The Successful Marketing Approach

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

In today’s volatile and competitive marketplace, the strategic manager must possess a sophisticated perspective regarding creating and maintaining the overall image of the organization.

In order to accomplish this goal, marketing must play a key role, regardless of the company’s size.

To be truly effective, a company must be up-to-date with it’s marketing ‘psyche’. In bygone times, companies concentrated on items it was able to produce, not on customer needs and wants. This type of outdated thinking will most likely lead to a rather short lifespan.

Today, marketing is a holistic approach that is often more complex than first thought.

What Is Marketing?

It is a process through which an organization identifies a need and then provides a means of filling or satisfying that need.

Customers are more informed and savvy than in the past and they expect more – in the quality of both products and service. Today’s customer is not willing to merely sit passively by and consume – he wants a voice and relationship with the companies with whom he chooses to conduct business.

Marketing is not deciding where and how to advertise. This is only one component of the process. Effective managers make sure they have a well-defined and mapped out strategy that deals with the entire lifecycle of the process. The most successful companies have a keenly honed customer-centric marketing model.

This model outlines a process that allows the company to determine the needs and wants of a “target market” and deliver this while instilling in the customer the belief their company’s ‘satisfaction solution’ is better value than the competition’s.

The first step in a marketing strategy involves the identification of unmet needs within a market and delivering/developing products and/or services to meet those needs.

Define Your Market First.

Is it a business-to-consumer company, a business-to-business company, or both? Regardless of the target(s) a company must be able to clearly identify a common need amongst a large portion of this market, as well as that portions propensity and ability to buy that product or service.

Once the target market has been identified it is time to do some analysis. The depth, complexity and related cost should remain proportionate to the ratio of overall business this product or service is anticipated to generate.

Analyze Internally.

What will be involved in creating this product or service? Is there access to all of the necessary components? How much volume can be handled? Are their efficient distribution channels? What will it cost to make or provide this? The next phase is an external analysis that looks at specific trends within the target market. With this information in hand, a company is then able to make an informed decision as to whether or not it is feasible to proceed. Now that the target market has been identified and the operational side has been flushed out, a strategy can be addressed. How a company decides to communicate its message should be in correlation to its overall marketing strategy. Whether the most effective method of conveying you message to the target audience is through traditional advertising channels, the Internet or more innovative activities, it should be apparent from the prior analysis. The final phase of a marketing strategy should examine the component of customer relationship management: What processes are in place to service our customers? How do we ensure a positive resolution of customer complaints? What performance measurements will be used to determine how well clients are being serviced? And, most importantly: How will customer relationships be maintained so they will do business with us again and again? By developing a comprehensive strategy that spans the entire lifecycle of new to repeat client, a company will find it is able to effectively address the present needs and wants of it’s target markets, as well as being able to incorporate new areas as they develop. Article written by Lee

The Adult Internet – More Than Just Porn

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

So you have several adult websites up and running and, if you are one of the lucky few in this day and age you have already started to make money from your adult sponsor programs however, there are so many other ways that webmasters can make money in the adult industry in addition to their regular ‘porn site’ sponsors yet, many webmasters do not realize there are vast opportunities awaiting them.

Lets spend a few moments to look at the alternative sources of income that we can use in the adult industry and also take a look at the basics of each type of affiliate system.

Email Collection.

Opt in email is big business, there is no denying this fact so why not jump on the opt in email collecting bandwagon? Most email collection sponsors will offer you anywhere from $0.50 per email collected to $2.00 per email collected and, better still, to start making money from your existing traffic base all you need to do is include a small email collection box.

Software Programs.

Many of the larger adult affiliate programs now offer their webmasters a range of software products to generate additional income, many of these products are good for use not only in adult but, also in mainstream. For instance, Anonymous browsing software, history deletion software, IE Toolbars and even submission programs are all good ways to generate additional income either on a per download or, per sale basis. Best of all, you only need to add a new banner to the sites you currently have in order to get a share of this lucrative market.

Herbal Products.

