The Ins and Outs of European Domain Name Registration

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Domain Names | Response: 0

A domain name is more than just your online adult business address; it’s a crucial aspect of your online adult business. It is closely linked to the way a surfer thinks of and, more importantly, remembers your site. In many European countries, domain names that end with a country code carry more weight with the Internet-surfing public than dot.com domain names. So, if you want to have of a chance of selling to a foreign adult surfer in a European country you might consider registering a European country code top-level domain name (ccTLD) for your site.

Obtaining a ccTLD could potentially:

• Increase your chance of getting listed on a national search engine. Many national search engines require a company to be local, however that may be defined, to be listed with them.
• Get you a higher ranking with a local search engine.
• Make your business more accessible to customers and vendors in a specific country.
• Make your business seem more local and thus help overcome any fear local customers might have of buying from a non-European outfit.

What Is a ccTLD, Anyway?

Generic top-level domains (TLDs) are not linked to any geographic area. They include the well-known and familiar .com, .org, and .net domain names. In contrast to these generic TLDs, there are ccTLDs: Each country and territory in the world has its own TLD. They include, for example, .at for Austria, .be for Belgium, and so on.

Essentially the domain name policies regulate who can register what type of a domain. In principle, nearly anyone can register a generic TLD.

It is important to keep in mind that you might lose a domain name you recently registered in Europe if another company can prove in court that the name is rightfully theirs. If the court decides that the plaintiff has a right to it, you will lose that domain name however, I am assuming that nobody reading this is going to be considering registering ccTLD’s for the purpose of cyber squatting.

Each country or region has its own rules, policies, and regulations about who can register a ccTLD, and how. Common restrictions include the requirement to be a local registered company or to have registered the company and/or company name as a national trademark in a specific country. However, some countries are less strict about who can register. As always, it depends on the country and its particular rules.

The table below is meant to give you easy access to the information you will need when you are ready to register a European domain name for your site.

Here is an explanation of the categories used in the domain registration table:

• Country: Name of the country you might want to obtain a domain name for your business in.
• Name of domain: The ccTLD (a two-letter abbreviation).
• Must be local: This can mean that your business presence, your company’s physical presence, or your trademarks must be local.
• More domains possible: Some countries limit the number of domains that you can register.
• Same name as owner: Some countries require that the registered name be the same name as the owner’s company name or trademark.
• Signed contract: Some domain name registration agencies demand a written, signed declaration or contract to be sent in. If in doubt, read up on specific rules relative to the specific domain name registrars you will be using.

Now you can see the possibilities available in respect of registering more than just dot.com addresses perhaps you might like to find a country you would want to gain some extra traffic from and see about registering a ccTLD and developing it.

Also, you could improve your chances of gaining additional traffic to your new ccTLD domain by having some country specific language on that domain, again, how your site comes across to the surfer is just as important than the domain and, there are plenty of Adult Site Translation companies out there who can assist you with this part of the ccTLD development.

There are, of course, other ways to gain additional foreign surfers other than just registering a ccTLD for example, on European Webmasters we have a domain name registration section that will allow you to translate specific text in order to gain type in foreign traffic on dot.com TLDs perhaps, if you don’t want to or, cant register a ccTLD in the country of your choice you might like to take this approach at gaining additional foreign traffic to your sites.

I hope this article has given you a little insight into the varieties of domain names available in and around Europe and that you might just register a domain and see for yourself how profitable the European markets are.

Article written by Lee

Becoming A Webmaster – Communication Home Truths

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

Ok, we are ALL guilty of the things that are going to be mentioned in this article in one way or another, this article isn’t going to be a ‘see I told you so’ session rather an explanation of how and why certain things happen from time to time in the adult industry and, how they can be overcome.

Get ready, his may make you realize the way you have been managing your time this far has been completely and utterly wrong.

Message Boards.

A great tool to the webmaster, virtually every resource site owner and their friend has one but, there is one thing that you are not being told as often as you should about them, they ARE counter productive to YOUR work schedule. Think about it, how often do you access a discussion forum on a daily basis? Two, three, four times? maybe more? That time you could be using more effectively, coming up with new ideas, putting sites together, tweaking your traffic sources etc.

