I was on the Marketing 101 seminar panel at the Phoenix Forum yesterday, along with Aly from The Best Porn, Kath from Klixxx, Sean from CCBill, Rainey from PrideBucks and Chad Belville from ChadKnowsLaw.com and we fielded a lot of questions from a packed room of both experienced webmasters and newbies and the most asked question was "What are the best ways to get traffic to my site?"

Why did I say it was the most asked question considering one would think that once it was asked and answered it wouldn't need to be asked again? Because there is no single answer to that question and the answer is probably different for everyone in the room. One attendee owned a site that did a wide variety of things including selling lingerie and sexy shoes, sexual aids, and an advice column. He said he's getting around 60,000 hits uniques a month but can't seem to find ways to get much more than that.

My first answer to him was to promote each section of the site independantly. He wrote that down because he hadn't thought of that one before. Next, I asked him how his advice column was set up and it was basically just a page where he answered questions but he made no attempt to monetize that actual section of the site on it's own. He thought it would just attract traffic and the surfer would look around the rest of his site once they got there. I suggested that he turn the advice column into an advice blog and everytime he talked about a product that would help spice up a couple's sex life he should link it directly to the page on his site where he sold that product. He wrote that one down too.

Now, obviously those answers should help him drive more traffic to his site, but wouldn't be the right answers for the others in the room that had pay sites or TGPs so the answer kept popping up. One lady in the audience said she had a pay site but couldn't get any traffic and didn't want to pay for it. Hello? I told her, no offense, but anyone that is running a pay site and has no budget for advertising has no business running a pay site. At that point a gentleman responded that he's very successful and has never paid for advertising, he pays people to post on the news groups for him. Now let me ask you this (and yes, I asked him too), what the heck would you call paying someone to post on newgroups if it wasn't marketing?

My point is that there is no one pat answer to how to get traffic to your websites. Yes, there are some common ways that would be good for everyone, like concentrating on optimizing your sites to get search engine traffic, but there are so many ways to get traffic and so many different types of web sites, that no one is going to be able to give a satisfactory answer to a room full of webmasters that works for all of them, unless we do a 24 hour seminar and answer each attendees question individually.

So, if you're wondering how to get more traffic and were hoping that I was going to answer your question here today I probably wasn't too helpful -- unless you have an advice column -- but what you need to do is analyze exactly what type of traffic you need and then start identifying ways to get that specific kind of traffic. If you ask another webmaster how he does it, make sure his sites are similar to yours, otherwise his answer probably won't be very helpful to you.

Just a short entry today since I'm about to get on a plane. I'll be at the Phonenix Forum for a few days, networking and doing all those other cool things we adult webmasters do at porn conventions. This is one of the few conventions I haven't been to before, so I'm looking forward to it. On Thursday I'll be one of the panelists on the Newbie Roundtable, so for any of you that read this before then, I hope to see your shining faces in the crowd.

My next few posts will be from my hotel room in Phoenix, so I'll be sure to let you know how it's going.

As anyone that knows me will have to admit, I go way out of my way to help newbies, but they also tell me I tend to be blunt. Sorry, that's my nature and it's not going to change, but I applaud any newbie with the courage to post and ask questions (even if they seem stupid to veterans) because I was a newbie once and understand what it's like. I also appreciate the ones that thank me for helping them and being honest with them and those are the ones that I will put even more effort into helping and I'm sure the other webmasters that take the time to offer advice feel the same way.

However, the one thing that bugs me the most is when newbies ask question that they can find the answers to by just searching either Google or the board's past threads first. Don't ask me what a TGP is, go look it up. Once you know what a TGP is and don't quite understand how they work or why it's important to set up trades, ask me, I'll be happy to answer, because I know that you've at least taken the time to find the basic answers on your own and and aren't just sitting at your computer waiting for someone to explain the next step to you.

It's no different than going to college. You start in kindergarten and work your way up. By the time you get to college you know the basics and now they can teach you the specifics of how to make a living in the world. They're job is not to teach you basic math or how to write a proper sentence. Can you imagine what a college math professors response would be to a student that asked how many sides a triangle had?