Penis Pills, Breast Enlargement, Vitamin Supplements, you name it you can sell it on adult traffic. Whether you run a TGP, Link List or your own collection of free sites, these herbal products can often sell much better than ‘porn sites’ and, for the most part, the payout levels are the same, if not higher than what your regular ‘porn site’ trial will make you. Again to get started with this type of sales all you need to do is add a text link or banner to your existing sites.

Casino Sites.

Gambling makes BIG money, just look at Vegas for the example, millions of people a year visit Nevada to gamble and millions more simply can’t get there for a range of reasons however, almost every home in the United States has a computer and internet connection so why not start using this to your advantage? Many of the larger casino affiliate programs will pay based on the amount of funds credited to a new users account and, to get started making money from casino sites it is quite literally as easy as adding a banner or text link to your existing sites again.

Pre Paid Services.

Such as Credit Cards and the likes, selling these types of products to your adult surfers not only offers then ‘anonymity’ on the web when they do make online purchases but at the same time when your surfers sign up or one of these pre-paid credit cards you will be making some money in the process. Often however you will find that these types of affiliate program do not payout as much ‘long term’ as they are pretty much a first time deal as far as, once the surfer spends money to initially ‘charge’ their pre paid card with funds, that is when you will make money and not again. Still, even if you can make $50 by selling one of these cards, its still an additional $50 you wouldn’t have made otherwise.

Adding To Your Profits.

As you can see from the above, there are a wide range of products and services you can offer your surfers and, as we all know, the more things we can offer our ‘customers’ the more chance we have at one of them buying something. Of course, as with anything, the more effort we put into marketing these products and services the more chance e have at making a sale however, unless we try to sell the surfer something other than porn, how will we know whether they will buy or not?

Article written by Lee

What’s A CHMOD?

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Hosting, WebDesign | Response: 0

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

Protecting The Kids – Europe’s Role

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: 2257 | Response: 0

As adult webmasters we have certain obligations we must fulfill daily whether these be, legal or moral.

One issue that is constantly cropping up in our industry is that of minors (Children) accessing adult websites and, more importantly, the ease of which they can do.

Recent figures released by one of Europe’s top internet analysis companies show that children in Europe and, specifically within the United Kingdom are more likely to visit a website and that, ‘showing that around one in five Internet kids (290,000) check out the sex sites’.

These figures are certainly alarming to say the least, bearing in mind they are specifically talking about the United Kingdom, that leaves a vast majority of Europe, as yet, un-analyzed.

We should all adapt to new methods in order to protect minors from accessing our site whether that includes placing your sites behind AVS systems which, in my opinion is one of the best ways and, most profitable of protecting minors or, utilizing ‘web safe’ software packages that are available to block access to adult sites completely we all need to adopt these practices.

The fact of the matter remains that, in this day and age, no matter what precautions we take in order to prevent access there will, undoubtedly, be a majority of children who can and will, get access to adult sites.

Does that mean we should compromise on the quality of our sites? No
Does that mean we need to think harder about how we develop our sites? Yes

It takes very little effort to subscribe to the services to block access and, you can get a single line of code to place within your html from ICRA which will at least, deter underage surfers from accessing your sites.

In addition to the above mentioned service, you can also place a link on your warning page/s to the following services for parents to block access from children to our sites, SAFESURF, CYBERPATROL, NETNANNY and, SURFWATCH amongst others. Its not just about utilizing software and ratings on our sites though, we can go much further than that and, for instance, using nothing but softcore content on our sites will protect to some extent the materials available to children but, in addition you will also notice your conversion ratios will go up! I have and, I’m sure you have, heard it time and time again.. Make them ‘Pay for pink’ and, by using softcore images on your sites that’s exactly what you are doing.

I for one certainly hope that you take heed at this article, protecting our children is paramount if, we are to succeed in the business, it is getting harder and harder to control who accesses our site but, we can at least take a step in the right direction.

Article written by Lee

Traffic Filtering – Country Specific Redirects

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

To some, actually marketing to foreign surfers is a waste of time rather than a business practice. Unfortunately, they are missing out on additional revenue. We are already beginning to see some of the major sponsors in the adult industry embracing these foreign markets and, not just by utilizing dialers.

However, filtering your traffic base is often the hardest part of this money making equation. That is where the following piece of PHP coding can come in handy.