I would whole heartily agree that there IS a need for forums but, at the same time, what would happen if every time we went to post a message we left it and posted a selection of them in some time put aside for doing so? Another thing regarding message boards, they are there to benefit the webmaster, we can let our sponsors know when we have issues, we let other webmasters know when we have issues with them and, we also ask for help and advice, as I say a great tool to the webmaster but also one that should IMHO be used with a little modicum.

Instant Messaging Clients.

Again, another great global communications tool for webmasters, we get in touch with our sponsors, our peers and our friends and family but, how many of us spend countless hours a day conversing back and forth about things that, quite frankly, are of little or no importance? Who can honestly say they have time set aside each day to purely log onto your messaging client to just communicate with people? I know I am guilty of keeping my client on 24/7 and answering messages almost instantly whilst also bugging my peers for idle chit chat.

Email.

The Bain of every webmaster, speaking from personal experience, if I don’t check my email 50 times a day I check it 100, first thing I do in the morning, check my email, last thing I do before I go to bed? Check my email. I realize there is absolutely no need for me to do this but, non the less I do, its almost as if I have become addicted to checking my mail. I’m sorry to say it but, again, this is one thing that we probably couldn’t live without but, we can certainly cut down the time we check our email each day. If I never had to reply to an email again, I would be happy, as it is I get close to 200 business related emails on a daily basis and, lets be honest, I rarely reply to them the same week.

Sponsor Statistics.

Again, another GREAT tool that we are kindly given by our sponsors but, again, even this simple tool can become a Bain to the webmasters workload. How many times do you check your stats on a daily basis? Hell, even I will admit to checking them 3 times a day and, yes, I know even this is to many times. Some sponsors now have stats by email, again, this is better than logging into your stats each day but, it also adds tot he problem with email checking above. Basically, there is only a need to check your stats once a day if that. I used to check them every hour then, for whatever reason, I checked them once a week, then I slowly got back into the phase of checking them morning, noon and, night. The stats are still there every time I look so why do I bother? I guess that’s one of the mysteries of life but, I know I spend far to much time checking them and waiting to see an additional sign up or two on top of what I already have.

Anyway, I’m going to leave this article alone at this point, as, the above would seem to be the most popular methods of wasting time on a daily basis, we all know we waste our time and we all know that what we need to do is manage it better but, how and when, getting our time management sorted out takes time in itself.

Article written by Lee

Using Full Page Ad’s

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Promotion, Traffic | Response: 0

Full page ad’s can be used for more than just ‘adverts’ in fact, there is a wide and varied range of uses for them, below I have detailed some of the uses that I have tried in the past and from my experience, they seem to work well enough.
Creating A ‘Hub’ Site – By interlinking FPA’s together in a range of niches and, offering your surfers a money bar linking to other FPA’s in different niches, you can actually get some good rankings in the SE’s and, if you utilize banner exchanges or counters on your FPA ‘hub’ site you can also ensure you get a fair amount of additional traffic. One thing I like to do with my FPA hub is use it as the ‘exit’ page when a surfer leaves one of my sites. This ensures that I am getting optimum traffic for my time spent a) building sites and B) building my hub.

A lot of people I have spoken to about ‘hub’ sites simply forget about them once they have been built, personally, I do not see the point in doing this, if you build something like this why not send your exit, top list, counter, banner exchange traffic to the first page of your ‘hub’?

Doorway Pages.

FPA’s also make exceptional SE doorway pages, by optimizing your image names, meta tags and text on the individual FPA’s you are not only ensuring they WILL get ranked by the SE’s but, if you ‘hub’ them together as explained above you will also get some premium listings from them.

Filter Pages.

What I learnt to do early on is rather than send my surfers directly to the sponsors using the ‘standard’ linking codes is to send them first to an FPA with a money bar (or table ad) on it, this way, if they click the link in error and not realize that they are going to a pay site, you can give them an option, not only to use their ‘back’ button but also, to go to a different niche or, to continue into the sponsors tour. Now that you can link directly to a specific tour page on ARS sites, this method is a good way to give your surfers a ‘fresh’ tour front page.