How many times have you heard someone say, or wondered to yourself whether they or you should switch sponsors because your conversions aren't what they used to be, or thought about promoting a sponsor's site, but were worried that since it was such a popular site and had been around a while that it probably wouldn't convert as well as you'd like?

We all hear the expression and I use it quite often myself... 'think outside the box'. I'm sure we all know what that means, but I wonder how many people really understand how that philosophy works when you're thinking about marketing an adult website. In "Climbing out of the box - Part Two", I'll tallk about ways to make money with mainstream products and services on our adult websites.

Please note that the following technique will only work for those webmasters that are proficient at doing their own design work, although for those that aren't, you can always hire someone that is, because I think the expense will be well worth it in the long run.

Let's suppose that you're promoting a sponsor's website that just isn't performing like it used to, or that you're considering promoting a website for a good sponsor, but the site has been around awhile and you're concerned that it's been overexposed because you see it promoted on all the TGPs. What can you do?

Build your own tours and banners.

Think about it for a minute. Yes, there are lots of sites out there that have been around for years and have tons of great content and retain members like a mother, but the problem is that every webmaster that promotes that niche is probably already promoting that sponsor, using the same banners and free content as all of their other affiliates, and sending everyone to the same exact tour, so naturally, conversions will be low.

But, if you build your own tour and banners, using the free content that the sponsor provides, no one will have seen the banners on your site before and if they click on the banner or a text link, they won't be landing on a tour they've possible seen before either. Even though the name would be the same, they won't recognize the tour and it probably won't even register that they've heard of the site before. The only thing you need is the ability to build a halfway decent tour which you would link to that site's join page.

I do particularly well using this method to promote a webcam site that has been around a long time and lots of webmasters promote, but instead of doing what almost every other webmaster does and sending my traffic directly to that site's tour, I register my own domain names and build my own webcam sites, covering all the popular niches and then linking to a somewhat generic join page that that particular sponsor has, so unless the surfer looks closely at the fine print, they think they're joining a webcam site they never heard of before.

Keep in mind that these tours don't need to be splashy, uber professional tours like the sponsor might already be using, and to be honest, they might convert better if they aren't. An excellent way to use the idea of building your own tours would be to focus on one particular model for example, and then list that small site on toplists that fit the niche. Since you won't simply be trying to list a site using the sponsor's url with your aff code, but will be listing a site with it's own domain name, you shouldn't have any problem getting sites like this listed in places that don't normaly list the large sponsor sites.

Another benefit might be focusing more tightly on a particular niche with your own design than the sponsor's site does. For example, if you want to promote a fetish site for a particular sponsor, but their own tour features a variety of fetishes, why not focus on just one, like feet, and build a small tour using foot fetish pics? Now, when you promote that site using pay-per-click sources, you will be promoting a very specific niche to a very targetted group if you focus your marketing strategy on 'foot fetish' instead of just 'fetish' in general.

NOTE: Be sure to check with your sponsors first to make sure they will allow you to do this and I'm sure they'll want to approve the tour you create before they allow you to use it, but I'm sure you'll find that this will work with most sponsors. I'm sure some of you promote sponsors that have a BYOT program and perhaps you just never knew what that meant before.

I've seen this question asked often on the boards and I personally feel that each has a place, but how do we decide where that place is? I think it comes down to what type of site we're promoting sponsor's sites on, what type of traffic those sites get and whether you're looking to make money on an ongoing basis with a rev share program and hope that the member renews his membership for several months or whether you prefer to make a flat $25 or so from a surfer that you presume is just going to download as much content as possible during his trial period and then move on to another website and do it all over again.

When you think about it the answer to the question doesn't seem quite as cut and dried as some webmasters might think. When asked this question, I often hear webmasters say, without skipping a beat, that they always go with rev share because it pays more in the long run. Personally, I think it depends on the website you're promoting as well as the niche. Does the website update often and with a lot of content each time so that the member won't get bored and move on? Is it a common niche like big boobs which is something the surfer might be interested in this month but next month he might decide he'd rather look at teens with great asses, or is it a niche like bondage, that would tend to attract a more loyal member? Does the members area have things like chat rooms, message boards and live webcam shows, like a typical amateur site, which would definitely retain members for several months because they feel like they're part of a community or feel a friendship towards the featured model, or is the site primarily pictures and videos and not much else to capture a members interest for an extended period of time?

