When optimizing your site for better results, you need to devise a marketing strategy, for which data research is a fundamental part of such strategy. Now, first of all, let’s define a marketing strategy in a very simple way by declaring these basic steps:

1) First of all, define your budget and existing assets
2) Define what is known as USP (Unique Selling Proposition). This is what you’re going to sell and why potential buyers should choose your product or service over other seller’s products.
3) Define your target and how to reach it that market niche
4) Define realistic goals with realistic time frames

As you can see, very basic, and nothing out of this world, even people that never opened a marketing book knows most of this in an instinctive or logical way.

So, we started our great business and we have a basic marketing plan. Now, even though this applies to online and brick and mortar businesses, we’ll stick to adult marketing strategy for online businesses.

In online business, SEO is crucial. I won’t go deep on SEO since it’s not the purpose of this article, however there’s an obvious direct relation with the subject: not only you can target certain keywords, but you can target different Search Engines. Obviously, you’ll want Google traffic, like everybody else. But… what about the other Search Engines and what about the results for each one?

Let’s see, the key for data research is to have the best possible data research tools. There are many in the market, ranging from $10 or so to 4 or 5 figures software. However, based in a price/quality relation and even as an absolute relation, there’s nothing better than the FREE analytic tool provided by Google: Google Analytics . Say whatever you want about specialty tools, but you won’t find many tools better than this, and with a price of 0 (zero, zilch, nada), you can’t beat it in any way.

As an example, I’ve this project (real case) where I get these amounts of traffic from different search engines:

• Google: 37%
• Bing: 22.6%
• Yahoo: 20.3%
• Baidu: 9.2%
• Yandex: 5.1%

Then I have some irrelevant traffic from Altavista, Tiscali, Terra, Ask and such. Now, please take a look at the last 2. many people didn’t even heard about them, however, they’re pretty big and they may send a nice chunk of traffic. Question is: what kind of traffic? Baidu is from China, Yandex from Russia. If you’ve at least a short experience in adult business, you’ll know that’s not very good in terms of money. And Analytics provides me with a nice tool (Bounce Rate) that proves me right: I’ve the almost impossible to reach 0% BR with Baidu and only 19% with Yandex, while Bing and Yahoo are around 38-40% and Google over 50%. Good news, right? NOT! If I follow the entire paths followed by the Baidu and Yandex users I’ll see that they’ll visit many pages, download everything they can and while at it, I’ll find many hacking attempts and spam.

Interpreting the results I’ll see that Google traffic is bigger and higher quality, people will bounce if they don’t find EXACTLY what they’re looking for at first sight, while Bing and Yahoo are quite good. And Baidu and Yandex traffic is almost all freeloaders which will produce $0.

What to do?

With the available data, it would be good to have some kind of service you can sell to Chinese and Russian demographics. Although chances of making a buck are scarce, if you know those markets and the language you may find the jackpot (we’re talking of extremely big markets discovering capitalism and consumerism ), but for most of us, the best you can do is redirect the traffic to a hub or site you feed and try to juice something out of that traffic.

However, with the “good SE traffic” and aided by the great Google Analytics tool, we can see what people is clicking, what they like the most and what they don’t like at all. Using that data, start some A/B testing and optimize your site as much as possible. You can track trends, hot spots, positioning, colors, browsers, sponsors, whatever you may think of and create very narrow campaigns without much effort, define the prices for ads spots in your site, adjust trades, maximize clicks. Anything you want is possible!

So… how are you planning to spend your day today?

We’re happy to announce the launching of our new project Body . After a few months of working on it, developing and adding many bells and whistles, we finally came to the final stages. The site uses an extremely customized WPMU+BP backend that integrates Mechbunny’s tube script, XML and AHAH tools and a lot of custom scripting. The results are outstanding and the first test are announcing we’re facing a ground breaking milestone in adult: The first Adult Social Media community.

As yo may imagine, we designed everything on it, but we also are in charge of marketing, development, content creation and every single aspect of it. And this is just one of the many projects we’re working on our own where we take over all aspects of the business, and quite frankly, as big as it sounds, this one isn’t the bigger we’re working on!

Hope you like it, any comments are more than appreciated!