless of whether they are actually written in law, as regulations, rules or, unwritten, unspoken standards.

Adult Industry Standards – The List.

This is a list of the 4 most common ‘Adult Industry Standards’ that webmasters would seem to operate their businesses towards, these are not ‘official’ industry standards more general operational guideline which are accepted as the ‘norm’ in our industry.

1) Adult Webmasters should use ‘legal’ content.
2) Adult Webmasters should abide by the rules of the sponsors they use.
3) Adult Webmasters should not promote ‘child pornography’ or imply the promotion of the same.
4) Adult Webmasters should operate their business within the scope of the law.

Taking the above four items into account, there of course, other standards by which webmasters already self-regulate to some extent for example, you shouldn’t steal other webmasters work, content, bandwidth (through hotlinking), etc. However, other than the four primary ‘unwritten rules’ above there doesn’t appear to be any special ‘code of practice’ to which webmasters should or even, can adhere to.

Taking the above information one step further, lets take a quick look at the adult industry sponsors, almost all of them have a different variation of their Terms and Conditions however, implied or otherwise, most of them tend to stick within the confines of the details already mentioned above. This in itself can lead webmasters into some troubles for example, promotion of sites, most sponsors have unwritten rules about what webmasters can and cant do to promote sites, no spamming paysites, no misleading links but, again, there are no ‘set’ rules that any two sponsors seem to say in the exact same manner.

Adult Industry Standards – Self Regulation.

We all know by now (at least those of us whom have been doing this for a few months) that the adult industry is pretty much self regulated and, whilst this is almost certainly a good thing it can also lead to complications. For example, ‘Webmaster A’ does something to promote a site that they got permission to do whilst, ‘Webmaster B’ does the same thing without having permission. in this instance, more often than not ‘Webmaster B’ will the one who gets their name blackened in the industry. it would also seem that, whilst those webmasters who have a long standing in the industry are capable of getting away with certain things, others, who perhaps have seen things done, when they try the same they get ridiculed.

Adult Industry Standards – Overview.

As ‘Adult Webmasters’ and, i would like to stress the ‘Adult’ part of that job title we have a lot of information thrown at us from the very first day of joining this industry, how we choose to use that information is up to us on an individual basis. That said, until the ‘standards’ are set on a level playing field i cant help wondering what effect, negative or positive our own style of self regulation is having on our associates and peers, does it help that we can go to message forums and call sponsors, hosts, other webmasters cheats? or, does this hinder our industry on a much wider scale?

One thing is for certain, if i were a journalist writing a report on the adult industry as a whole, i don’t even think i could write about the actual ‘business’ side of things after all, we all run our businesses as we see fit and, at the same time, read the rule book that would at least, for the time being, suit us as individual business owners.

Article written by Lee.

Using Basic Server Side Includes (SSI)

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Server side includes are what their name sounds like.  A way to include the contents of another file into your current web page BEFORE the web page gets sent off to the surfer.  Not only does this include contents of a static file but you can also include the results of a CGI program and on some web servers, you can even have it display the current date and time.

Now, many web hosts do not normally have server side includes turned on. You will have to ask your host if they have SSI turned on and if they do, what is the file name extension for SSI.  By default, SSI files have an .shtml extension.

Sometimes, you can turn SSI on yourself.  If you host doesn’t have SSI turned on for you already, you can try adding the following two lines to your .htaccess file.  Then create a file with the .shtml extension, include a SSI command and see if it works.

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml

When you use SSI commands, you place them exactly in the location within your web page where you want the output of the SSI command to appear when you finally browse the page.  If you have SSI, then you can use the following command to include a file.  When you include a file, you can either give it a path name to the file or you can give a URL to the file. I’ll list both here.

<!–#include file=”/some/path/above/my/web/to/my/header.html” –>

This is an example of how to include a file based on its path name.  Now,
here’s the same file put included with its URL.

<!–#include virtual=”/to/my/header.html” –>

And this is an example of how to use a URL.  With a URL however, it cannot be a complete URL such as http://www.somesite.com/somefile.html.  It has to be within your current website.  You can also use the URL method to run a CGI script!  Here’s an example of that:

<!–#include virtual=”/cgi-bin/somescript.cgi?myfirstarg=1amp;mysecondarg=2″
–>

As you can see, we can even pass arguments to the CGI script just as if you typed it into your browser!  There is also another way of running a CGI script but this is not as widely used any more and you should use the #include virtual method instead.  Here is the same example so that you will know what it means when you see it.

