(This article was made in collaboration with our resident Psychology Doctor and Professor for the Methods and Techniques of Scientific Research Department at University of Buenos Aires. For obvious reasons, I can’t post her name)

If you were in this business for at least a year, I’m pretty sure you have seen the motto-mantra “Content is King” ad nauseam. It has been said in every possible way and it’s the solution for EVERY problem in adult industry. When everything fails… CONTENT IS KING. It’s a pretty understandable concept in an industry like online adult business where content is the main product to be provided. And it certainly is a very important aspect of this business, yet I’m not so sure that it is the most important. Furthermore, I’ll shock many of you by saying that not only CONTENT ISN’T KING, but it’s closer to Miss Congeniality so to speak.

Let’s be clear: I’m not denying the importance of content, it would be totally absurd. I’ll just show you how this concept is flawed and why content might be the most important aspect for a few sites, while it is just a bunch of crap on most sites. And just to add a little more pizazz, I’ll teach you a few secrets based on extensive marketing research, which you may use or not, your choice.

First of all, I want to define the word MARKETING: If you think marketing is buying drinks at a convention or having 1 million posts on a board, please stop reading here. I know it’s the common meaning in adult industry, and of course,  it’s 100% wrong. This meaning emerged from an industry where there were no professionals and therefore PR got confused with marketing. This is one of the many mistakes that led this industry to the point where it is now, and I’ll show you why and how. Anyway, if you’re convinced that PR is marketing, I probably won’t be able to change your mind.

So, let’s define marketing by using our beloved Wikipedia (I like this definition more than the usual Kotler’s definition)

Marketing is the process of performing market research, selling products and/or services to customers and promoting them via advertising to further enhance sales. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.

Marketing is used to identify the customer, to satisfy the customer, and to keep the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, it can be concluded that marketing management is one of the major components of business management. Marketing evolved to meet the stasis in developing new markets caused by mature markets and overcapacities in the last 2-3 centuries. The adoption of marketing strategies requires businesses to shift their focus from production to the perceived needs and wants of their customers as the means of staying profitable.

The term marketing concept holds that achieving organizational goals depends on knowing the needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfactions. It proposes that in order to satisfy its organizational objectives, an organization should anticipate the needs and wants of consumers and satisfy these more effectively than competitors

Interesting, huh? I mean, no mention to buying drinks and quite honestly, nothing that 99.99% of adult companies and webmasters do. I’m leaving out a 0.01% because I know a few companies are in a stage of development where they’ve understood what marketing is and how to use it. And of course, they won’t tell anyone.

So, now that we can start from a clear understanding of what marketing is and what marketing isn’t, we can dive into the deeps of business research.

As a clear example, let’s start with the “content is king” mantra, I promise you a good journey, and whether you agree or not, I’ll do my best to give you some food for thought.

When I say “content isn’t king” I’m not making out things just to add some shocking factor. Like I said, content MIGHT be king for some sites. But it isn’t for most. To come to this conclusion, I’m putting everything in the mix: from costs to profits, customer satisfaction, technology, many years of experience and close to 5 years of research.

Let’s start: in real world, content isn’t king by definition. DELIVERY is king. Content has to adapt to delivery technologies, and all the philosophy behind content (audio, visual, written, interactive) is what delivery companies wants you to see, how will you see it and when will you see it. The most important part is this external part, and most of the times content is produced in a way where you have to buy way more expensive gadgets every single time, or adapt to some specific form of delivery, or adapt to the way it’s presented. That’s why most content companies (movies, music, TV even books) have been acquired by…. technology and delivery industry companies.

Furthermore, everything you see around, everything you buy, everything you wish, most of what you think, most of what you like, even how your body looks was molded in a laboratory by guys with suits and ties that decided that you will like, you’ll do, you’ll think, you’ll love something that, quite coincidentally, they’re SELLING AND MAKING MONEY OFF IT.

Surprising, isn’t it?