Another very important factor that I always consider when deciding which type of program to promote is what type of site I'm using it on and where the traffic is coming from. If it's a TGP/hub, TGP gallery or freesite, I tend to favor cheap trial memberships and a flat rate program because I personally think it's less of a stretch to convince someone that is primarily looking for free pictures to signup at a paysite for $3.95 than it is to expect them to pay $29.95. My assumption is that the type of surfer that is looking at galleries and freesites is more than likely quite experienced at joining a website for 3 days and harvesting all the content he can and then cancelling before the trial converts, so I'd rather make the quick $25 when he joins instead of 60% of $3.95 and hoping he rebills at the end of the trial.

If, on the other hand, it's a review site or a website that gets a high percentage of traffic from search engines or paid adertising, I lean towards the rev share model. In these cases I feel that since the surfer is actively searching for something in particular there is a much better chance that he will join and stay a member for a few months and in that case, 60% of $90 is better than a flat $25.

What about free joins, where the surfer only has to provide an email address to gain access and the affiliate is paid $1 to $2 for every valid email address that is harvested? I like to use this type of program on exit pages. I don't like to use them alongside ads for paid memberships becuase I don't want to sidetrack the surfer and have him join a site like that and only make $1 if there was a good chance he would have joined a paysite instead. However, if the surfer has finished on my website and is leaving anyway, I'd still like to take one last shot at making something from him so I hit him with a popup. -- Yes, I know about popup blockers but I'm using a script that defeats IE sp2's blocker so exits are still working for me, but that's another blog entirely. -- Since he's leaving anyway and wasn't enticed to pay to join the sites I was adertising on my website, there's a good chance he may be willing to type in his email address, even if it's just out of curiousity. He may not know that he's about to be bombarded with email spam for his troubles, he just thinks he's going to get to look at some more free porn. You won't make a lot of money from him, but even if you don't have a lot of traffic, you might still make enough from free join sites to pay your hosting bill, but if your site does get a lot of traffic, those dollars add up.

That's a pretty common question, especially from newbies, but the answer isn't simple. Obviously there are a lot of variables to take into consideration, such as:

1. How much money do you want to make?
2. How popular is the niche?
3, What's the profit margin?
4. Where does the traffic come from?
5. Will you make money from recurring membership fees or a one-time payout?
6. Is it a paysite or a free site and if it's a paysite, do you own it?

We all know that without traffic our sites will fail, but do you need 100k hits a day to make decent money? You do if it's a TGP and even then you won't be getting rich, but in my humble opinion, you can make a living from a site that gets 500 hits a day.

For the sake of discussion, let's say that your answer to question #1 is that you want to make a decent living and you don't have a big family to support, and let's assume that for you, that's $50k a year. If that's not enough, then you'll obviously need to get more than 500 hits a day or keep your day job and use this as one hell of a good supplemental income. I realize that $50k a year is not what most of us would consider a comfortable income, but then again, 500 hits a day is just a drop in the bucket and easy to achive, so stay with me here and modify my traffic numbers accordingly.

Following through with my assertion that you can make a living from 500 hits a day, what would you need to achieve from that traffic to make $50k a year? Well, if you're an amateur that is willing to do live webcam shows, I'd say sign up at iFriends, build yourself a website featuring yourself along with some other models and then promote that website. You'll make $40 to $80 a signup from any visitor that has to join iFriends to see your live shows and videos and then you'll make a percentage of what they pay to join your fanclub once they get their free iFriends membership, and that can go on for months. An income of $100k a year is not hard to achieve using this scenario.

Let's say that you aren't interested in being your own content, which I'm sure is the case with most of us. I'm still going to use iFriends (from ClickCash) for my example, because I believe it's one of the easiest programs to promote and profit from. There are others of course, but I'm just going to focus on one to illustrate my points.

