Time Management – Organizing Your Content Purchases

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Content | Response: 0

From time to time it is inevitable that as adult webmasters there will be two things that will happen:

1) You will buy some licensed content.

2) You will use this content for a gallery.

However, unless your content is organized you can end up spending to much time to make a 10 pic gallery page. This article is going to offer you some sound advice on how to organize your content from the second you take delivery of it which, will save you a lot of time long term.

So we have taken delivery of our adult content either by download or, on cdrom what next, we could just file it away on cdrom but, by taking a little extra time to organize your content from the start you will end up not only building sites MUCH quicker but also saving time all round.

Here are some helpful hints to get you on the way to content organization.

1) Unzip all your content sets and, if applicable, separate them into model and niche sets.

2) Create folders for each model and, each set of 10 images within the main model sets.

3) Rename all your images in the 10 pic sets starting from pic1.jpg through to pic10.jpg.

4) Crop, compress and thumbnail each image within each set of 10 that you have.

5) create a html page that calls your thumbnails and main pics using relative urls i.e. /set1/gallery1/image1.jpg for the larger image and /set1/gallery1/thumb1.jpg for the thumbnail image.

6) Inside each of your 10 pic/thumbnail folders place this HTML page you have just created.

7) Burn each of the gallery folders to cdrom.

Lets now look at what an hour spent has enabled us to do.

Instant Galleries.

Say we want to build a 10 pic gallery to add into a free site or an AVS site that we are building, we know we have all the galleries already made, its just a case of finding the correct gallery and uploading it to our server.

Image Swapping.

What happens if we need to swap an image from one of our pages to a more appropriate one for the niche we are marketing to, simple, you go to the image set you want, look for the image name and simply change the image without having to upload it as, you will now know the EXACT location on your server of the image you are changing to e.g., /set6/gallery8/image9.jpg would change to set24/gallery2/image2.jpg.

There are of course other ways this can benefit you for example, you can plug in your galleries to any site you own if you have them all uploaded to a central content location domain.

The benefits of organizing your content from the instant you take delivery are endless, the above is just a sample of how I have successfully saved time and effort by becoming more organized, the only limitations you have with your organizational skills are those that you impose on yourself.

Article written by Lee

Domain Name Registrars – Saving Your Business

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

The one thing that all webmasters rely on to make their money is something that all of us have, a domain name however, what would or should happen to your domain names when and if, your registrar files for bankruptcy or just disappears, surprisingly enough i do not recall this ever happening in the industry to date however, being prepared for the worst case scenario is always a good thing.

Prevention Is Better Than A Cure.

As the age old adage goes.

The first thing that you should do before even registering a domain name is to check out the background of the company you are considering using, you need to ask yourself a variety of questions about this company including the following:

1) Is the registrar ICANN accredited?

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is a non profit corporation which was formed to assume the responsibility over the IP and entire domain name structure as we know it. This in essence means that if your registrar is ICANN accredited then you at least know your domain name registration will be handled professionally and, should be reasonably secure so far as your registrar going out of business.

2) What are you paying for?

Many of the domain name registration companies packages vary greatly, with some companies you register a domain yourself, some companies register it on your behalf and, others will register your domain including some form of hosting etc, check with the company you are using to see what added services and support features they offer.

3) What is their transfer policy?

Some domain name registration companies have specific policies so far as transferring domains to other companies, registrars and, individuals go. Check with your registrar before you buy your domain to see what this process involves and, as always, check with one of the other registrars to see which registration company offers the best ‘bang for your buck’.

Saving Your Name – Help And Advice.

First and foremost, if you discover your domain name registrar has closed its doors you should immediately send an email to them and ensure you keep a copy of this email for your own records, ask them what is happening and, more importantly, what controls / access you still have available (if any) to manage your currently registered domains.

Usually, you will receive some form of communication within a few days from your registration company letting you know what is happening and how you can continue to use your domain name.

In most cases, when a domain name registrar company closes what you will find is that they will already be in the process of transferring the management of your domain to another registration company.

If however, you are still able to control the domain yourself then you should immediately seek out a new registrar with whom you can manage the domain / domains that you own. At this point you should contact them and ask if they have any fast track solution to transferring your domain to their company.

If All Else Fails.

If after everything else you are still at a loss as to how your domain name transfer or registration is being handled then you should contact ICANN ( http://www.icann.org ) directly. Ultimately it is their responsibility to ensure that once you have registered a domain name, you are able to access it as you would like, in most cases however, contacting ICANN is always the last move you should make and, only use this form of information should you exhaust all other methods mentioned above.