So, if you’re not researching, if you’re not creating a need or fulfilling a void, it really doesn’t matter much if you use that hot blonde with big boobs for your next great superb set. I’ve news for you: You, me and everybody in the world have seen that scene 1 million times before. Years before you shot it. Just change the background, maybe the blonde had smaller boobs, maybe she had a mole, maybe a different hairdo. But in the end, it’s a busty blonde being fucked, absolutely the same to thousand before her and thousands that will come after her.

What did you miss here? The differential. That very thing that makes your content stand out. The thing that will make a CONSUMER become a CUSTOMER, even helping you in promoting your content.

And how do we achieve it? You can use many approaches. You can use the perfect visual holder (ie a nice design with a nice flow, interactivity, ease to access the content with as many clicks as possible), you can add technology as a WOW factor or you can simply use marketing research to know what YOUR OWN MEMBERS want (let alone what your prospective members want). Yeah, I know, I’m cussing too much with the taboo words “marketing research“, but it is what this article is about.

For the first approach, you can use some professional adult design and development solution (cough cough), for the second, you might need to empty your pockets and for the third, you can either use existing marketing research or do your own. Whichever way you choose, it will only help you. Believe me, you should rather INVEST more money and efforts in development, design, traffic, research, interactivity, product development and so on that SPEND it in that hot busty blonde. It’s a numbers game: if your exclusive content costs are (say) $12k a month and you get 8 sets a month for 2 updates a week, try spending half of it in exclusive content and INVEST the other half in proper marketing and additional non-exclusive content so, instead of 2 updates a week you can make 3 to 5 updates A DAY. Do you really think someone will complain because instead of getting the same set again and again and again you added more quantity or variety? If so, think again.

But well, let’s say you want to keep it 100% exclusive. Or maybe you have a solo girl site. Or whatever situation that makes you need to shoot your own content. Here is where you’ll need marketing research.

GETTING TO THE POINT

Before anything, my first advice is that if you don’t know the niche, just don’t do it. You’ll save a lot of time and money. I’ve seen some ridiculously off niche sites that they weren’t even funny. And of course, they all failed. Without a single exception. Let alone if we’re going into fetishes, some sites I’ve seen got even to the point of being ANTI NICHE!!!

So, getting back to research, I’ll point you out some pretty obvious flaws and a few guidelines to get the ball rolling. Most of these will help you in one way or another. None of them will harm you, so what do you have to lose? TRY IT AND RESEARCH!!! The following scenarios are related to mainstream niches and are just a few examples of how badly content people is missing the point, the failing in specific fetishes is so huge it would take months to describe all the mistakes

Ridiculous Flaw #1: Nice teen gets a huge cock in her ass and she just stays comfy, smiling and looking to the cam.

I mentioned this one because it’s one of the most obvious and common scenes. Whoever researched at least a little on anal sex would knew that for males it’s related to rape fantasies, power, taboo breaking and infliction of pain, while for women it’s related to taboo, adventure and in some cases, the submission of male to woman’s desires by giving him that hidden treasure. Therefore, an anal scene should perform a woman in pain, or in lust, or in pleasure trying to make out the best off the situation (avoiding pain, dominating man, etc). And of course, the woman SHOULDN’T agree to be fucked in the ass! It’s so unrealistic and retarded that it can’t be explained with words! Instead, she should always say no and be forced to it, convinced to it or she should give her ass as a reward. And no, she should NEVER EVER EVER LOOK AT THE CAM, keep the fantasy alive, it’s content shooting 101!