So, here's the formula. 500 hits per day + x = $50k a year. What is x? Well, 'x' is a successful program that pays enough per signup and converts well enough to generate $50k a year.

The question now becomes, is it possible to find a program that will help us achieve x? Sure it is, but you'll need to combine it with the ability to generate very targetted traffic. I'm not going to go into all of the ways that can be done, it's been talked about over and over before, but pay-per-click advertising, and buying banner ads on sites that tightly fit your niche and aren't going to charge more than you can make back plus a profit, are two of the best ways.

Using my iFriends model, you would need to achive a conversion rate of approximately 1:140, which is definitely not hard to do. With 500 hits a day and a conversion rate of 1:140 you would generate 25 signups a week. The payout would be $40 for the first 10 and $45 for the next 15 for a total weekly payout of $1075 per week. Multiply that by 52 weeks and you have a total annual income of $55,900 a year. During the year you could have spent $5,000 on advertising, $900 on hosting and bandwidth, (assuming you were building a lot of tgp galleries) and still make the projected $50k. $5000 a year in well spent advertising can go a very long way.

Keep in mind, that with ClickCash, the per signup payout increases as your weekly signups increase, doubling your daily traffic will more than double your annual income and further increases in traffic increase your income exponentially. For example, with 20k hits a day and the same conversion ratio I used in my example, you would make well over a million dollars a year.

Note: It's doubtful that you will achieve a conversion rate of 1:140 by sending traffic directly to iFriends. I personally suggest building your own websites, using iFriends' content and driving traffic to those sites. Personally, I've found that method works well for many sponsors. If there are 5000 webmasters all promoting the same paysite tour, design your own and then just link to the join page from your site.

If you want to make money promoting webcams but need a website built, click here.

I replied to a post on a board a couple days ago and it got me to wondering about something I see over and over again, and that's newbies posting that they've had their website up for 3 weeks and still haven't made any money yet. For some reason people think that running an adult business is going to be easy. Why is that? This is a business just like any other other business and in some ways is harder, in my opinion.

If you wanted to be a doctor, you'd go to college for about 8 years and then you'd intern at a hospital for a couple more before you started making any real money and you'd have spent a least $100k during that 8 years to learn how to make money which you'd probably get in the form of loans that you'd have to spend several years paying back.

If you wanted to become a graphic designer, you'd go to college for 4 years and then you'd get a shitty job at a design agency somewhere making about as much as the kid selling tennis shoes at the mall, and after a couple years of learning the ropes, and assuming you had some talent, you might eventually start making some decent money. So, why is it that after a few months of trying to start an adult website business, newbies start complaining that it's taking too long?

The only job you can get that is easy to learn how to do and will give you a steady paycheck right away is something simple like flipping burgers or taking tickets at the movie theater. If it's simple and any chimp can do it, you'll be paid accordingly.

Anything worthwhile takes time and a lot of effort. So you need to decide. Do you think it's worth spending a few years and some money learning this business and eventually having a chance to make a very comfortable living, or do you want something easy that pays for a tiny aparment and an old car that smokes and a bank account that never gets over $500 before you have to spend some of that money fixing the car that smokes?

One of the most asked questions on any board has got to be, where can I buy traffic for my website and who's reputable? The pat answer is 'don't do it' followed by mudane comments about how if the traffic was any good they wouldn't be selling it anyway, or it never worked for me, so it must be a waste of money. Although I do agree with those answers in general, the truth is that there are ways to utililze even the worst quality traffic. However, that's not what I want to talk about today. The point I'd like to make is that when we say 'buy traffic' we are really talking about any form of traffic that costs us money and is not strictly limited to broker traffic that usually is in the form of exit popunders, blind links and 404 errors. Pay-per-click advertising is certainly 'buying traffic' and as most of us know, can be among the best you can find. Another way to 'buy traffic' is to pay for advertising. It can include PPC, but would also include buying text links and banners spots as well as offline advertising, like print publications. If you are paying to get a customer in the door of your website, you're 'buying traffic'.

