This tutorial comes after some discussion on GFY board regarding traffic, Google and what not. What you will see below is a real experience and it turned out quite nice, so be sure to read and comment, we’ll try to exchange as much info as possible.

So, we were working on this site, for which we did an ultra customized site working on WPMU engine. The ultra customized part isn’t really important, the thing is you’ll need to use WPMU or WP 3.x Multisite (see some instructions on how to do it here). This site was a full community setup which communicated in real time with tube section users (it was Mechbunny‘s script which we had to customize for this), webcams, dating and such. Of course, an adult site. And of course, we offered space for blogs for community members.

So, what happened? After 2-3 days, I started noticing most users were spammers creating non-adult pages selling any kind of mainstream product you could think of. At first, we deleted them at sight. Then, we simply killed them with an auto-ban script we wrote. But then I was checking stats and noticed many of those pages were having traffic. Nothing important, but anything from 10 to 50 unique visitors a day. So I took down the auto-ban script and analyzed the traffic, tendencies, results and everything I could measure. And then I noticed this: these spammers were helping this site ENORMOUSLY. We got loads of pages listed, we got a PR3 in 2 months and mainly we got traffic to our main page. 2, 3, 5, 10 unique hits a day, which multiplied by 1000s of pages added up to a pretty nifty amount of traffic…. FOR FREE!

Furthermore, these spammers were ranking high for long tail keywords, so I simply build a few special themes with nice headers/footers and auto-included the latest posts of the MAIN PAGE into their themes and the latest videos in the tube section were added in the footer. Ka-Boom! we went 0 to 20000 unique visitors a day without buying a single hit, 100% organic.

The best part is that those spammers work on a linkwheel scenario, so we had traffic and links coming from many sources and IPs. A win-win situation that only required a good server (which we had) and a simple straight-forward change of philosophy: instead of killing the spammers, let the spammers work for us.

Of course, I assume you can imagine further scenarios, like letting them build the traffic and then redirect everything to your main page, or even visiting their sponsors and change links to yours. As long as they are breaking your TOS, you can do whatever you want. But be careful: maybe being greedy will hurt you more than what it will help you, try to research the traffic and if they’re providing you with good decent traffic, maybe you should let them do what they want. As I said, it’s a change of philosophy and a win-win situation, so, why fix what is working?

Anyway, just try it and lmk how it worked for you!

Coda: you may ask yourself what happened to this site. Well, I can’t provide any info on it since we’re on a process to get all the money we’re owed due to a middle man who screwed both us and the site owner.

If you follow these pages, you had probably saw The Tumbling Sniper post in this site. If not, do it, I spent a lot of time writing it!

Now, back to this post’s subject,  some people wonders whether what I say is true, just made up stuff or just some honest (yet unproven) theory. Well, after you read that post, please take a look at this post at GFY board. As you may see, GFY post is almost a month older than mine, yet it describes what happened to Private almost to the A. Of course, it’s not like I was predicting something, what I exposed in my original post is a quite common occurrence in big companies, and sadly, one of my favorite adult sites is the victim of it. The ‘good news’ for you is that now you can see a live example of what I was saying, and hopefully, you’ll be able to learn something from it.

So, what can we learn about this? I know most readers of these pages are very smart so I won’t go in condescending mode and explain it. Plus, it’s my intention not to give you the fish, but the fishing gear to get more fishes. The fishing gear here is RATIONAL THINKING. Now, go to Private and take a close look at that site. If you followed my posts, you’ll probably be able to determine what’s wrong with that site (tip: it’s more than one thing). The funny thing is that this is a new tour, and quite frankly, it’s improved over previous version. Nevertheless, with the state of things in adult, you’ll need something more than just some slight improvement. Either you go on a massive improvement OR you change radically your business model*

Another funny thing is that, due to its history, Private has content that makes it possible for them to get massive sales by just changing the focus. ie, they have the most original movie ever shot in adult, filled with superstars and it’s almost a secret. Basically, this is what happened to Private: their human resources were sub-par for the task, they had a mix of non-adult industry personnel and some adult industry people working in a 1 company context with lots of ego clashes. Again, everything I said you have to avoid in the Tumbling Sniper post.