Ridiculous Flaw #2: A guy with a huuuuge cock and perfectly shaped body fucks a girl for 30-40 or even 60 minutes. After that, he comes all over her face and mouth

Sounds familiar, huh? Well there are so many things wrong here it’s difficult to explain it, so I’ll be as short as possible. Porn content is always about fantasy, no matter how dull or wicked that fantasy is, the viewer has to relate to that fantasy and make it his own fantasy. Since nobody can guess what thousands of people’s fantasy is, you’ll need to get a reasonable middle point so your members (aka CUSTOMERS!) can re-elaborate their fantasies based on what you provide them*. Now, please tell me how anyone can relate to an impossible image of man who can’t even get excited enough to cum. Most people will get bored by the 3rd or 4th minute of that video. The ending is sublime too. After seeing that his lover isn’t excited at all and considers that fuck just a dull and boring work, her female partner will feel the urge to get a load of cum with a smile! Ridiculous, isn’t it?

Now, what about a guy that shows he is excited enough and can excite a woman in a way she’ll take that load because… she’s excited? What about a guy fucking a woman for 5 to 10 minutes (news flash: this is above average for most men) and then she gets an orgasm because that man is powerful enough to provide her pleasure at will? How many men can (and will) relate to this second scenario? The answer for non-pathological personalities is…. 100%! Still, you’ll see the unrealistic scenario above, but you’ll hardly find the realistic and desirable scenario.

Remember, people wants content based in fantasy. That fantasy can be related to the situation, the scenario, the performers or any combination of these. But in straight heterosexual scenarios, it will never be related to boredom, closet homosexuality and male gymnastics. If anyone disagrees, please explain it, I’m very curious to hear the arguments against this. The point is that your customer can fuck a whore in person. He can fuck his wife or lover. He could even interact online via chat with other women. But he wants fantasy. FANTASY. And most adult sites are failing at it.

Ridiculous Flaw #3: Girl with big boobs

Aaah, we all love big boobs (before continuing, let’s just say it’s an expression of Oedipus complex and it was considered a paraphilia until not so much time ago) . Problem is that due to that psychological singularity, this is a pretty complex niche. First of all, let’s say that any trick is ruined if you show the strings. The same happens when you show the scars of a boob job, or really bad boob jobs. Couldn’t you use make-up? Couldn’t you retouch the photos? Couldn’t you just hide this? No, it seems you didn’t even care.

Another thing: in boobs fetish , the main subject is… boobs! No matter how much you like that male talent’s cock, boobs fetish is about.. BOOBS! People wants the attention on that. They want to see those boobs sucked, pinched, squeezed, covered in cum, chocolate, milk, just dripping water, bouncing, moving at the sides… everything but your male talent’s cock, he’s just a prop, a mere contextualization for the real fantasy, slightly more important than the couch or the bed they’re on! And on top of that, when you film or photograph big boobs, most big tits fans will want to see the action performed by (or on) those boobs and the satisfaction face on the girl. In other words: FANTASY. People is fantasizing than they’re providing pleasure to their object of lust.

Now, for those that shoot big tits content, let’s say you’re pretty good and you got over the scars issue, you even avoid to display hours of your male talent’s cock. Good for you. Now, did you know the following?

1. Most people won’t care about natural or fake boobs AS LONG AS IT ISN’T EXTREMELY NOTICEABLE.
2. When they’re extremely noticeable, you can turn the fetish to inflation fetish. Another very different niche, but at least now you know what to do
3. Around 70% of big tits fan will favor dressed or partially nude/transparent clothed tits over fully naked tits
4. When it comes to hardcore action, around 65% of people will prefer that the bra is on while the remaining 35% has no opinion. If a boob pops out of the bra, that’s a huge bonus. Your beloved guy coming all over her boobs AND BRA: cash-iiing!
5. Tit fucking featuring the bra as part of the play: plan on your new mansion
6. Black, tan and white bras (in that order) are preferred over other combination of colors. Pink might be the worst (it’s associated to another sex object:  the vagina)
7. If you shoot partially dressed content, nylon and cotton sweaters, white office shirts and wet t-shirts are a real turn on for most boob lovers. If sweaters are wet and nipples erected, your content will be niched as big boobs as well as WAM or acquaphilia (yay!). Either way, you won.
8. Male talent should always be playing with the girl’s boobs. Always. He should MAKE LOVE to those boobs, not just fuck a girl who coincidentally has big boobs

Did you know all of the above? No? Isn’t it time to start doing your homework? After all, it could mean a difference of thousands of dollars

So, again, do you think “Content is King”? Well, then research your own content. There are huge chances you could save lots of money using it for other (more effective) purposes.

