i.love.bs

October 3 2011 by masteryan in marketing |No Comments

Spend a couple of minutes on any of the free tube sites, like xhamster, pornhub, or porntube, and one question immediately comes to mind – why would anybody pay for porn? There are now thousands of tube sites and the largest tubes have thousands of full-length porn videos for FREE. Watch as many hours of free porn as you want with no obligation.

For people that own porno paysites, the tubes are a depressing subject, and they are a regular daily topic on adult webmaster forums like gofuckyourself.com. Most adult webmasters blame the tubes for the rapid decline of the porn industry over the last few years, which resulted in many major adult producers going out of business. And they wouldn’t be wrong.

From a surfer’s perspective, tubes are the answer to all of the problems with porn sites – hidden charges, weak member’s areas, and a lack of variety. Visit a tube and you get all the variety you can handle with zero fees. You don’t have to join multiple sites to enjoy three different niches. You just click a different category and you are there.

The problem with all of this is that porn still has to be produced, and production costs money. This point is being overlooked for now, but it won’t be long until the content sources dry up and surfers will be looking for fresh content. Right now the only producers that can afford to mass-produce new content are the large companies. They of course are also the companies that own the large tubes. They supply their own paysites and tubes with fresh content every day. But what kind of content are they delivering? Companies like Mofos and Reality Kings are churning out over-produced, vanilla content. This is good for the newbie surfer, but experienced porn surfers get bored with this type of content fast. Unfortunately, their desire to surf for free bankrupted the studios that were producing anything else!

Now in 2011, the industry consists of a very small number of huge companies and a huge number of very small companies. The huge companies are earning most of the porn revenue, while the small site owners continue to struggle. As time goes on, this situation will only get worse.

PornCMS has always been focused on catering to the solo models and solo proprietors of the adult industry. The tools we’ve added to the cms – like webcams, pay-per-view and blogs – were primarily added to help solo models succeed in this business. PornCMS is a great and simple platform for publishing a solo site, but how does that help when the small sites are being killed by tubes and huge production companies?

The most important tool out of all the modules on PornCMS is the webcam. This is the only content on your website (or any website) that can’t be copied, stolen, or posted on tubes. As a solo model or solo producer, your webcam is the one and only weapon you have that can allow you to survive and prosper in the adult business.

Many PornCMS clients are already taking advantage of the webcam tool with daily or weekly cam shows. Some clients broadcast their show free, while others require a membership or charge pay-per-view. The webcam module is easy to use and clients are very happy with it.

However, what most clients are not happy with is their traffic. PornCMS provides some tools to help gauge traffic, like the Google Analytics module, Dashboard stats, and campaign tracking, although these tools don’t actually generate traffic. We have a marketing department that can help, MarketMofo, but most clients don’t have the budget to hire outside marketers.

In our free marketing pdf – PornCMS Guide to Solo Model Profits – we encourage site owners to participate on adult boards and spend time on free cam sites, like MyFreeCams, to build their brand. We also encourage models to interact as much as possible with their members.

As the glut of free porn grows every day, a new way of marketing solo sites has emerged – fight fire with fire! A majority of porn surfers, and thus porn buyers, are spending their time on tube sites, torrent sites, and porn sharing message boards. Since that is where the customers are surfing, a key strategy of solo model marketing should be to join and engage on these free sites.

We know these surfers are looking for free porn, so give it to them. Upload and share your videos and photos with free porn surfers. Let them get to know you and turn them into fans. Then market the one thing they can’t get for free – your webcam. Post a title screen at the end of every shared video with your cam show times and website address. Customize your signature on the boards with your cam schedule. Focus all the time on bringing people back to watch your cam show and you will turn free surfers into paying customers.

Here’s a list of sites where I recommend you join and share:

PornBB (surfer board)
My Dirty Hobby (amateur sharing site)
FreeOnes (surfer board & free galleries)
xHamster (free tube & partner program)
PornUsers (surfer board)
WhatBoysWant (surfer board)
Cheggit (torrent site)
Planet Suzy (surfer board)
Amateur Pile (surfer board)
Peachy Forum (surfer board)
Link Indexxx (illegal sharing site)
Free Porn Source (surfer board)

Oh, and here’s a Public Service Announcement you can share:

Maintaining Brand Presence

March 31 2011 by masteryan in marketing |No Comments

I get so many emails from clients wanting to know the sure-fire way to market their site for conversions. It can be done, even in adult, but its a lot of work to get there.