Article written by Lee

Foreign Search Engines

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

‘Suchmaschine’ | ‘Moteurs de Recherche’ | ‘Motores de Busqueda’ ? Or, to you and I ‘Search Engines’.

Well what if I told you there was a huge chunk of the market (again I know) that your missing out on because, frankly, you haven’t attempted to get into it?

What is this wondrous market? Simple.. Foreign search engines.

I would say that AT least 80% of my traffic comes from the search engines, Google, AltaVista, etc, etc however a large portion of this se traffic is from countries whose language even some of my translators don’t know.

So, how do you get the foreign search engine traffic? again that’s simple, there are several ways to get it, you can:

1) Submit to your favorite search engine and wait, and wait, and wait… or 2) You can submit to your favorite search engine then, instead of leaving the page, go to the foreign equivalent of that same search engine!

Guess what, if you submit to Google in English then go to google.de the submit form asks you exactly the same information as your submission on the English form would do…so, ya don’t even have to speak German to submit to google.de, isn’t that handy?

In my previous article a few weeks ago I mentioned what countries were top of the ranks for surfers in Europe, well, this week I want to run some figures past you again about which search engines ‘seem’ to be sending a decent amount of foreign traffic.

So here goes, we have the top 6 search engine referrals for December 2001:

http://www.crawler.de/

http://www.lycos.de/

http://www.infoseek.com/Home?pg=Home.html&sv=ES

http://search.yahoo.co.jp

http://www.excite.co.uk/

http://www.infoseek.com/Home?pg=Home.html&sv=FR

As you can see infoseek (which has an English version) sends me lots of foreign traffic although, in reality, this is only for English pages, don’t ask me why but I guess the Spanish and French surfers love surfing for porn in English..

On a separate note, for those of you who are either to stubborn, lazy or, stupid to try submitting to the foreign search engines we will shortly be releasing a foreign search engine submission chart on European Webmasters which will tell you step by step what to put in each of the boxes on the submission form, so even you have no excuse!

Of course, the foreign traffic is going to mean you will need to pay more attention to your sites, perhaps offering these surfers a site in their language to sign up to or, before sending them off to a dialer, trade these foreign surfers off for some ‘English speaking ones via the use of a toplist. Admittedly, I haven’t found sending them to a toplist productive myself however, you might get different results to me.

Basically, if you start to get the traffic, hell, the chances are your getting foreign traffic now and don’t even know about it… USE IT!

If you want to ask questions specific to the foreign market that’s what our forums on EW are there for, we would gladly spend all day everyday answering your foreign traffic questions however, as yet, very few US based webmasters are taking the initiative to investigate further this GREAT source of revenue so, I guess ill just have to go back to my foreign search engines and get a bigger chunk of the ever increasing foreign porn surfer for myself.

Article written by Lee

The Lost Traffic Source – Picture Posts

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Pic Posts | Response: 0

Back in the day, pic posts were all the rage, taking less time for webmasters to build for and, less time maintaining however, in recent times we seldom hear of these traffic sources as more and more webmasters turn to the TGP’s in an effort to get traffic ‘quantity’ over ‘quality’ my personal feelings are that the pic posts of the past will soon start to make a comeback.

The Basics.

So, we know the history behind the Pic Post but what about the dynamics? How exactly do they work? That’s easy, you take an image, give it a HTML page and add the recip to the PP (Pic Post) you are submitting the page / image too along with a banner leading to your site. At this time, it would be prudent to add that, if you will be submitting to PP’s on a regular basis, you might also like to add the url to your main domain on the image in the lower right or left hand corner.

One other thing to take into consideration when using PP’s is that softcore is often better. With the readily available hardcore content on TGP’s the chances are, that the surfer has decided to visit the PP because there is not as much widely available hardcore content.

Cost Balance.

In addition to the relatively minimal amount of work required to create pages for the PP’s there are several other factors that make them much better then TGP’s and Free Sites the main one is that bandwidth usage is relatively low for a start, not to mention the fact that you can knock out hundreds / thousands of PP pages a day compared to the tens / hundreds of TGP and Free Sites.

Also, when looking at cost, the one factor people often forget is the submission time and, unlike the TGP model of traffic the vast majority of PP’s will actually encourage or, in some instances, prefer automated submissions, this means that you can target hundreds of PP’s in less time than it takes to submit a TGP or Free Site.

Marketing Basics.