EVEN MORE RESEARCH FACTS TO HELP YOU

1. Vintage style lingerie (girdles, garters, bustiers, hosiery, stockings, etc) will be preferred in around 83% of cases over no lingerie or “slut lingerie” (the most commonly used)
2. Woman’s orgasm face outperforms no female orgasm by 78%
3. Short videos are preferred over long videos (15+ minutes)
4. Innocent romantic teens having sex in a tender way are preferred over slut teens ass fucked and bukakked (and smiling!). The numbers? 76% to 18% (if they smile I guess it’s 100% to 0)
5. Regular guys with decent sized genitalia are preferred over guys with perfect bodies and enormous cocks. However, you can do a set with enormous cocks guys for shocking purposes (and then you should research into pussy punishment and maledom fetish)
6. MILFs using stockings are preferred over no stockings. Numbers are really impressive: 93% (stockings) to 7%(no preference) and 0% for no stockings!
7. Amateur niches sell as much or even better than glamour, yet there are no real definitive numbers for one or the other
8. Are you planning to do a  femdom site? Are you personally into it? No? Then just don’t do it. You’ll fail miserably.
9. Do you REALLY know smoking fetish niche? No? Then avoid it.
10. Do you REALLY know about the new X fetish you’re planning to launch? No? Avoid it!
11. White backgrounds, black backgrounds and blue backgrounds (in that order but with little difference) are preferred over most other colors. Pale yellow, pale gray and pale pink are in a second league.
12. Professional looking sites with a big amount of interactivity sells better than amateur looking sites.
13. Horizontal navigation menus are preferred to vertical navigation by a huge margin. However, vertical navigation menus seems to slightly outperform horizontal ones in conversions.
14. “Magazine style” and long page designs seems to convert better than “episode” layouts. However, episode layouts on black backgrounds may have a slight non-conclusive preference over magazine and long page layouts.
15. Professionally made trailers are better than actually showing parts of scenes.  No content preview has poorer conversions but it sells more
16. Mobile versions of sites converts way better than home computer versions. However, the amount of sales for home computer versions is many times bigger
17. Do you do A/B testing? Even better, do you do A/B/C testing? Do you base it on traffic sources? on Geo-IP? on time frames? NO? What are you waiting for???
18. Did you take a look at this? No? Well, your loss!

I promised you it would be interesting, now it’s time to start to do your own research and get the most off your investment!

By the way, feel free to comment and ask questions, as a matter of fact I encourage you to! More to come soon!

*If you’re interested about the psychology part of this, you can read Sigmund Freud’s “Totem and Taboo” and Carl Gustav Jung’s works on Archetypal psychology, Anima and Animus and Atavism theories.

This is a landing page made for the $1 Brazzers Network Pass. Instead of going for the usual landing page approach, we did a mix of mainstream and adult marketing with strong sales claims and a very appealing message supported by the images and clean and to the point colors. Extremely simple, almost amateur looking, yet elegant. Like most of our work, a strong marketing concept goes hand to hand with the correct graphical presentation for that concept. Of course 100% valid XHTML to round up the package, but I assume you would know that by now, right?

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.

WARNING: while innovative, this is a really “crazy” idea, so if you are one of the trend followers, please stop reading. Now, if you’re looking for “out of the box” ideas and you have what it takes (namely an existing program, server, some spare content), then this might be for you.

Before going in depth, I know there are many ways to get more affiliates. Basically, there are 2 main branches to achieve this: You can get them through pure marketing (ads, bonuses, incentives, PR and such) or you can get them through program optimization (mainly conversion and/or retention improvement, but also innovative marketing tools, customer service, payment methods and so on). I won’t go deeper on those subjects since more or less they’re quite known, and those that aren’t are part of the arsenal of tools we provide some of our selected clients.