The tricky thing about porn marketing is that the market changes all the time. Every site has a different customer, so you have to try all types of marketing to see what converts the best. Its a never-ending trial-and-error and costs a lot of money.

I always tell clients that 20% of a site budget is development and 80% is marketing.

There are still millions of customers buying porn every day – online and offline – but the market is completely flooded with competition. It takes massive effort to make your sites stand out. Not only do you have to design an attractive tour that will convert, you must also develop a known brand in your niche. That means having a constant presence on as many sites in your niche as possible.

Ok, so how do you maintain your brand presence in a flooded market? This requires a mix of free site submissions, member banner trades, and paid ads.

Banner trades and paid ads take some hunting to find the right deals. Many paysites (large and small) will rotate your banner in their member’s area, provided your site matches the needs of their members and it converts. Just find sites in your niche and send an email to the webmaster. About 10-20% will respond.

Paid ads work the same but getting banner approval is a lot easier. Member area banner trades pay the site owner an affiliate commission. However, a paid ad is guaranteed money for a site owner. You can buy pay-per-click ads from many sources these days, but what a lot of marketers don’t realize is that any banner trade can be a paid ad. If you really want your banner in the member’s area of another site, or in a good spot on a free site, offer the site owner some money. The response rate for an email offering money is around 99.999%.

Free site submissions are rather easy. Conversions from free sites happen every second of every day, but your success will depend on whether your offer meets the demands of the customer. For instance, you can’t sell a leather/bondage paysite on a teens tgp or on an asians tube. The offer must meet the audience.

Here’s a couple tools to make this part of your day really simple:

Chameleon Submitter – Use this tgp submitter to easily post every day to hundreds of tgp sites. The result is usually a lot of traffic. Just make sure your fhg page is simple and unique. Don’t try submitting a gallery or template you posted for affiliates. Every tgp owner has already seen it dozens of times.

Tube Sites Submitter – Tubes are an unavoidable channel in the adult world. They are by far the most popular destination on the web to watch porn. If you want to capture some of those tube surfers, your video must stand out and your offer must be cheap. Few tube surfers will go from watching hundreds of hours to free porn to paying for a paysite UNLESS the offer is too good to pass up. You can’t charge $30 a month for content he gets for free. You can charge $10 a month for just about anything.

For more info and help contact Market Mofo

Delimiter Sucks Ass

October 14 2010 by masteryan in servers |2 Comments

On my last post I mentioned that I moved some of my hosted CMS accounts to Delimiter VPS. After two months of hosting I have switched off of their accounts. The reason for this is incredibly excessive downtime.

I set up servers in Atlanta with mirror servers in Amsterdam to protect the sites from outages. This turned out to be a crucial necessity. Both of those facilities had multiple downtimes of 10 hours or more and both had uptime under 90% for the 2 months I used the Delimiter service. This is in stark contrast to the 99% uptime they claim on their website. Luckily both facilities never went down at the same time!

In over a decade of renting servers I have never seen such poor service. I had good failover service from EdgeDirector that ensured my clients’ sites had minimal downtime, but this could have been a disaster. Other webmasters have also been affected by Delimiter’s poor service (read here) so if you are planning to rent some VPS servers, save yourself the trouble and stress and AVOID DELIMITER.

The Right to Choose

August 16 2010 by masteryan in marketing |No Comments

I just spent 20 minutes paying a $15 invoice at a VPS hosting facility. I had to click through several pages of their billing website until I was finally sent to Paypal. Then after I paid I got flooded by emails:

* Sale transaction has been accepted
* Receipt for Your Payment to {Host}
* {Host} invoice #xxx (ID xxx) dated 16-Aug-2010
* Your subscription #xxx (xxx.com) has been activated
* Payment #xxx (ID xxx) dated 16-Aug-2010 has been received by {Host}
* Payment received for invoice #xxx (ID xxx) from 16-Aug-2010

How many emails do I need? I put in a support ticket about this excessive spam, but they didn’t respond. Ce la vie.