PPC Listings.

An FPA is an ideal way to get sites listed in the PPC engines, not only do you show the surfers EXACTLY what is in the site they have just clicked on but, you also have the added option of being able to utilize blur consoles and exit consoles on them.

One other thing that I will mention, is that often, you will find that FPA’s that you have made yourself, no matter how ‘amateur’ looking they are will work better than the ‘pretty’ sponsor built FPA’s.

Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas on how you can better utilize FPA’s and not just use them in the same manner as every other adult site on the internet. If you have some good results from using FPA’s in this manner feel free to post about it on the ARSR Support forums and likewise, if you can think of any additional uses that have not been mentioned here let us know on the forums.

Article written by Lee

Filtering Adult Traffic For More Sales

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

When webmasters build sites there seems to be the train of thought that just because they use one of the top converting sponsors site they will make sales regardless of what type of traffic they are sending.

Unfortunately, this is often not true.

One of the first steps that we should take as webmasters when it comes to creating a new site, whether it be a free, avs or a TGP site is to learn the art of targeting our sponsors tour with the content and, more importantly, the traffic we are going to use.

taking it to the simplistic levels, a straight teen sponsors wont convert on a site that gets mostly mature traffic, the niches, although complementary, are so far apart its unrealistic.

That said, lets take a look at some options we can all implement on our sites to better target and filter our traffic to ensure optimum conversions.

One of the simplest ways to target and filter your traffic is to build yourself a hub or a surfer trap. Of course, we also have to take into consideration the type of traffic we are currently receiving to our site and, that we ‘could’ receive in the future.

Just because we receive 10,000 hits to our teen TGP doesn’t mean that ALL of that traffic IS looking for a teen site, this is where our surfer trap or hub site can come into play.

Even if your main focus is the teen niche, you should make sure that the first thing the surfer see’s when visiting any type of site you build is a multi-site FPA (Full Page Ad) where applicable.

This then starts your filtering process. If they know that they can find other niches than teen on your TGP then chances are, they will go to them either because that is what their niche is or, they are curious about that niche.

Another thing we can do as webmasters is to ensure we use the headers and footers of our pages in the proper fashion, offer our surfers a choice of the main niches, Asian, Gay, Ebony, Teen, Ect using only text links and, you will probably find that by lining these text links to your hub or surfer trap that you actually have a diverse range of traffic available to you.

In addition, rather than sending our surfers directly to our sponsors, send them via a filter page whether this is an FPA, or a page full of text links you made yourself detailing the benefits of the sponsor you are going to send them to, again, you will let the surfer know where they are going and, give them a choice as to whether they want to continue to that site or, choose an alternative.

Overall, webmasters who target their surfers by niche can, for the most part have some excellent sales with a variety of sponsors that otherwise they would not be able to see.

Target, Filter, Micro-Niche, however you do it, make sure your traffic is not wasted and, more importantly, make sure your sponsor is able to offer your surfer what you are telling them is inside the site.

Article written by Lee

Favicon.ico – What Does It Do?

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Favicon.ico is the name of the graphic Internet Explorer 5+ uses in the address bar and when someone views their favorite bookmarks. There should be one beside the address of this page now if you are using IE5+. If you want to see favicon.ico in action among your favorites bookmark our site now by right clicking and selecting ‘Add to favorites’.

Internet Explorer looks for this file in the same directory as the HTML page currently being displayed, if it cant find favicon.ico it will then display the default Internet Explorer icon in the address bar. As for viewing of favorites, IE will check its temporary folder to see if favicon.ico is there again, if it is not located it will display the default white background with a blue ‘e’ icon.

For a webmaster there are three main advantages to using the favicon.ico ‘trick’.

The first, is that it helps to brand your site with a nice little icon that is easy to recognize.

The second, is that it makes your website more professional.

The third, is that your entry will stand out in surfers bookmarks over the others. This is especially good as, if you can get a surfer back to your site then you have another chance at making a sale.

Many internet users have a multitude of site bookmarks so, you need to use favicon.ico to give you an edge. I highly recommend using it and, now I’m going to tell you how.