But this time, I’ll present you a “3rd branch”, somehow a mix of the other 2 branches, although it could be considered something totally new, depending on how far you wanna go. Just make no mistake: this isn’t something spectacular or specially difficult. Like most good ideas, it’s extremely simple, just that most people would never consider it because of its main characteristic: you won’t get a cent off it. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch.

At this point, you will probably stop reading, but if you got to this point, you could hang with me a little more, right?

As I said, you won’t get a cent… apparently (now sounds better, huh? )

The idea is as follows: You have an existing program with a line-up of sites, you have a server. You probably have loads of content. You have processing and probably a CMS. With all this, just build a great nice looking site, with all the bells and whistles and host it on a nice server. Add some good and decent processing and give your affiliates 100% revshare for life (after processing). Yes, I said 100%. I didn’t say 70, 80, 90, not even 99. I said 100%. And I didn’t said for 1 month, or 2, or 6. Not even a year. I said FOR LIFE. And by the way, before you start thinking on some cheap template, no marketing tools and a members area that will never update, I gotta tell you the secret of this is that you treat this site just like any site of yours. Or even better.

Now, sure as hell webmasters will fight to promote your site. After all, they’re getting 100% revshare without any costs involved. So where’s the trick? Well, you’ll give webmasters this site with 100% lifetime revshare barring some conditions, in example, you could add some of these terms and conditions (for ease of writing, I will call this site “A100″):

- webmasters will get 100% revshare as long as they send the same amount of traffic to the remaining sites in your program (don’t be greedy, if they send 100 unique hits to A100, then they should send 100 or more to all the sites in your line-up combined, not each of them)
- if they don’t get to this 1:1 ratio, they’ll get 90% and then a decreasing number each month they don’t get to the 1:1 ratio (ie 2nd month 80%, 3rd month 70% and so on until you get to 50 or 60% or whatever your regular revshare percentage is)
- they will be free to use content for marketing purposes, but whatever they build will be public usage for all members (thus you save money on promo material and your members will get a wide variety of marketing material)

of course, if you want to tight the bell (I’d recommend you to loose it, but it’s your site), you can make that 1:1 ratio to be not based on traffic amounts, but sales. This may scare webmasters, but again, the decision is yours. You can also count traffic based on Geo IP tracking. Either way, webmasters going for this A100 site will promote the sites in your program as hard as the 100% revshare, and furthermore, they’ll push it harder because they can’t risk to fall short. You can even put a 1:1.x ratio if you feel greedy and/or insecure.

Now, as you may see, there’s a lot to win: new affiliates, lots of traffic diverged between your existing sites and a site that you didn’t have anyway (so no loss), competitive traffic, higher quality traffic, people looking for your program just out of curiosity and so on, and so on, and so on.

But wait, this is not all. This is just the tip of the iceberg, because, as a matter of fact, this kind of setup could provide you with a very good income, either by using traditional additional sources of income (upsells, cams, etc) or by using high end non traditional marketing tools that have way more income potential power. But you won’t expect me to spill the gourmet beans just like that, right?

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.”

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

(note: this is an adaptation of my Marketing degree thesis and as such you may have seen a similar post somewhere else since I used it in a couple boards)

When dealing with marketing research and niches, we’ll always find ourselves in a point where applied research requires optimization to make the most out of our marketing budget(s). This point can be planned in advance (ie if we’re setting goals by time frames) or may surge out of necessity (ie, we notice our marketing efforts aren’t working as expected).

Now, if you’re worried this post may be something heavy and tiresome, don’t worry,  I won’t go into deep technical stuff nor research methodology. Instead, I’ll try to explain this in an as simple as possible way, by providing easy to understand examples and then some ideas on how to implement these techniques in a really easy way.