PHP FILTERING CODE

<?
$user_lan = $HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE;

if($user_lan==’de’) {
## German
$redir_url = “http://www.germanlanguagepageurl.com”;

} elseif($user_lan==’fr’) {
## French
$redir_url = “http://www.frenchlanguagepageurl.com”;

} elseif($user_lan==’it’) {
## Italian
$redir_url = “http://www.italianlanguagepageurl.com”;

} elseif($user_lan==’es’) {
## Spain
$redir_url = “http://www.spanishlanguagepageurl.com”;

## US traffic or Rest of world not defined above
} else {
$redir_url = “http://www.yourmainpageurl.com”;

}

header(“Location: $redir_url”);
exit;

?>

So, we know that the above piece of coding can redirect surfers based on their country of origin however, in order for you to maximize this to its full potential you will need to know the country specific codes (Also called ISO 639 codes) for each of the main browser languages. Some of these are as follows.

da | Danish
de | German
en | English
es | Spanish
fi | Finnish
fr | French
it | Italian
jp | Japanese

The problem you now have is finding where to send your filtered country specific surfers to. Of course, there is always the dialer option however, this is not going to be as lucrative to your wallet as what most people will have you believe.

In fact, I very rarely use a dialer on my foreign traffic instead, I tend to send them to a language specific tour page from one of the big sponsors and, if they do not sign up to that sponsors site, this is the point where I throw a dialer at them and, if the dialer still doesn’t make any money off the surfer I then recycle the surfer for a fresh one through a toplist or banner exchange heavy page.

In doing this I find it is often more productive than ‘regular’ English speaking traffic as, if you give the surfer something they are looking for, they will be more inclined to buy.

Hopefully this article has given you some insight into filtering and using your foreign traffic as oppose to just sending them off to a dialer program.

Article written by Lee

10 Killer Advertising Sentences

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

10 Killer Advertising Sentences.

Tell your readers what they are probably thinking, feeling or doing as they read your ad copy. This strategy will usually trigger their own subconscious mind to bring out these feelings or actions.

You can add these sentences into any ad copy. You may have to change one or two words so it relates more to the product or service you’re selling.

1. As you keep reading this ad copy, you are feeling more and more compelled to experience all the benefits of our product.

2. The more you understand just how valuable our product could be to your life, the less you think about delaying this important purchase.

3. After you read this short ad you will feel like your problems are almost completely solved, all you will have to do is order.

4. As you’re skimming through this, you’re beginning to think you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying out our product.

5. As you’re scanning over this ad copy, you are beginning to imagine using our product and enjoying all the benefits it brings.

6. The more you keep reading our ad the more you feel it would be a waste to let this opportunity slip by.

7. The more you review our ad the more you begin to find yourself getting very excited about our product and starting to feel the urge to buy now.

8. You don’t know it yet but, at the conclusion of this ad, you will feel driven to order and experience all the benefits of our product.

9. You don’t realize it yet but, in a few short minutes you’ll realize that you can’t put off this vital purchase and then you’ll be yanking out your credit card.

10. As every word you read travels from this ad to your brain, you start to understand just how much our product could benefit your life.

I hope this article has given you some insight as to how we, as webmasters, can actually ‘manipulate’ the surfer into doing what we want them to and, ultimately, into making us money.

Article written by Lee.

Maximizing Your Profit Potential – Upsells

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Sponsors | Response: 0

We all know the reason why pay sites have upsells inside them, to make more money so, the past few weeks I have been ‘experimenting’ with the same type of strategy the pay sites use and, to my surprise, actually found out you can make quite a nice amount of additional income by offering your surfers products or services other than porn!

Now, this may come as a shock to many but, when you build a free site, TGP Gallery, AVS site etc you can use non adult products on them.

I have found the following work well for the various different types of site:

Free Sites.

Dating Services such as http://www.oscardate.com , http://www.adultfriendfinder.com, etc etc.

Video Stores such as http://www.mallcom.com and http://www.moviemountain.com.

Sex Toys such as http://www.gayadultshopping.com and http://www.mallcom.com (Mallcom sells toys and videos)

Also, to my surprise, search engines have done really well on our traffic. Where we would usually use a text link I SSI’d some files and included some text files going directly to a variety of niches earning me in excess of $0.40 per click in some instances!!