Personally, I've found buying advertising to be the easiest way to get good targetted traffic and you don't have to worry about it going away -- like SE traffic can when Google decides to dance -- unless you stop paying for it. Certainly, you'll need to keep track of your ROI and drop any advertising that doesn't work, but once you find a good source, as long as you continue to pay, you'll continue to get good quality traffic.

The first thing that comes to mind when someone thinks about buying advertising is to look for big sites that have lots of traffic and have an 'advertising' link on their site somewhere. The problem with that is that usually, they've priced the advertising at the point where it's not going to be cost effective for the average webmaster and is primarily useful for large companies with very big advertising budgets that are interested more in branding than direct financial results and have allocated a certain portion of their advertising budget for that purpose. So, now you're probably wondering how you find websites to advertise on if they don't sell advertising already. The answer is that almost any webmaster will sell advertising on his site but doesn't actively do it because he doesn't think he has enough traffic to justify it. The way I look at it, if your site has enough traffic that it can produce even only a few sales a month for me, you've got enough traffic. When you find a website that you like and you think is getting enough traffic to make it worth your time to pursue, send an email to the webmaster and ask them if they'd consider letting you advertise on their site. Note: If a website has an Alexa ranking of 200,000 or higher, they're worth a shot, IMO.

Anyone can buy traffic this way and you don't need a large advertising budget to consider trying it. The truth is that spent wisely, even $200 a month can produce excellent results and if you reninvest some of what you make in profits each month, you should be able to add to your budget as each month goes by. In the beginning, you might spend $200 a month to make $500, but soon, you'll soon be spending $2000 a month to make $5000 and eventually you'll be spending $20k a month or more. The old saying "It takes money to make money" is very true, but it doesn't mean you need to be rich to get started.

So, the next time you're out surfing the net, looking for sites to trade traffic with, or checking out the competition, or just looking for some good porn to... well, never mind that last one, I know none of us actually look for porn to jerk off to. wink, wink, nudge, nudge -- keep on the lookout for advertising opportunities. If you find a website that has some logical synergy with one of your sites and they aren't already promoting something similar to your site, fire off an email. Tell the webmaster you like his site and tell them that you'd be interested in paying them to put a text or banner ad in a good spot on their site. You'll be surprised how many webmasters will be happy to take as little as $50 a month.

I posted on a webmaster board recently about a banner that was running on that site that disturbed me. I was mostly joking, but the banner featured a closeup of a woman's face, focused primarily on her eyes. I'm guessing the idea was to mesmerize me into clicking the banner, but it didn't work.

There were a couple things that bothered me about the banner, one of which was that the company's name was very small and turned so it ran vertically up the right side of the banner and unless you twisted your neck, it was almost impossible to read, and the other, the one that really got me, was the chick's eyes. They looked like black holes. They weren't blue and alluring, they were black and dark and definitely weren't having the desired effect on me, assuming that the desired effect was to get me to click on the banner.

We've been hearing for years that banners just don't work as an advertising tool anymore, and yet there they are, on just about every website you go to, some of them even blinking and talking to you. Is it true that they don't work, and if so, why are webmasters still using them? Personally, I think banners do work, but only when they're designed well and used effectively.

When we compare the click through stats for banners and compare them to the stats for well written text links, we will usually find that the text links work far better. But, is that because text links work better than banners, or is it because most of the banners just suck? I think a properly written text link will out perform most banners on most web pages, but there are lots of places that a well-positioned banner will work very well. If you are building a TGP gallery, for example, and you put a banner at the top of the page, above the thumbs, it's probably going to have a poor click-through rate, but if you start with some enticing text to set the mood, like "If this babe doesn't get your dick hard, you're gay or need Viagra. Click here to watch her get ass fucked in this free video.", I can almost guarantee you'll get a decent click rate. Does this mean you should leave the banner off completely? No, it just needs to hit the surfer at the right time. If you start with a text link and then show some thumbs and then hit them with the banner, it will be much more effective, especially if the banner isn't the standard 468x60, but a nice big odd-sized banner, and if the banner knock their socks off.