To start, let’s go with what I called the The Sniper and the Machine Gun models. In this scenario, we have two soldiers trying to reach their targets. One of them has a high precision sniper rifle, and the other has a machine gun. At this point I’m pretty sure you’re figuring out what will be this about, but let’s have a look at it:

The Sniper Model

This is the Sniper Model. Our sniper is using few bullets (money/resources) to make a sale by researching the proper way to get an easy target. Thus, the full line goes straight to the heart of the target (or, in other words, make a sale). Now, you’ll see the blue dotted lines that goes to the “body” of the target, “injuring” him, which may lead the target to “survive” (meaning he won’t buy because of a weak call to action or unrelated motives) or maybe he will “die” because of his injuries (meaning that he may NOT buy at that exact time, but may be buying sooner than later).

To add to that, our shooting range has 3 zones: niche targeting, media delivery (proper or wrong choice of media and marketing materials) and competition, and it’s easy to see our bullet will be farther from the target as the zones become bigger. The more accurate and restricted our “zones” are, the less loss in accuracy.

Let’s get the metaphor out of the picture and straight to business:  If we define our niche in an accurate way, our target will be closer to become an effective sale since we’ll have less dispersion. Once we start adding more factors, the dispersion ratio will have a compound rate increase.

Before continuing, let me add something that I know most of you hate to guts, but it’s very easy to use and extremely useful and needed in marketing and economics research: the Compound Interest Function. It’s as simple as this:
Value   =   IV (1  +  R / t)^Yt

where IV=Initial Value , R=Interest Rate , t= times of occurrence per year (every month would be 12) and Y=number of years.

In the graphic above, I’ve used a reasonable deviation of 3.4%, which comes out from the difference between total sales per campaign minus impulse buying multiplied by dispersion factors. So in this simple graphic, with only 3 dispersion factors, we could notice that around 30-35% of our budget is being 100% effective (leads to a sale) while the remaining budget has a 33% of chances of convert to a sale at a later time. Again, this is a very simplified model, you may find out that working with real numbers adds an exponential value of difficulty *

The Machine Gun Model

So we got to the dreaded “machine gun” model. Here, our soldier will use a really high number of bullets to get the same results than the sniper. Take a look at the graphic below:

Here we can see that the amount of resources used to achieve the same results increases in an exponential rate. In the basic example, we have a 360 degrees market with 8 targets, so, to our machine gun soldier it will take 45 bullets to get a 100% target (sale). In other words, the budget will increase 45 times for 100% effective sales. You’ll also notice that brand awareness is a little higher in this model, and that’s why companies going for wide range branding won’t care much about niche refining (this is a very common usage in mainstream marketing, however, in my humble opinion it’s a waste of energy and resources in online adult marketing).

In short, it’s common sense to use the Sniper Model. However, most people uses the Machine Gun Model. Why? Well, because unless you’re part of a certain community or a very knowledgeable person about a certain market niche, the sniper model requires a lot of specialization and the use of every single resource available to refine data. Of course, data research is the most important one, but technology usage, smart design elements, competition status research, innovation, economics and so on are factors to keep in mind. As an example, I honestly doubt any designer could compete with me in certain niches (ie pornstars, glamour and some fetishes) when it comes to results. But, what if I need to do a design for an amateur mature site? Well, 99.99% of designers will say “Yes, I can do that” and come with the same cookie cutter design, just changing the subject. We all know it’s like that, and I can’t blame anyone on that, there’s not a lot of work for designers, and at the same time, some site owners aren’t well informed on the subject as well, so it all comes to a vicious circle.

However, information is power, and I’ve the knowledge to make things different, so why not use it? I’ve seen/heard many times the usual mottos “marketing is useless”, “you don’t need a designer to do a site, do it yourself because you know the niche better” (I gotta admit this is the funniest one, out of tens of thousands of adult webmasters I can count with my hands the number of people capable of doing this with decent results), “I’ve been doing this for years” (yet most old adult companies are closing doors) and so on and so on. And so on. I won’t say anyone is wrong, to each his/her own. However, if everybody else is failing, why keep following the path of failure?