Anyways, I’m using VPS hosting now for Porn CMS client accounts so I can isolate each install and manage my costs. I’ve automated the installation which makes things easy.

Last weekend, I signed up to my first Delimiter VPS – UPDATE: READ DELIMITER SUCKS ASS — account due to the frustrations and pricing of the host discussed above. To my surprise, the server was set up instantly. I received ssh login within seconds of submitting payment. Their billing is set up as a Paypal subscription, so I don’t have to think about it every month. First impression, way less overhead working with this host.

I have no idea whether Delimiter will work in the long run. Only time can tell if a host is any good – or will stay good. I’m just glad I have a choice.

What a nice capitalist world we live in that allows me to choose between that first mind-sucking, over-spamming VPS host and others like Delimiter.

The Western world wouldn’t have progressed very far without the right to choose. Even in this Internet Age, its unlikely that we would have progressed very far if we didn’t have the choice back at the beginning between UUNet, PSInet and later AOL. Most likely, the suckiest one would have dominated and slowly killed the net.

Come to think of it, without the right to choose, I doubt tecnology would have come far enough for me to even write this blog. Deep thought for a Monday morning. lol

History of the Internet

Traffic 101 v.2010

August 7 2010 by masteryan in marketing |No Comments

Traffic patterns in porn have definitely changed over the last few years.

I can remember a time, not so long ago, when a site could hit it big with some in-house TGP and links work. Way back in 2003, I sold 100 memberships a day with a simple design and packaged content (Mount Filth) by slamming the TGP sites with photos. On GFY, they call those the “golden days”.

header of old Mount Filth lol

And now, 10 years after the millennium, everything has changed..

traffic cop

Before mid-2008, attaining Traffic was mainly the work of in-house staff requesting links and banners on other websites. Success was based on man-hours and affiliates only played a small role.

In the last two years, the web hit adolescence. The stumbling, learning-to-walk years are over and things are starting to take shape. The Internet is now finally a true web of connected humans.

As a result of the socialization of the web, once-invisible websites gained power simply by being popular. Getting shared on Facebook, getting re-tweeted, or just simply getting mentioned in email is what makes a site successful. Yes, the web is now a popularity contest.

And just like high school, only the popular survive.

Few people own sites that serve 1 million users a week. Those that do make bank. Unless you own a very popular website or two, the choice for a paysite owner trying to grow becomes: 1. do i spend my time and money building a socially popular site; or 2. do I spend my time and money trying to get these popular site owners to link to me?

Since its nearly impossible to build a popular site (or all sites would be popular, hence none, etc..), we usually must take the 2nd path — get links on popular sites.

And that leads us to the sudden power of affiliates.

Affiliates own all of the heavy traffic sites — (because you don’t) — So the key to good traffic is to attract lots and lots of good affiliates.

Trying to get links on popular sites in your niche is the first place to start. Those sites are spending thousands a day for their incoming traffic. If you can convince them that your site is worth a link, you can benefit from their traffic efforts.

Review sites are also in the affiliate group and always the best converting. Reviewers spend time visiting your website, and their descriptions (even the bad ones) sell a lot of memberships.

When you finally attract a good crowd, don’t forget to keep in touch with them. The web is social, so be social. Email your affiliates and members regularly to keep them clicking back to the site.

For the sites, I manage (see MarketMofo) I do weekly member newsletters and monthly affiliate newsletters packed with all the new content.

Finally, I better mention, traffic sourcing in 2010 requires an affiliate program. If you don’t have an affiliate program, what are you doing online? lol

A picture is worth a thousand words, or about .00003 cents.

August 5 2010 by masteryan in marketing |No Comments

I love erotic art. I think photography is one of the most important elements of an adult site (hence my nearly decade old site – dailynudesblog.com). Erotic photos set the mood of a fantasy and give far better detail than video.

Today I was thinking about the monetary and intrinsic value of erotic photos. TeenDreams.com claims to have well over 1 million photos on its website. A monthly subscription costs around $30, which makes their photos worth about 3 cents per thousand (that is, if you ignore the 2,000+ movies).

I don’t want to make this into an ad for Teen Dreams, since there are at least a dozen sites on the web with that content count. I was more interested in evaluating the usefulness of such a low value asset.