First, you will need to create an icon file which is exactly 16 x 16 pixels. If the icon is larger or smaller IE5+ will just ignore it. As for the colors in it, 16 is standard. You can use more colors if you want but, the more colors you use, the larger the .ico file becomes and, the longer it takes to load.

You now know the standards the favicon.ico file has to be, now to actually create this file you can take one of two routes.

The first is to convert and existing 16 x 16 BMP or GIF graphic with 16-32 colors into an .ico file using converter software making sure to save it as favicon.ico.

You know the standards the favicon.ico file has to be, now to actually create favicon.ico . The easiest way of creating a favicon.ico file is to convert an existing 16 X 16 BMP or GIF graphic with 16 – 32 colors into a .ico file using converter software making sure to save it as favicon.ico.

Once you have created your favicon.ico file all you need to do is to upload it to any directory on your server that contains html pages. This way, when IE5+ searches for favicon.ico it will be bale to find it regardless of which page you are on.

That’s nearly all the areas of favicon.ico covers apart from, what if you want different icons for different parts of your website? Can this be done? The answer is yes it can. All you have to do is place the following HTML code between the <head> and </head> tags of your web page.

<LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”differenticon.ico”> (SHORTCUT ICON should be kept in uppercase).

Now when someone adds a web page with that code to their favorites, IE5+ will not look for favicon.ico but will look for differenticon.ico and if it’s there it will display it, if not the default icon will be displayed.

Using favicon.ico or the SHORTCUT ICON code is nice way to add a unique touch to your site, and of course will result in more repeat visitors than if you were not using it – which is always good for any webmaster.

Article Written By Le

Building Your Brand – Business Basics

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Branding | Response: 0

Many online businesses have a good solid brand name attached to them already for example, ARS (http://www.adultrevenueservice.com), Webair (http://www.webair.com) and, WEG (http://www.wegcash.com). These companies have worked long and hard to build up their own brand name on the internet and, specifically, in the adult industry where, it almost seems that everyone is out to make a name for themselves so, how do you as a small business owner get a piece of this branding pie?

Branding Basics.

The word ‘Brand’ or ‘Branding’ can refer to several items when used as a noun to describe a company name, product, service or, trademark. Branding started centuries ago when cattle ranch owners used to place their unique insignia on their cattle so that surrounding ranch owners knew who the cattle belonged to and, so that the owners of the brand knew if their cattle were being stolen by others.

Starting The Branding Process.

From the very first site you build you should start working on your own inimitable brand name or logo, perhaps it will consist of a small logo on top of every page you build or even a simple text link for your sites domains, either way, the one thing that is important in recognizing a brand is being able to place it to a product instantly.

Building Your Brand Name.

Now that you have started the branding process how can you continue to grow your businesses brand name or product even further? This is what we will take a look at next.

Domain Name Registration.

Buy the domain name that is representative of your ‘brand name’ if your brand is going to be 123pornosex then go and register 123pornosex.com be cautious though, just because you think of a brand name, you should ensure the domain is available to register BEFORE you start using that brand in detail.

Getting The Word Out.

This may seem like the hardest of tasks at first but, once you make a start in branding your site or, yourself this is relatively easy to keep up on an ongoing basis.

Visit the boards, use your tagline as often as possible and, either mention your brand name in the tagline or, link to your brand names website. This is especially easy to do if you run a TGP or some other site that needs to attract webmaster traffic in order for it to succeed.

Start your own newsletter, this may seem an odd way to build your brand up but, if you name your newsletter the same as your brand name for example you might have a text link saying:

Join the BRANDNAME Newsletter.

This keeps the branding process alive and well. The next step you should take it to ensure that the sender address of the email is something like brandname@brandname.com again, even though you have collected the email addresses by sending out mailings from an address like the one above you have more of a chance of your brand name actually staying in the mind of the newsletter recipient.

In addition to a newsletter, you might also like to consider having a designer make you a logo or button you can use on your site/s this will come in handy for several uses for example, if you own a traffic site you can use this logo as a reciprocal link, you can use it in your signature on message forums and, you can even include it on sites you build.

