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.

Note: This is the continuation of Marketing: The Sniper and the Machine Gun models (Part 1), please refer to it in case you don’t understand what is this article about. It’s highly advised to read it first either way.

So last week we saw our incredible sniper maximizing the results of his actions by acting smart and carefully aiming to his target instead of just shooting bullets at random. Easy to say, hard to do, but at least now you have some insight on how to do it and hopefully you started doing it. This week’s article is about what happens when companies grow to a level where they get so big and powerful their target’s are becoming a real problem. I’m calling it “The Tumbling Sniper” and you’ll see why.

Before anything, please take a look at the image below these lines:

As you can see in this nice 3D model (not so coincidentally, the graphic mathematical representation of this model is a 3D graphic as well), our great sniper became more powerful, more resourceful and, at least in theory, he has all targets at sight and within range.  In his mind, he can win the war by himself, but not everything is as promising as it looks. Let’s see: after his first campaigns, he has a solid foundation (budget) that provides him with more range. He also wants to keep his position in the market, so he needs to add an additional level of resources for branding. However, to keep himself going stronger, he needs yet an additional level: human resources. Metaphor aside, this is the bread and the butter of business administration: how to keep your business organization rational.

This is one of the biggest challenges an organization will need to face sooner or later, and it will define whether this organization will keep growing or just disappear. In our example, we can see how that 3rd level causes a real problem: our sniper lost his accuracy and he’s busy trying to hold equilibrium rather than getting new targets, while other snipers are closer to the targets. To make it worse, our sniper’s range clashes with the other sniper’s range (competition), which means there will be more resources applied to fight the other snipers as well. In business terms, our sniper will have an untouched market (the reddish zone behind him in the graph), a shared unfaithful slice of the market (the zone our sniper and other snipers are fighting for) and an exponentially growing amount of non-targeted marketing actions.

As you may imagine, this means our sniper (who isn’t a dumb one) must do something and he must do it immediately. The “beauty” of this is action paths will get really limited, making the choices more clear. However, as time passes by, the cost for taking each path will increase. In this model, there are 2 obvious choices:

1. Professional development: Improve human resources by hiring professionals or by adapting the existing human resources via training
2. Atomization: create smaller business areas with a high degree of independence between each other, each one of them dedicated to a certain market target (product, service, etc)

Personally, I think that in 80 or 90% of situations, option number 2 is the best. Of course, it’s more expensive, but it usually gets the biggest and better results, therefore it’s the path followed by most (if not all) successful companies. You can see this happening in adult industry as well, only that in a lesser scale and usually with a higher degree of inter-dependence between business units.

Real life techniques

Stronger foundations

To provide our sniper with a stronger base, we need to maximize the results in the sales over business levels costs equation. In maths terms:

x=I/(B+Br+HR)^12-1

where I=Total Income, B=Budget, Br=Branding Costs and HR=Human Resources applied to marketing actions. 12-1 is the period (if we want 6 months, it will be 6-1 and so on). Needless to say, the higher x is, the better we’re doing.

Question is: how do we achieve this if we don’t have a big budget or a strong business organization?

Answer is: TECHNOLOGY.

First of all, if you want to run a tight ship by using applied technology, do yourself a favor and HIRE A PROFESSIONAL PROGRAMMER.

Now, let’s get our hands dirty. Take a look to our previous tutorial as well as Data Research: Working with Search Engines. I’m sure you already know what will this be about, but just in case, what we’ll try to achieve is smart data tracking applied to concrete marketing solutions. To achieve this, get your programmer to create a backend in which you can add as many business units as you want. In example, you may have Site 1, Site 2, Site 3 or Program 1 (Site 1, Site 2, Site 3) , Program 2 (Site 1, Site 2, Site 3) and so on. After that, make him create an auto-import feature for Google Analytics or at least some CSV, XML or whatever importer.

Inside Google Analytics create a custom report where you include AT LEAST traffic, Avg Page Views, Mobile and everything in the content tab, including Site Overlay. All of this but the Site Overlay is the data you’ll import into your script. Now, you’ll have at least 2 data analysis sources: a general one and the Site Overlay. Take a very careful look at this one and check what are the most clicked areas in your page/site (Tip: if you want to include this into data tracking analysis, simply assign “zones” to links, ie Header=Zone 1, Nav= Zone 2, Sidebar=Zone 3 and so on). Now… is the most important link in your page being clicked the most? If not, why? Just take a look at the position of the most clicked zone and try to move your join page link there. Did it improve? If so, you can refine, if not, change color, shape, make it blink, whatever. Once you start seeing results, you’ll need to use another module you’ll need to add to your script: a page builder. This module will need to build pages according to your optimized template and change all other business units automatically. By the way, it’s very fast and easy as long as you use CSS CODED BY A PROFESSIONAL. If you plan to save $50 or 100 or 200…. well, good luck.

Finally, if you’re using a stats script, make your coder import that data as well so you know what sells and what not. It might be better if you have it custom coded, but as long as you can auto-import this data into your database you’ll be fine.

So now we have all other sites being dynamically targeted and refined. That’s great and you can stop here, or add a degree of complexity (and hopefully results) and make your project totally dynamic and driven by data. In this scenario, your sites will change dynamically depending on time of the day, geo IP and even on how are other sites in the network doing. Let’s say you are using 5 sponsors across your network of 10 sites, and the previous hour Sponsor 1 was the best seller in 5 of your sites, Sponsor 2 in 3 sites and Sponsor 3 in 1 site, while Sponsors 4 and 5 had no sales. Then your program may assign the best sellers to your hotter spots and keep it like that as long as the situation continues.

Well, hard and complex, but believe me, we’re just starting, this is just the tip of the iceberg!

Don’t forget to bookmark this page and visit us again next week: Our sniper goes on the hunt!

Update: I didn’t have time to add the new article, but see a LIVE EXAMPLE of what I said in this post in exchange of the article I didn’t deliver

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?