<!-exec cgi=”/cgi-bin/somescript.cgi?myfirstarg=1amp;mysecondarg=2″ –>

As I mentioned earlier, you can use SSI to display the current time and date. Here’s how:

<!-echo “$DATE_LOCAL” –>

This will display the current date and time. SSI is usually used when you  want to have a standard header or footer on each page.  It’s also used for displaying rotating banners or page counters. As you see above, you can also  use it to display the current date and time or the date when the page was  last modified.

SSI has also been used for cloaking and some tracking  software uses SSI to track each incoming hit to the web page.  If you would  like more information about SSI, go to
http://www.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_include.html.  This is the definitive guide on SSI on the Apache web server.

Most other web servers that use SSI also follow these conventions.

Article written by Lee

Now They Signed Up – Learn How To Keep Them

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General | Response: 0

Member retention is going to have a large effect on the adult industry over the next few months, with Visa chargeback rates being lowered and, many affiliate programs lowering their payout model something has to give and, hopefully, the thing that does give will be that affiliate programs start to realize that once they have your surfer, it becomes their responsibility to make that member retain.

With that in mind this article will look at a few things that we have been doing on some of our paysites for the last few months and, instead of having to provide an excess of plug in content we have started updating our sites regularly within the niche confines of what our members are actually looking for, also, despite this increase in content, we have started doing something unique so far as member retention goes – actually communicating with the member directly.

Communication Pays.

Actually spending the time to listen to what your members want can be beneficial on many levels for example, how many of the big sponsors offer the member a chance to become involved in a ‘community’ inside their paysites, i can only think of 3 paysites that i have personally visited that do this.

Often, offering your members a way to communicate to YOU what they want inside the site can, and usually will increase the value of their membership to you in the long run. offer your members weekly polls, offer them incentives to keep an active membership, perhaps some kind of loyalty program, in addition to a method of your paysite members being able to communicate to each other inside your site.

Content Updates.

We all know that paysites need to update however, how many paysite owners spend the time to ask their member what they are looking for? As mention in the previous section, offer your members polls on the next updates you will be doing, ask them what sections of the site need improving and, more importantly, ask them if they are happy with how your site looks and feels overall.

Renewal Time.

So you have managed to keep hold of your paysite member for a few days without them canceling and, their trial period is ending what now? Well, more often than not, communicating to the member that they are about to get rebilled can have a positive effect, send them an email prior to the rebill informing them of what your next set of updates will be, let them know they are a valued member of the site and, more importantly than this, that you are there to help them and listen to their suggestions. This is also an ideal time to remind them of why they joined your site in the first place, you have a lot of exclusive content that, simply put, no other paysite can offer them, you listen to their feedback and, again, value their feedback, all of these things will ensure that your member base retains well over the trial period.

Second Month Renewals.

So you have managed to keep your member for a month, and, again they are due a rebill, as with the first rebill you gave them, re-iterate the points of your site and, tell them what has changed over the past month, give them some sales speak about how your site is doing and, more importantly, what you have coming next month, by communicating these updates to your members a day or so before they have to renew, you should, in all honesty, keep their interest in your paysite and, more importantly, make more money from your members.

So Your Member Cancels.

Okay, so perhaps you managed to rebill your member for a few month or, perhaps they left after the trial period, what now? Simple, send them a follow up email, find out the reasons they cancelled their membership to your site and, see if you can offer them an alternative to stay, perhaps a reduced cost membership or, maybe even an alternative site altogether, if they entered your teen pay site and, were looking for amateur teen pics, even though you know you don’t have them yet, you will probably know of a site that does, tell this cancelled membership about this site and, get them to try it out, if you can match what the surfer is looking for to a site you own then you have a second chance at keeping their membership and, making money.

Retention Overview.

When all is said and done the one thing that is apparent so far as pay sites go is that a lot of them do not communicate with their members and build the sites they operate around what their members are looking for, we can all say we actually do this constantly but, how many of us really, hand on heart, can prove that they ask, listen and, more importantly, implement the feedback from their members base?