Of course, as with any type of site that we build as webmasters, the main reason that surfers will visit our sponsors is the marketing ‘spin’ we give them, this is where the use of Alt Tags and Text can become extremely useful, bearing in mind, the surfer can already see the ‘larger picture’ on your PP page by utilizing Alt Tags and other SEO methods you can actually entice the surfer to click through to your sponsor and, get some very good rankings in the search engines at the same time.

Housekeeping.

Now you have started to use Picture Posts, as with any form of traffic you need to ensure you keep ‘accurate’ records of who is and who isn’t accepting your pages along with details stats on the amount of traffic each PP sends you and, you ultimately send off to your sponsors site.

Adjust everything you can. trial and error plays a MAJOR part in using PP’s just because you use softcore images one day and get 1000 hits to the page you created, that doesn’t mean that by using hardcore images the next day you will receive more or, less traffic, also being niche specific, unlike with the TGP game can have its disadvantages, use images that appear at first glance, to be ‘generalized’ then, over time adjust your advertising methods to reflect the niche of surfer you are targeting.

In addition to keeping records of the pages you create for the picture posts, you should also be sure to keep a record of where else you have used them, just because you are using them for the PP’s specifically, this doesn’t mean that you can not interlink these pages together and get some traffic of your own to them, does it?

Hopefully this article has given you some more insight into the world of the Picture Post and, if you try an experiment with this little known source of quality traffic, I feel certain you will be pleasantly surprised with the results you see.

Article written by Lee

Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 1

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

The last 2 weeks I have had a LOT of webmasters email and ICQ me regarding traffic and, not getting any sales.

So, I thought it would be a good idea to make a step by step tutorial on building your own surfer trap.

Now these are some of the arguments I have heard why people haven’t already built one over the last few weeks…

* To complicated to follow.
* I want surfers returning to my site.
* Don’t have the time.

The first two however seem to be the ones that I hear over and over again.

First of all, a surfer trap IS NOT complicated, in fact, it is probably one of, if not THE easiest type of site to build.

Secondly, Why get a surfer visiting your site over and over again if they are not paying for trial memberships? All you are doing is wasting your bandwidth.

Thirdly, A surfer trap can be built over a period of time, my very first trap was built within 1 hour my next was built in a day and my next one was built in a week.

So onto the start of building our surfer trap…

The first thing that I want you to do is to look at the Multi-Site FPA’s that ARS in the marketing section and choose ONE of them.

Download it, optimize the keywords on the FPA, make sure you add meta tags, titles descriptions and Alt tags on all images.

Once you have done this, you now need to search through ALL of the single site FPA’s and download and optimize one for each of the ARS sites that you have on your Multi-Site FPA. (Even the gay sites!)

This should take you 2-5 minutes for EACH FPA, any longer than that and you are doing TOO much work!

Once you have all of the single FPA’s downloaded, optimized and uploaded onto your server that is the first stage completed.

Article written by Lee

Obscenity – Put It To The Test

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

Regardless of how long any of us have been an adult webmaster we all need to be
aware of obscenity laws and, in particular how they affect our businesses
whether we think a hardcore photoset is ‘obscene’ or not ultimately, if you get
taken to court on obscenity charges the one thing you should be aware of is how
the courts will decide whether the images you are using will be classified as
obscene or not.

Testing Obscenity – The Miller Test.

The Miller test was developed in the 1973 court case of Miller vs. California
and in comprises of three parts ALL of which MUST be satisfied on order for
something to be deemed obscene by the courts. The Miller test is the ‘official’
method used by the United States Supreme Court for determining whether an
expression or a speech can be determined as obscene and, if deemed obscene, it
is not protected under the First Amendment and is therefore prohibited by law.

The Miller Test – Part One.

Part one of The Miller Test states something may be obscene if ‘the average
person, applying contemporary adult community standards, would find that the
work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest’ In essence, this
means that if the ‘average’ person on a jury or on the bench finds the work to
be deemed obscene then, it is. However for the court to rule something as
obscene it also has to be deemed obscene by the standards set in part two and
part three below.

The Miller Test – Part Two.

Part two of The Miller Test states that something is potentially obscene is
‘the average person, applying contemporary adult community standards, would
find that the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual
conduct’. Basically this is saying that if the images or speech is something
which is not practiced in a manner befitting your local community standards
then again, it may be obscene. However, as with part one of The Miller Test for
a court to find something obscene it needs to fall below the standards in part
three below.

The Miller Test – Part Three.