Another reason a lot of banners perform poorly on galleries and freesites is because the webmaster gives away too much hardcore and the banner certainly isn't going to get a surfer's attention if it's sitting in the middle of a bunch of thumbs showing hardcore sucking and fucking. But, if you keep the hardcore to a minimum and focus more on using the gallery pics to tease the surfer and then slam them with a killer hardcore banner, especially if you've built it yourself and used the same chick that's featured on your gallery and save the most explicit shot for the banner, I assure you, the banner will be effective.

Hey, there's a novel concept, don't use the sponsor's tired old banners, build your own. I've written about that before and also espouse building your own tours, but I digress.

Another big reason banners aren't effective and doesn't necessarily prove that banners are worthless, is something I mentioned earlier in this article. Designing an effective banner requires talent. Just putting a sexy picture and a line of text that says "Our content is the best" isn't going to cut it. First, you've got to get the viewers attention, but once you've got it, you've got to make them click on the banner. If I can't tell what the hell you're trying to sell me, I'm not going to click on the banner just because there's a pretty girl on it. There are probably already plenty of pictures of pretty girls on the page I'm looking at already anyway.

One of the biggest points I think most webmasters miss is one of the main reasons large companies still pay huge amounts of money to display banners on websites. Branding. Which brings me to another point I made earlier about the name of the site being difficult to read. If you're banner prominently displays the name of your website and also lists the url with the .com on the end, it doesn't need to be clicked to be effective. Building brand awareness should be an important part of any marketing campaign, especially if you are advertising a service oriented website or a paysite. Surfers won't always be in the mood to check out what you're advertising at the specific moment they see your banner or won't be in the market for your service at that particular time, but if you get your site's name in front of them often enough or prominently enough that they at least read it and remember it, at some point you might still make a sale when they type it in some day.

Lately it seems that the new darling of adult webmasters is blogging. They aren't doing it because they like to write and want to share information, they're doing it because they think it's a way to make money. I've even seen posts lately discussing how blogging is the next TGP.

Blogs are an excellent way to get search engine traffic, because as we all know, search engines love text and what is a blog after all? Lots of text. And, therein lies the problem and the subject of this blog entry.

There are a lot of good blogs on the Internet. Some are informative and others are entertaining in one way or another. But, will a saturation of blogs really be of any benefit to anyone when everyone is doing it and most of them are incompetent at it? A good blog serves a purpose and in most cases, the goal is to get more and more people that like to read your blog and return often to do so. But, if the blog isn't updated frequently and isn't enjoyable to read, the benefit would only come from a one time visit and not repeat traffic.

Is that the goal of most webmasters that are starting blogs? To simply spam the search engines with their pages that are used to promote something? My observation is that most webmasters can't write. All you need to do is to read the posts on adult webmaster boards to see that. They can't spell, they don't have a clue what the word 'punctuation' means and in many cases, they can't string several word together into a logical thought. So what the hell business do they have writing a blog? None. They have no more business writing a blog than some guy that buys a $100 digital camera at Walmart has being a photographer. They will both be producing garbage. Unfortunately, it's the garbage that will ultimately make the medium less valuable to the webmasters that are actually competent to use it.

Way back in 'the day' it was possible to build a TGP gallery with some teaser content on it and sell memberships to paysites. Nowadays it's become extremely difficult to do that. Why? Because so many webmasters don't know how to build a gallery that converts so they think the thing to do is to put a bunch of hardcore pictures on the gallery. As most of us know, all that does is give surfers something to jerk off to instead of enticing them to join our paysites. The Internet is glutted with free porn, and now we're stuck finding more creative ways to make money in spite of it.

The same thing will happen with blogs. Soon, every webmaster will have a blog and 99% of them will be complete garbage. They won't be interesting or well written and in most cases, they won't be updated often enough if at all. Eventually there will be hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of crappy blogs flooding the net and clogging the search engines and the webmasters that know how to use a blog will get less and less benefit from them.

Well, I've been posting on the adult webmaster boards for a few years and had started writing some articles for another blog site that never got off the ground so I decided to start my own blog site. If you like it, great, and if you don't, I don't give a rat's ass.