Article written by Lee

Straight From The Horses Mouth – Get Googlized

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

Many webmasters wonder how to ensure their sites will be included in Google’s index of web sites. Although Google crawls more than a billion pages, it’s inevitable some sites will be missed. When Google does miss a site, it’s frequently for one of these reasons:

* The site is not well connected through multiple links to others on the web.
* The site launched after Google’s last crawl was completed.
* The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to effectively crawl its content (excessive frames, tables, etc).

Google’s intent is to represent the content of the Internet fairly and accurately. To help make that goal a reality, we offer this guide to building a “crawler-friendly” site. There are no guarantees a site will be found by our crawler, but following these guidelines should increase the probability that your site will show up in Google search results.

Do…
Provide high-quality content on your page – especially your home page.
If you follow only one tip from this page, this should be it. Our crawler indexes web pages by analyzing the content of the pages themselves. Google will index your site better if your pages contain useful information. Plus, your site has a better chance of becoming a favorite among web surfers and being linked to by others if the information it contains is relevant and useful.

Submit your site to the appropriate category in a web directory.
Listing your site in the Open Directory Project http://www.dmoz.org/ or Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com/ increases the likelihood it will be seen by robot crawlers and web surfers.

Pay attention to HTML conventions.

Make sure that your <TITLE> and <ALT> tags are accurate and descriptive. Also, check your <A HREF> tags for errors since broken or improperly formatted links can prevent Google from indexing your page.

Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server.
This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block our crawler. Visit: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html for a FAQ answering questions regarding robots and how to control them once they visit your site.

Ensure that your site is accessible through HTML hyperlinks.
Generally, your site is crawlable if the pages are connected to each other with ordinary HTML links. If certain areas are not linked, you may be excluding older browsers, differently-abled users, and Google. Google can crawl content from a database or other dynamically generated content as long as it can be found by following links. If you have many unlinked pages, you may want to create a jump page from which the crawler can find all of your pages.

Build your site with a logical link structure.
A hierarchical link structure is not only beneficial to you, but also to Google. More of your site can be crawled if it is laid out in with a clear architecture.

Don’t…
Fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to “cloak” pages, or put up “crawler only” pages.
If your site contains pages, links or text that you do not intend visitors to see, Google considers them deceptive and may ignore your site.

Feel obligated to purchase a search optimization service.
Some companies “guarantee” your site a place near the top of a results page. While legitimate consulting firms can improve your site’s flow and content, others employ deceptive tactics to try and fool search engines. Be careful – if your domain is affiliated with one of these services, it could be permanently banned from our index, we have found search engine optimization software like Web Position Gold works best but, again use it in moderation.

Use images to display important names, content or links.
Our crawler does not recognize text contained in graphics.
Use ALT tags if the main content and key words on your page cannot be formatted in regular HTML.

Provide multiple copies of a page under different URLs
Many sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the graphic-enriched version of the page. While Google crawls these pages, duplicates are removed from our index. In order to ensure that we have the desired version of your page, place the other versions in separate directories and use the robots.txt file to block our crawler.

Article written by a Google employee

How To Become A Gay Porn Star

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Employment, General | Response: 0

A quick look across the gay side of the adult industry will show it is lacking in one thing that its straight counterpart has in an abundance, amateur male models with their own adult porn sites. With that said, if you wanted to tap into this market how could you go about doing so and, more importantly, could you make money from working on the other side of the camera for a change? This is what we will look at in this article.

Becoming A Porn Star – The Basics.

Any web cam model will tell you, to have your own porn site will take a lot of persistence, time and, more importantly, personality, not least from the webmaster side of the industry however, in my opinion I think the pressure that a webmaster may face breaking into the gay male porn side of the adult industry might just be a bit harsher than what the bubbly web cam girls have to contend with, not only because as a male you will be appearing in content but, because your primary traffic base, whether you like it or not, will be a mixture of women and gay males.

Male Amateur Sites – Getting Ready.