Now, do I think Private is bound to die? No. They are one of the biggest adult companies in the world and they get there not because they’re stupid. Of course, they’ll need to make something more than a few cosmetic changes, they’ll need to hire professionals, and I don’t say “professionals” like in “they have a MBA or a PhD or whatever”. I mean professionals in their own field, with the ability to interact but with freedom of movement. They already said they’ll try something different. Good for them, and I really hope this time they get the results they deserve, if they do what I think they will do, and they do it right, I can’t see how they can fail. Of course, if they continue on their own self-destructive path…. well, nothing good will come out from it.

* Berth Milton, Private’s CEO said the following: “There are ways of making money from non-paying traffic and that’s what Private is going to do. I can’t reveal anything more about our strategy, but we’re going to be more and more free, which will help us recruit paid subscribers.”

This article I wrote was originally posted at GFY. You can follow the discussion after it, with some very valid and interesting points from other people. Just in case, although I wrote and posted it, this article owns everything to Ed and Agnes, our in-site marketing research consultant and psychologist respectively, I just compiled the information and posted it, nothing else.

After some interesting discussion here, that somehow deviated to a “tube wars” thread, I thought it would be cool to add some pizzazz to the discussion.

Personally, I think, I’m convinced, I vouch and I can swear everything is about RETENTION. See, most people tends to believe the so called “mainstream” marketing rules don’t apply to adult, or if they do, they do it just incidentally. Of course, that is the same like saying people surfing adult sites or buying adult products are not rational human beings in a society with given uses, values and habits and they’re some kind of aliens from outer galaxy instead. This is a perception usually maintained and encouraged by people who has no knowledge on the subject and they’re afraid of losing business, power, whatever.

IMHO, not only mainstream marketing techniques applies to adult: it’s basically the same

So yes, I’ve some idea about what I’m talking about. I’ve a degree in Marketing and was a Marketing Manager for several mainstream companies, including Citibank NA, Deutsche Bank AG and Cinemark Mexico and Argentina. And even when I recognize some differences based in PSYCHOLOGY (question: how many psychologists do you know in adult biz?), I can’t see a single difference when it comes to techniques, research and such. As some people knows, I use to research a lot, work with tendencies data, apply it to design, etc. And frankly, everything is exactly the same, no matter if you want to believe it or not.

Going to the point: one of the basic premises in marketing is “getting new clients is difficult. Losing them is really easy”. Hence, most efforts are put in keeping clients, and there are formulas to set the cost of a new client and the time you’ll need to recover the investment in getting that client (yeah yeah, I know). Anyone that knows the “kitchen” of adult biz knows IN MOST CASES (with some honorable exceptions) it’s the exact opposite to adult business, where efforts are set to get new affiliates and/or members (CLIENTS!) and after that, or even in the same proccess they lose it. A perfect example is the crazy xsells and shady rebillings.

So, most webmasters I talked to are perfectly happy with a 50% retention rate, some of them even BRAG if they get a 50% retention rate. IMHO, that’s obnoxiously low. I’ll show you an example I call the “stalled growth paradox”

Rebilling only 5% more every month shows a notable increase in income

the first example takes 60 sales a month (fixed, no sales loss) and a retention rate of 50%. You’ll see that by month 6 you’ll be stucked in the same numbers. No growth but some marginal centesimal. Of course, it’s worst with less than 50%, although the tendency is maintained.

In the second graph, I’m showing you a 51% exponential retention rate. As you can see, you grow and grow. To make it easier, with just less than 6% constant growth in retention, you’ll double your income by 100% in 11 months. Nice, huh? That’s the beauty of rebilling businesses, and it’s the nature of the game. Many programs are setting for “1 buck today, tomorrow we’ll see”.

So, what does it leaves us with? Well, to avoid loses or stalled growth, you need to increment any of the numbers of the constant, whether it’s sales or retention rate. In a context where sales are going down the hill, your only remedy is to increment conversions at the same rate you lose traffic just to be even, or increment conversions beyond your traffic loss rate. Or, increase the amount of traffic in absolute terms. This will increase costs as well, of course. Depending on many factors, it could be worth it or not. In absolute terms, ie absolute amount of money, big programs will have no big deal with this. However, smaller programs will face losses sooner or later. And both of them will decline any growth ratio they may have.

Now, I won’t show you a graph where sales goes down instead of my fixed rate example or you’ll want to shoot yourself.

In the meanwhile, keeping a member happy is relatively easy and with way lower costs in the short/mid range. Some of them are “adult only” solutions, but most of them already exists in the dreaded “mainstream” marketing.

So yes, the short, easy and rational answer is RETENTION is the key of the game

Feel free to discuss this article and share your thoughts!