Part three of The Miller Test states that something is potentially obscene if,
‘a reasonable person would find that the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious
literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.’ This is pretty much where
you could potentially come unstuck after all, everyone has different sexual
tastes and because of this, just because something that may be widespread such
as ‘bare backing’ (to use as an example) could potentially be considered as
obscene if you happen to have a jury who are devout practicers of safe sex.

The Miller Test – Overview.

In essence The Miller Test is a useful guideline for webmasters when it comes
to operating our sites and specifically, when it comes to choosing the types of
content we utilize on them however, for the most part The Miller Test itself is
outdated. Since the early 70’s when this test was devised there have been many
sexual practices that were once deemed obscene that have become more a part of
everyday life and accepted in to society as whole thus, what once would (or
could) have been deemed obscene would no longer be in the same sense as
something that may be deemed obscene today could be found not to be in 5 years
time.

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

The Next Big Traffic Craze – Thumbnail Link Lists

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Link Lists | Response: 0

As adult webmasters are constantly thriving to create the next craze in traffic sources to garner sales from their sites it comes as no surprise that there is already talk amongst the ranks of the next big thing, what is this new idea? The Thumbnail Link List.

Thumbnail Link Lists – Re-Inventing The Wheel.

As the past year and a half have taught us as webmasters, regular TGP’s have almost become a thing of the past with more and more thumbnail TGP’s being created and submitted to daily, why then, has it taken so long for someone to think up the idea of the Thumbnail Link List? Quite simply I think it has been a case of to much has happened over the last 12 months in the adult industry for webmasters to think this idea up.

So What Is A Thumbnail Link List?

A thumbnail link list is in effect a way of displaying free sites on your own standard Link List by utilizing small thumbnail samples of the images contained within the free sites galleries, in fact, much the same way that a thumbnail TGP works however, instead of only listing single image galleries your link list will consist of links to individual free sites.

Much like the Thumbnail TGP traffic source, the thinking behind the Thumbnail Link List is that by showing your surfers what type of pictures the sites within your link list contain they will be more likely to visit the free site thus improving your CTR to your webmaster submitted sites and, ultimately, your site overall allowing you to manipulate the traffic to garner more sales for yourself as the Thumbnail Link List owner.

Submitting Your Site To A Thumbnail Link List.

Looking at the Thumbnail Link List idea from a webmaster who would be submitting your free sites for listing (and ultimately traffic) how do the rules of the Thumbnail Link List differ to that of the regular link list which we are all used to seeing, well for a start, the main difference will be that you either need to submit a thumbnail yourself or, enter the url to one of your gallery pages in addition to the main entrance to your free site, this will actually be the only significant change in how you operate your link list submissions compared tot he current link list method, however, as each Thumbnail Link List owner will have their own individual rules you should check before submitting as to what is required from you as a submitter.

Thumbnail Link Lists – Overview.

The whole Thumbnail Link List idea is one that, in all seriousness should mean more traffic not only for the submitters of the free sites but, also for the Thumbnail Link List owner themselves, by offering the surfers a preview of the content contained within the free sites they will be visiting they can simply reduce the amount of sites that do not appeal to them and focus more on the sites that do meaning that the webmasters who submit highly niched free sites to the links lists will now be able to benefit from a larger traffic base and ultimately, more sales.

Article written by Lee

Organizing Your Hard Drive And Server

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Hosting | Response: 0

We have probably all done it at some point, we get in such a hurry to upload our new site that we have just spent the last 20 minutes building that we don’t think about maintaining the site at a future date or, worse still, we need to change a site we built 6-8 months ago and can not remember where we uploaded it to.

By organizing your server from day one of your steps into becoming a webmaster you will, inevitably, save yourselves a lot of time in the long term future of our business model.

Lets take a look at how we can accomplish this ‘organization’ though.

On your hard drive you need to have a ‘central’ location for all of your online files and folders, what better place to keep this than in a folder named ‘Online’ of course, this is just an example but it will son become apparent to you that this is probably the most logical folder name to use.

Now, within this folder you are also going to need to have a few sub folders, i would suggest using a folder for each of the domains that you own so for example, for your first domain, you would name it myfirstdomain.com, your second would be named myseconddomain.com etc.

Within these domain folders you will also need to have a selection of sub folders again, I would suggest names for these folders such as /html/, /scripts/, /articles/, you are now well on the way to organizing your server.