Before you start to even put your first ideas down on paper you need to do one thing, spend some time to research what is needed in order to start your own amateur porn site. In doing so, you will see that not only is everything in the two paragraphs above true but, you will also learn a little about yourself and, more importantly, about other webmasters and your surfers. Now you have the fundamental questions you need to ask yourself these are, What equipment do you need to run a male amateur site? What amount of investment in both time and money do you need to put into building your site? How much will you charge your surfers for access to your site? and, Is this going to be a long term commitment from yourself that could be possibly better spent elsewhere? Answer those questions as honestly as you can before proceeding and furthermore, think long and hard about the answers.

Gay Amateur Web Sites – The Alternatives.

So lets stop for a moment and consider that you have realized you do not want to build and maintain your own male amateur site but, you would still like to be male porn material, where do you go from here? Well there are companies who can put you on their books and give you work from time to time such as http://www.redbagproductions.com a male modeling agency for the adult industry, this will in all likelihood be the place for you to start your search, find out how many places there are that can get you talent work and, what type of modeling work you will be required to do.

Becoming A Gay Porn Star – An Overview.

With sites online such as Every Stag and the slew of other male modeling agencies finding a medium to start your modeling career wont be hard but, with this career comes uncertain hours, hard work (in more ways than one) and, to some extent, fame amongst the gay adult porn surfer. If this is something that you feel you can devote the time and energy towards and, are able to cope with the voyeuristic side of your personality then go for it, if however, you are still unsure after reading this brief article, perhaps becoming a gay pornstar isn’t for you?

Article written by Lee

Pay Per Click Or Search Engine Optimization

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Paid Traffic, Search Engine Optimization | Response: 0

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

Writing Your Sales Text – Some Facts

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

Do you know the difference between writing sales text for print advertising i.e. magazines and, writing sales talk for websites?

Well some of these differences will go against your intuition however, these differences are based on how people read specific items.

Where Do Eyes Go First When Your Page Loads?

Contrary to what most webmasters think it may not always be towards the thumbnails and banners on your page instead, surfers eyes will more than likely go to the first few lines of text on the page therefore, your first chance at making a sale before the surfer starts to burn your bandwidth is to have some enticing text on any site or page you build. Another reason why learning to write good text links can benefit you long term.

Also, as most surfers will only look at a page for between three and fifteen seconds before they decide whether they want to stay on the site they are at or close it this now starts to question webmasters use of heavy graphics on their sites, if a graphic takes three to four seconds to load you have just lost valuable sales time on your site.

How Much Of Your Copy Do Users Actually Read?

On average surfers will read about 75% of the length of any given page. Again, this is good news because it now means we can draw our surfers attention tot he ‘important’ sections of our sites by using headlines and bullet points to make them stand out. Also, this means that, given surfers will read only the first 75% of any page that the bottom half of your pages may not be as important as what was first believed.

Why Do Most Banner Ads Produce Poor Click-Through Rates?

Again as with any advertising media there is only a specific time frame that anyone will look at something, in this case it has been found that the vast majority of surfer will spend a mere 1.25 seconds looking at a banner which, is about enough time to read say 5 words based on the average college students reading time of 350 words a minute.

Therefore, banners which are animated and can take up to 5 seconds to get all the information across may in effect be completely worthless on our sites. More bad news for webmasters who have fancy animations and the likes on our pages.

Why Is Reading Online More Frustrating Than Reading Print?

Did you know that reading text on a computer screen can cause your reading ability to slow by up to 25% in some cases? This means that over inflating pages with text heavy content may actually aggravate the surfer instead of draw there attention! But, how can we stop this from potentially losing us a sale? Simple here are a few suggestions.

Rather than having one long continuous stream of text have several smaller one or two line paragraphs of text.

Use headlines to summarize what you are telling the surfer for example, if you sponsor has free trials tell them in bold lettering ‘Free Trials’ you get the point across and, you may draw their attention to click on the text.

Are Your Web Page Users Not Getting The Whole Picture?

Can surfers ‘scan’ your website? Lets look back at the above figures, 75% of the page gets read, banners have an attention span of only 1.25 seconds on average, that’s not much time for a surfer to look at your pages.

I think that would probably explain the reason why surfers tend to ‘scan’ our sites and only concentrate on the free images, how many of us actually take the time to read word for word EVERYTHING on a page?