You might also like to consider writing articles for other sites to use, usually the sites that publish your articles will place a link or a small bio to you or your site, this is another way to increase the ‘exposure’ of your brand.

Branding Overview.

All in all, building a brand name for yourself or your business need not be a hard and tedious task in fact, if you start off almost immediately building up name recognition for you and your sites. Regardless of what type of product, service or site you operate getting your brand name recognized by both webmasters and surfers can lead to a lot of money long term, start now and reap the benefits later in your career.

Article written by Lee.

Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 2

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

In the last tutorial we hopefully got the foundations of our surfer trap laid and in this stage, we will start to put this thing together.

Ok the first step of stage two of building your surfer trap is to start linking each of the individual FPA’s to your Multi-Site FPA.

The easiest way that I have found to do this is to give each FPA its own sub directory on your server and have the html page named index for each of the single site FPA’s.

So for instance, if you have the site All Petite on your Multi-Site FPA you would link it to:

mydomain.com/all-petite/

Or whatever you called the sub directory for the All Petite single FPA.

Now, once you have linked these single FPA’s to your Multi-Site FPA we need to start ‘playing’ with them once again.

You should now have copy’s of your single site FPA’s and Multi-Site FPA on both your server and Hard Drive.

Take the copy’s you have on your hard drive and add a small NICHE pop up console to each of the single site FPA’s AND the Multi-Site FPA.

I would suggest making 6 NICHE consoles.

These consoles should be pure text and nothing else.

Each of the links on this small console should link to a different niche of your single site FPA’s I usually go with one link for each of the following niches…

Gay
Mature
Teen
Fetish
Hardcore
Asian

Plus, I usually add a link at the bottom of my console which goes to the POTD program.

Once you have these consoles built you should upload them to their OWN sub directory on your server, I would suggest calling this directory ‘consoles’ and calling each of the niche consoles the name of the NICHE they represent.

So, you should now have the following on your HD and on your server:

1 Multi-Site FPA
50 or so Single Site FPA’s (All Linked From The Multi-Site FPA)
6 Small Pop-Up Consoles (Popping Only One On The Multi-Site FPA and The Single Site FPA’s, each different niche Single Site FPA pops a different niche console however.)

You now have to check that your surfer trap is working so far.

Article written by Lee.

New European V.A.T Laws – Are You Prepared?

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

Under a new law that has been passed in the EU from July 1st 2003 any internet based company selling services or goods to customers inside the EU will have to pay the member state of their customer/client the equivalent V.A.T (Value Added Tax) Rate.

This in itself is not a big problem, online business have been paying taxes for many years, the problems start to occur when you take a look at the current state of the V.A.T system in the EU state members on an individual basis.

The following list shows the percentage of V.A.T that you will need to add to your clients bills if they are located inside a member state of the EU:

Austria – 20% VAT
Belgium – 21% VAT
Denmark – 25% VAT
Finland – 22% VAT
France – 19.6% VAT
Germany – 16% VAT
Greece – 18% VAT
Ireland – 21% VAT
Italy – 20% VAT
Luxembourg – 15% VAT
Netherlands – 19% VAT
Portugal – 17% VAT
Spain – 16% VAT
Sweden – 25% VAT
United Kingdom – 17.5% VAT

This will pose several problems for the adult industry namely, how will our billing processors be able to handle transactions from European Union citizens? After all, with so many different VAT rates across the EU their billing systems need to be able to correctly calculate the correct amount of VAT to the surfers final order.

Several accounting firms have set up new divisions to handle this for the mainstream side of the internet industry however, until just recently, the adult internet was unaware this was happening.

It would seem that although the international market place is a wholly viable one for adult webmasters to break into, it brings with it more complications that simply breaking the language barrier.

This new law will be a good test of the adult industry processors to see how they can handle the economic changes of the global market place and, more importantly, how they handle the new frontiers of international marketing on a global scale.

Article written by Lee

Converting French Traffic – The Niche Paysites That Work

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

In our last article we took a look at a three (3) month period of international traffic stats and, what niches worked on German adult traffic. In this article we will do the same again except we will be analyzing what niche paysites worked best on French porn surfers.