In addition to these sub folders you will also need to create sub folders for your images that you will be using on your sites, I would suggest using the names /banners/ and of course, /images/ for these two folders, you now know that the /banners/ folder contains all of the buttons and banners you will use on your sites and the /images/ folder contains all of the .jpg and .gifs you will use. Inside the /images/ folder, it might also be advisable to create a sub folder called /thumbnails/ which, you can store your thumb nailed pictures in if required.

One other advantage to organizing your folders and sites in this manner is that over time, it will assist you when it comes to dealing with hot linkers. Instead of having to find the paths to all of your individual image directory, you know instantly where you put them, without the need of logging onto your server.

Ok so you now have a semi-organized folder structure on your HD, so far we hopefully have a folder structure that looks somewhat like this:

C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/

C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/html/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/scripts/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/

C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/html/Banners/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/html/Images/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/scripts/Banners/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/scripts/Images/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/Banners/
C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/Images/

So, hypothetically, if you created a article called ‘Article One’ you would find this in the following place on your HD:

C:/online/myfirstdomain.com/articles/articleone.html

See how easy that was to find on your hard drive?

Of course, on your server the folder structure will be no different so, your structure will be mirrored EXACTLY from your HD to your SERVER I.E.:

/usr/www/sites/myfirstdomain.com/articles/articleone.html

Not only will you make your server layout a lot easier to navigate but, it should, in theory, save you time when submitting your sites to the search engines, free for all’s etc as, in your head, you will already know the location to any single page.

Try this as an example…

You have created an article site called ‘Online Marketing’ on your third domain, where is it located?

That’s right, you will find it at http://www.mythirddomain.com/articles/onlinemarketing.html

How much time would you have usually spent logging into your server trying to find this page?

One other MAJOR advantage to keeping your server and HD structure the same is backing up your data now becomes easy as pie. you simply have to download your folders into the /online/ directory on your HD, then simply burn that entire directory to Cdrom.

Hopefully this article has given you some insight into how proper organization can be of use to you on your HD and on your server. If you are just starting out in the adult industry hopefully you will see that spending a little time to make a structuring system such as this can save you a lot of time long term.

One last question for you however, where would you find your article called ‘Marketing Shoes’ on your 56th domain name?

Article written by Lee

Over The Rainbow

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

So why is the gay community over the rainbow? As promised today I’ll finish up on the symbols that are prevalent in the gay community. Last week I mention the Pink Triangle and it’s political emergence. And technically, the rainbow flag has a similar political beginning.

I always love answering a question with another question (it is one of those annoying habits I have). So, when I am asked the “what does the rainbow flag stand for?” I look forward to the response when I ask, in turn, “what do YOU think it means?” Here are my top three favorite answers:

1 – “It’s colorful and gay people like colors.”

2 – “It’s a dance party thing”

3 – “Judy Garland sang Over the Rainbow you guys loved her a lot.” (This has to be my all time favorite.)

Well like any political symbol, it is a way to distinguish ourselves. But this time we look not to a place in history but we look at the world in general. No matter where you are, whether it is on 8^th street in NYC or Rue du Champe in Paris, there will be a gay person somewhere. Now, some may argue that not all cultures and societies will have homosexual present. And I say, “BULL”. They are just in the closet somewhere.

So in essence, gay men and women cross every racial and religious culture around the world. We come in all shapes, sizes and colors. So what better symbol to show that with than a rainbow, all colors coming together as one – as one community. No matter how culturally diverse our world is, the gay community is made up from a piece of each.

The rainbow flag and the uses of the rainbow, in the gay community, are diverse. If you see it flying outside on a restaurant wall, and it means it is a gay or gay friendly establishment. See a set of rainbow rings around a friend’s neck, it’s gay fashion accessories. And see a political march with rainbows on posters and flags, it’s a gay assembly.

Last week I insinuated that the pink triangle was not a symbol to over use in design. Well, in my opinion, the opposite is true with the rainbow and the rainbow flag. I am NOT saying run out and re do all your sites with rainbow backgrounds. No! But, I am saying that the nature of this political symbol is somewhat more flexible. We ourselves took the rainbow and made jewelry, publications, tee shirts and such. And just as the pink triangle, the rainbow will say that it’s ok to be here, you have friends inside or you have nothing to worry about here – be yourself, this place is for you.

So what have we learned? What some people think as silly symbols that gay people use, actually have an origin – and, a potent origin at that. I still ask, for your own good, that you use them wisely and not over do it. The more you throw symbols around willy-nilly, the more people will think you do not know what you are doing. And the more that the surfers thinks that, the less likely you are to make the sale and get your business to grow.

Article written by Gary-Alan