AVS Sites.

Dating Services like those mentioned above e have found have done reasonably well however, for some reason not as well as they did on the free sites, you would think that they should do better than on free sites so I guess it is something wrong with my marketing, either way, we just plugged a link to one of our dating affiliates and, sure enough made some $$$ from them.

Penis Enlargement programs did VERY well inside our AVS sites again, all we did was place a simple text link with ‘enlarge your penis’ for the text and, surprisingly we made a few good sales from that.

We also integrated our own little MallCom store front on its own domain and have been sending traffic to that and, again, the results have been reasonable.

TGP Galleries.

To my surprise, the most profitable thing that we have tested on our TGP Galleries is again, Penis Enlargement type programs, Viagra sales from http://www.kwikmed.com have been doing well the last few weeks and we even had a rebill already!

One thing that I didn’t expect to work well that did was email collection, in fact, after just 10 days we already have 95 email addresses purely from our TGP Galleries. These emails will be used further in time to send out our newsletter and hopefully make some recurring sales from them.

I guess the point of this was to let you know you can use alternatives to your adult orientated sponsors on any type of site you build and make a profit from them.

Anyway, I’m off to do some more testing, I have found a nice casino sponsor imp going to send a few days of traffic to.

Article written by Lee

Payment Processors – Advice And Information

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

For many, the first step in launching a successful pay site is to find a billing processor that can adequately and efficiently handle all levels of the membership payment process. The processor must also have the technical savvy to grow with your site.

One such payment processor, iBill, is currently the premier provider of such solutions worldwide. They handle the payments in real time and all of the back-end services that enable you to run your business.

Of course, there are many issues to consider when deciding on a payment processor apart from their commission rates on your sales, including the following:

How do they handle the billing itself? Is it processed in real time? If your customers do not have immediate access to your site, they may decide not to join.

How do they supply your account reports? You may want to know at 3 a.m. the number of members you have and how they are rebilling. iBill allows you to access detailed, real-time reporting 24 hours a day, so you know exactly who is a member of your site and, more importantly, what their username and passwords are. No one wants to find a member has posted a username and password on a trading site. If this occurs, iBill’s real-time reporting tools give you the ability to stop this immediately.

How comprehensive are the payment options? Do you want to use credit cards, or do dialers or check transactions suit you more? The best way to maximize sales is to accept a full array of payment options. The more options you offer your members, the better the chance you’ll keep them rebilling month after month.

How good is customer service? Does your payment processor offer access to live representatives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? If so, you’ll resolve customer issues quickly and effectively, which reflects well on you and encourages loyalty from your members.

How good is the fraud protection? Internet fraud is a constant threat. Your payment processor should have state-of-the-art fraud protection systems to guarantee the integrity of every transaction.

Are there multilingual features for international members? Due to the global reach of the Internet, you must find solutions for foreign customers. Ideally, your payment processor’s website should be multilingual and easy to navigate in several key languages, such as German, Spanish, French, and Japanese.

Choosing the right payment processor is a long, arduous task that, if done right, will result in a long-lasting working relationship. In turn, your members will feel confident in your site and stay with it. We hope this article has given you insight into finding the right billing party for your membership or online store. If you need any further assistance please feel free to contact us directly using the form on our site (URL below).

Article provided by Internet Billing Company

Online Dating Programs – Working The Adult Angle

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Sponsors | Response: 0

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

Tips For Submitting To TGP’s

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: TGP | Response: 0

One of the most popular ways for getting traffic to sites these days is to submit galleries to TGP’s and because it is so popular there is a lot of competition for getting listed. If you like, it is a buyer’s (TGP’s) market, with the supply of galleries exceeding the demand. For example, at Richard’s Realm we only list about 60% of the galleries submitted and that’s after we’ve filtered out unwanted free hosts, free email addresses and submission bots. If we didn’t do that we would be listing about 20%-30% of all submissions.