The whole point of the online adult industry is to satisfy the fantasies of horny visitors. I’m usually disappointed by adult videos. It seems every photographer wants to get as much zoomed anus as possible in each video. My taste is more about the teasing and tempting. So for me, the set up is the most important part of any adult photo set or video. I want to be driven into the heart and heat of my fantasy. Everything else is just sticky random skin.

A good photoset can set up a fantasy in a surfer’s head much more vividly than actually showing every detail of the fantasy in a video. A photoset allows someone the luxury of adding their own details. But you don’t even need a whole photo set to set the mood, a really good single photo will do the trick too.

In site promotion, the goal is to trigger a fantasy and get the surfer interested enough to seek satisfaction. For example, if a guy sees a photo of a voluptuous girl standing by a tree in revealing lingerie, he may have a fantasy about being there with her. Maybe she’s the daughter of a neighboring farmer, or a friend who stayed overnight. If the fantasy is real enough to him, he will spend the time, energy, and money to seek more content of this girl.

Of course, this scenario assumes the surfer is intelligent enough to have fantasies. I’m not an expert in psychology, so I don’t know if all guys can have fantasies. However, I think we can safely assume that well-paid professional men with high credit limits have enough brainpower for it.

(and that’s our target market after all..)

Simple Dev Server Routing Setup

July 27 2010 by masteryan in servers |No Comments

I was trying to decide whether to build dev server capabilities into Porn CMS.

(dev server = non-live test & build server)

The plan was to make a script-based switch to push visitors to the dev or live server. That script would require at least a config page and some IP storage to manage the dev users.

Then somehow, as I prepped the whiteboard for the project, it came to me:

HOSTS file lol

Just go to the hosts file on your local machine and add the 2 lines below. One line points to the dev server and one line points to the live server. Changes to the hosts file are active immediately after saving the file.

# [dev routing example] # 69.175.85.202 alexander.fedorovhd.com #dev #69.175.111.18 alexander.fedorovhd.com #live

The first line above points to the dev server for alexander.fedorovhd.com – a new site I’m building. The second line points to the live server. When I’m working on the dev server I comment out the ‘live’ server. And when I want to view the live site, I comment out the dev server.

The only thing missing is a few lines of rsync code to push the updates from the dev server to the live server. And maybe also a nice script to manage the local hosts file (other than notepad).

——–
The example above is a working example. You can use it in your own local hosts file. When you visit alexander.fedorovhd.com you will see a yellow DEV SITE tag at the top left of the page if the dev server IP is active. Comment the dev server line and uncomment the live server line, and the DEV SITE tag disappears.

This is a permanent dev server so the IP shouldn’t change. If it does, come back here and I’ll post an update.

FURTHER READING

EDIT HOSTS FILE – MAC OSX 10+
EDIT HOSTS FILE – WINDOWS XP / VISTA / W7

Pricing Yourself Out

July 26 2010 by masteryan in marketing |No Comments

chinese-beggar The recession of 2009 affected the entire world. There are very few (if any) businesses and households that didn’t feel the strangling effect of the worldwide credit crunch. With less credit available, many households slashed spending. As a result, many companies were forced to slash prices to attract customer.

Then we look at the porn business. Sales of adult paysite memberships are the lowest they’ve been since at least 2002. Yet site owners refuse to lower prices. In fact, some even raised their prices to try to make up for the loss of sales volume.

Take, for example, my ex-client (who stiffed me for $18k) – Matt’s Models. When sales started their rapid decline in mid-2008, Matt raised the monthly price by $10. In his mind, this price increase meant that it would take fewer memberships to make the same money. As a result, sales declined at an even faster rate and his revenue plummeted.

Clearly, raising prices in a recession is not a smart move.

Why not satisfy your customer’s need to save money by lowering prices? If a cash-strapped father of three needs a porn fix, is he going to choose a $30 site or a $15 site? Of course he’ll choose to save $15. The savings may even allow him to subscribe to another site at the same time.

I tested this theory in the real world on two of the sites I manage for EroBabeCash. The main site, EroBerlin, had a reasonable monthly price of $19.95. However, seeing the summer slowdown take effect, I suggested that we lower the price to $14.95 a month.