I know I hardly do I just sit there and scan the page for things that draw me into the text or site. This is true again for surfers in fact, estimated figures show that roughly 21% of surfers actually spend the time to read every single word on any site meaning the other 79% only scan through our sites this again, cuts down our marketing capabilities dramatically making it more important to have headlines and well laid out pages highlighting the part we want our surfer to look at, namely, our sponsor links.

If we do not do this we are in effect only making 21% of our marketing efforts count again, taking away from our profits. That’s a huge chunk of our surfers we are losing out on gleaming a sale from.

What do all of the above figures tell us? Simple, we need to keep our pages quick loading, concise and more importantly unique, we need to draw our surfers to the specific areas that we want them to go to first and, in the process we should start to make more money from each of our sites.

Article written by Lee

Mixing Business With Pleasure

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: General | Response: 0

Regardless of your status in the world of web mastering there will come a time when you will want to attend one of the numerous webmaster seminars. However, what should you do to plan for the day you attend your first seminar, are there some things you should aim for and things you shouldn’t? Well in this article we will take a look at planning your conventions.

Before attending the convention of your choice there are a few things that you should prepare these are.

Exercise.

get out for half an hour each day at least two weeks before the day of your journey to the convention. You will be surprised at how much time you will spend walking around the convention floor and, by getting some basic exercise in before hand you wont feel the strain of being on your feet for hours at a time instead of being sat in front of your computer.

Contacts.

Make a list of people that you want to see and arrange with them in advance a time to meet up and have a chat. Most people who attend these conventions are busy for the entire course of the show. You may not get a chance to pop by their booth and talk tot hem if someone has already beaten you by booking a time to chat with the person you want to meet. It is also a good idea to trade hotel and cell phone information before leaving for the show, this way, if anything happens to make you miss a possible appointment you can call or leave a message informing them you will either be late or canceling.

Seminars / Parties.

Take a look at the events and seminars happening at the convention before you go, plan which ones you will want to attend make a list and take it with you. This will save you countless hours of wandering around aimlessly hoping to make all of the seminars and get to as many parties as you can in three days.

Booths.

Look at who is exhibiting at the convention, find out their booth number and make a note of it. List any specific details you may want to speak to the booth owners about. You can guarantee if you go unprepared you will miss out that important question or selling opportunity you wanted to make.

Baggage.

When packing your suitcase for the convention make sure you leave plenty of room for convention give a ways, You will be surprised at what you will be given for free at these shows, t-shirts, toys, books, flyers, you name it, you will be offered it.

So, you have done the pre check, what do you do when you actually arrive at the convention?

Food.

Eat at every opportunity you get. Most people will end up not eating for the entire length of the convention. perhaps even arrange to meet up with someone you want to talk to in a restaurant and grab a bite to eat whilst talking business.

Business Cards.

Take them and lots of them. Everyone and anyone will ask you for your contact details, if you have a bunch of business cards with you at all times, you can just hand them out. Make sure you include your full contact details, your name, nickname, email, icq and, aim contact details. The more ways you give someone to reach you, the more chance you have of them actually attempting to get in touch with you.

Clothing.

Wear comfortable, clothing and shoes. Think casual but, also think business, shorts and t-shirt may be good for comfort but, it doesn’t portray a good business image and, that’s the sole reason you are attending the convention, to do business.

Parties.

If you get offered an invite to a party, take it, plans change so quickly at the conventions, your friends may suddenly feel tired and you have nothing left to do, attend a party, then you have another opportunity to network some more.

Behavior.

Although the conventions are a fun atmosphere, don’t forget that they are in the first instance a place to do business, treat it as such, you may miss out on the ideal business opportunities if you are acting like a drunk ass hole. This will reflect badly on you long term.

You have taken in all the events you can handle, you have made your way back home what next? how exactly do you put this information and your new found contacts to use?

Business Cards.

Go through all the business cards you have been given and send your new found contacts a quick email thanking them for their time. This will be a good way for you to give them another reminder of what you spoke to them about and, I have personally gotten more business from the shows using this follow up method than if I had just waited for them to contact me.

Notes.

If you made any notes at the show, take a few minutes to re-write them, keep them safe in a notepad, you never know when one of these bits of information may come in handy.

Well, that’s pretty much it for the basics of the adult conventions, obviously there is more to it than this but, if you are attending your first convention you will have a bit of insight into the work involved.

Article written by Lee