Before you begin

Submitting to TGP’s is a numbers game. It’s all about volume and percentages. The amount of money your gallery generates can be estimated using a formula with 4 elements:

Total Hits To Gallery X Click Through Ratio X Signup Ratio X $ Per Signup = Total Revenue

So, for example, 1 in 25 surfers to your gallery clicks on a banner or a link, you use a sponsor paying $30 a signup and you have a 1:400 signup ratio with them from your TGP traffic. The formula then becomes:

Total Hits To Gallery X 4% X 0.25% X $30 = Total Revenue

You can see now that the only thing remaining that will affect your Total Revenue is the Total Hits To Gallery. If you increase the Total Hits To Gallery the Total Revenue will also increase.

Of course, experienced TGP submitters also know that you can work on improving the other elements of the formula to improve Total Revenue. They tweak their galleries and change banner and link placement to maximize the Click Through Ratio. If it is improved and rises from 1 in 25 (4%) to 1 in 20 (5%), their Total Revenue increases overall by 20%.

Building the gallery

Examine the formula above and you will see that two elements can be manipulated at the gallery building stage: Click Through Ratio and Signup Ratio.

It is always said, and surprisingly often overlooked, but select a sponsor for a gallery which complements the gallery’s content. For example, if you build a big tits gallery use a big tits sponsor. With more and more TGP’s becoming categorized people surfing the big tits category will be looking for bit tits and are more likely to be interested in a big tits sponsor!

In addition, be sure to use sponsors which are not overly-used, sponsors which are little known. If you go through a TGP you will see the same sponsors and banners showing up all the time. If a surfer sees a banner 10 times they are only going to click on it the once. So even if you build the perfect gallery with top notch banner placement and pictures, if the surfer clicked on the same banner on the previous gallery they’re not going to click on yours!

Selecting TGP’s

There are hundreds of TGP’s you can submit to. It is usually advantageous to select TGP’s that only post your type of gallery, as well as the more generic ones. For example, submit to TGP’s which only list big tit galleries or galleries with one-legged midget lesbians (if that’s your niche). The more targeted traffic will usually result in better click-through ratios and better signups, especially if you’re using a new or little-known sponsor for the particular niche.

TGP’s with a moderate level of traffic that send a few hundred hits tend to be quite good. Admittedly, to get any real volume you need to submit to quite a few, but consider using TGSW to do the bulk of it. My reasoning for using the smaller TGP’s is that they tend to list fewer pages and the surfers tend to be less “professional” and adept at dodging banners.

Submitting your gallery

There are no real tricks to this bit, but it is very important to remember that TGP’s usually get far more submissions than they need or want. You must try your best not to give them a reason to reject your gallery:

• Read the rules carefully and follow them. The TGP webmaster doesn’t put them there for fun and if you break them it’s possible you will be blacklisted.
• Look at the galleries already listed on the TGP to get some idea of what the webmaster likes.
• Don’t try to be smart and use different names and email addresses to avoid the per webmaster submission limits. Although galleries can look very different, reviewers have a good memory and can often recognize designs, layouts and descriptions. If they spot you trying to cheat you’ll probably end up getting blacklisted.
• Take a look at their TGP and see what kind of description they like, Adult Buffet have very different descriptions to Richards-Realm. This might not determine whether or not you get listed, but it’s a chance to get a good description of your choice and, hopefully, more hits.
• Select the right category for your gallery. If you submit your gallery to the “Teens” category and it should be in the “Mature Women” category it will get put there or rejected. If you get the gallery listed in the wrong category you may get more hits, but if a surfer is expecting a nice young lady in the pictures he’s just going to hit his back button and look at the next gallery in the list – probably not even giving your banners a chance to load.

Monitoring your gallery

Once you’ve submitted your gallery you should keep an eye on how it performs. View the stats to see who listed you, how many hits they sent and how much you made from the gallery. It is even worthwhile to create galleries dedicated to specific TGP’s, so you can monitor their performance even more closely. If a TGP sends lots of hits but no signups it’s probably worth no longer submitting to them or changing the gallery to see if you can improve the click throughs or signups. Compare before and after stats if you make changes in the gallery layout or sponsor to see if they’re working.

Whatever you do keep tweaking and monitoring your galleries to get the best possible performance for each of the elements in the revenue formula.

Article written by Richard