We saw the effects immediately. This small discount resulted in a 50% increase in the new sales daily average (from 30 a day – to 45 a day). It also affected the rebills, which increased 10%.

On EroBabeCash’s other paysite – Jan Nudes – I didn’t change the price so much as changed the price psychology. We launched the site with a price of $19.95 for 60 days (2 months). Sales were slow – at between 0 and two a day. In an attempt to change the fate of the site, I adjusted the price to $9.95 for 30 days. Same price just shorter time period. The result of this test was also immediate. Jan’s site had more sales within hours; and new sales shot up to 10+ a day.

The rebill volume on both sites increased due to these changes. To me it says that members are more likely to rebill if the price doesn’t gouge their wallet.

Subscription pricing affects the non-porn world too. I am a big fan of Tom Green. He’s a funny guy and very innovative. He had his own show on MTV several years ago, but TV work is hard to get. So rather than beg for a network TV gig, he now broadcasts his own late-night style talk show from his house.

I respect the fact that Tom bypassed the network TV racket and launched his own web-based TV show, so I became a member of his site about two years ago. Membership to TomGreen.com – with access to his broadcast archive – is only $5.95 a month. A reasonable price by anyone’s standards.

I only have time to visit his site a few times a year, but I happily let the subscription rebill every month. After all, $5.95 doesn’t even register as an expense.

What would have happened if Tom Green had charged $20 a month for a membership? Would I have stayed a member for two years? Its unlikely that i would have allowed that high price to rebill even once, let alone 20+ times. By setting a reasonable and affordable subscription price, Tom has earned $120 of my dollars (and counting).

Considering that most people are looking to save a few bucks these days, less can really be more. Guys don’t need less porn than before. If anything demand for porn is higher than ever. They are just more weary about spending money.

The demand today is not for more (or better) porn, the demand today is for better pricing. Lowering your prices will improve customer satisfaction, increase new sales, increase rebills, and help your site grow during this period of global decline.

NOTE: If you follow this advice and lower your price, add a comment below and get some attention. One more backlink never hurt anyone.

Where’s the Eyeballs

May 14 2010 by masteryan in marketing |2 Comments

I don’t think its a secret that the adult industry has gone through massive shrinkage in the last year. Many people are blaming the tube sites and the credit crunch economy, but it looks to be a lot more than that.

The main and only problem with adult sales is lack of interest. Between 1999 and 2007 most adult sites saw massive, easy growth and many site owners made a lot of money without much effort. It was easy because there was very little to do online. Guys checked their mail, maybe read some news, and then there was nothing to do but watch porn.

Today there are thousands of sites vying for your online time. Facebook, Youtube, and more small niche sites than you can count. Even my wife spends a couple hours a day on a Thai gossip site that didn’t exist a few years ago.

So the problem is not the economy or free porn, the problem is that porn isn’t interesting enough to attract eyeballs anymore.

I know I focused this post on the adult industry, but this is a global Internet problem. Ever since I started building and marketing sites over a decade ago, every client and every marketing book said their goal was eyeballs. Its not a new concept, now its just a lot harder to achieve.

In today’s oversaturated web it takes a lot more than a gimmick or a viral video to attract a loyal audience. Sure you can find some traffic with a good viral video, but if you want to succeed on the web, you have to get that audience coming back daily – or better yet hourly!

In theory the solution is simple: loads and loads of unique and interesting content. Easy in theory but not so easy in practice. After all, content is not cheap to produce or to publish.

Many of the web leaders have relied on user-generated content. Look at Youtube, xHamster, Facebook, and Myspace. Visitors come back daily – and some actually never leave – because those sites are constantly refreshed with new content.

User-generated content is good for traffic but it doesn’t do anything for sales. Nobody wants to pay a site to see content that the site didn’t publish. So the problem (or maybe the solution) to massive online sales becomes ‘how do you create constantly refreshed content for your visitors?‘

This of course depends on your niche, interests and audience, but if you want to survive on the web in the future, you better figure it out!

had to waste my time today pursuing a $95 chargeback from @waynehobdy because this asshole is too stupid to make money with his porn site.

i.love.bs

..and tech is all bs

There’s no money in porn.