French Traffic – Quick Analysis.

It would seem that for many of the surfers we managed to grab and filter from France that their primary interest was in Teen and the Amateur niches although, that said, we did get a few conversion on some fetish paysites, specifically fetish sites that had ‘watersports’ and ‘BDSM’ featured on the paysites tour pages.

French Adult Traffic – The Niches.

As with the German traffic we targeted in the previous article we also filtered our French adult traffic to some niche specific hub sites as well as some general hub sites to better judge which niches converted the best on French surfers the results we experienced are as follows.

Teen.

Our conversions on French teen sites were not as good as what they were for German surfers however, that said, they were good non the less. With a ratio of around 1:192 over the three month period we analyzed the French adult surfers we managed to get to our sponsors sites worked well for us.

Amateur.

With our amateur conversions the one thing we noticed was that tours that featured teens as the main focus were the ones which converted consistently, with this in mind, we did change a couple of the Amateur tours we used to see how that would affect sales towards the end of the 3 month period and, sales did drop slightly, this would backup the statements in the Teen niche made above in that, French surfers are looking primarily for Teen orientated paysites.

Asian.

The two Asian niche paysites we used didn’t have many sales overall however, we did notice that the little traffic that we sent to them converted well, as above, Asian niche sites that featured teens were again the better converters on the French traffic we received.

Ebony.

I think it is worth mentioning the ebony niche, especially when you take into account we sent less than 100 hits to French ebony paysites and, managed to get 2 sales from those hits. Unfortunately, we did not anticipate the amount of traffic that wouldn’t choose the ebony niche so we have no solid figures that are worth mentioning here or, any explanation behind how we made the sales.

Fetish.

Our French fetish traffic seemed to like the more niche specific type of tours, making us sales on Watersports, BDSM and even general fetish paysites that said, the figures we achieved with the fetish pay sites we used were disappointing as we had thought this would be the ideal niche for the French markets.

Gay.

The sales we achieved with our gay French traffic were reasonable overall, the surfers chose to signup to gay sites that featured ‘twink’ like models on the tours again, this would lend favor to the fact that overall French surfers seem to be interested in the younger generation to get their kicks.

French Traffic – The Results.

Overall we were happy with the majority of the results we received on our French adult traffic with the exception of a few bad choices on our part trying to concentrate on the Fetish side of the industry. We certainly learnt that it would appear French adult surfers are looking for Teen orientated sites over the other niches.

Article written by Lee

Newbie Webmasters – What Is A Newbie?

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: General | Response: 0

Newbie Adult Webmasters are something that is good for the adult industry as a whole. As more Newbie Webmasters join the adult industry the way in which things are done change and, more importantly, the way in which the newbies themselves get taught changes however, just what is a ‘Newbie’ when it comes to the adult industry? This is what we will take a look at in this brief article.

Adult Webmaster Newbie – The Differences.

Irrespective of what anyone tells you, everyone in the adult industry is a newbie its just a matter of figuring out what they are a newbie at. For example, personally i have just taken to learning PHP as a programming tool, i have never coded anything before so, i am officially a php newbie. Likewise there are webmasters who have never built a TGP gallery, they are TGP newbies, in fact, every facet of the adult industry has its own newbies some of them have been around for days whilst others have been around for many years. Going by the ‘true’ meaning of the word however, a newbie is someone who knows very little about very little.

Message Board Newbies.

At some point or other every webmaster will want to start posting on some of the industry’s message forums, whether this is to make friends or ask advice you will instantly be branded a newbie from your first post, if this isn’t the case, make sure that you give a brief history about what you do in the adult industry and, more importantly, how long you have been doing it, don’t go overboard however, just give enough information to let others know what it is you are doing on the message forum.

Newbie Adult Webmasters – Overview.

The perception of newbie webmasters is that many of them do not know what they are doing however, just because someone hasn’t heard the name before on a specific message forum this doesn’t mean the webmaster is in fact a true ‘newbie’ we all need to ensure that when using the term newbie we don’t make ourselves look like newbies in the process.

Article written by Lee