So yes, information is power, and although it’s very uncommon to see someone providing secrets to competition, well, here here are some useful techniques.

Some real life techniques

Marketing Effectiveness Research

First define a budget, no matter how small it is as long as you can do something with it, you can grow it later. Isolate this marketing action by using specific custom campaigns so data isn’t contaminated. Now, choose 2 to 4 marketing models (ie banners, text links, galleries, different traffic sources, same marketing materials with different selling claims/colors and/or any combination of these) on a strict time frame, for example 1 month. Try to keep traffic levels to be consistent throughout the whole time frame, for example, if you buy 90,000 hits try to make those hits come at 3000 per day.

After the time frame ends, you’ll have some amount of data, including traffic (one column per each source), CTR, sales, time frame and so on. Using Excel, input all the data per day (1 row per day) including amount of traffic, amount of traffic to sponsors (or to join page if you have a paysite), amount of sales and a last column should include cost of traffic (if you didn’t buy traffic, use the average value from traffic providers for the same kind of traffic you have). Make a graph with this data so you can see the results at first sight. Do this for each marketing model.

Now, if you kept the traffic flow at the same level, the last column should give you a somehow flat line, but chances are you’ll see several hills and valleys in the other columns. Quite possibly, you’ll see differences depending on day of the week and day of the month. So now, let’s go to data analysis:

a) first thing first, subtract  your initial budget from the total amount of money derived from that campaign. If you get a negative number or a little positive value… well, you’re doing everything wrong, so time to rethink your strategy.

b) take your total number of sales and divide it by 30 (or any time frame you decided to go with) to get the average sales per day. Add it as a new column to your graph, repeating the same value on each row. Now you’ll have a flat line. Check out every spot where the value is above the line, and try to find something in common. For example: are those spots on weekends? at start of month? coming from some traffic source? is there a daytime/nighttime difference? (most probably, yes). Again, do it for each marketing model.

c) now compare the marketing models themselves and you’ll see a lot of information that will help you to diagnose which are your strengths and weaknesses.  Thus, you may end with something like “best results came from Tour A with TGP traffic on Wed around 6PM and 3 AM with geo IP US-DE-UK”

so in this example, it’s very easy to see that all tour versions converts better on Wed to Fri  of Week 1, between 6PM and 6 AM (day/4 means we have divided the day in 4 equal parts, but you can do it with 3, 4, 6, 8, etc. I like 6 myself), with geo IP us-de-uk. We also see tour A converts great on TGP, while tour B seems to be built for SE. Let’s say our original budget was $3000 using 3 tours and 3 different traffic sources all equally divided, thus we invested (or wasted) $66.66 per sale, and common sense tells us to divide our budget in a more efficient way since most traffic fell out of effective range. Now it will look something like this:

Model 1: Tour A, TGP traffic, 3 days a week (Wed to Fri), first week of the month, 6 hours a day (6PM to 12PM), US-UK traffic

Budget explanation: when we started, we had 3 marketing models with $0.463 per hour per traffic source investment ($1000 divided by 30 days divided by 24 hours divided by 3 traffic sources).  Now we’re weeding out 2 traffic sources, 4 days, 3 weeks, 18 hours and we realize that each sale in this targeted model would cost us only $8.33 . See the maths below:

0.463 (hourly investment) x 1 (traffic source) x 3 (days) x 1 (week) x 6 (hours)

so Model 1 real cost per sale is 12.49% of what it was.**

Model 2: Tour B,  SE traffic, 4 days a week (Wed to Mon), first week of the month, 12 hours a day (6PM to 6AM), DE-UK traffic

Now we’re weeding out 2 traffic sources, 3 days, 3 weeks, 12 hours and we realize that each sale in this targeted model would cost us only $22.22 (33.33% of what it really was) . See the maths below:

0.463 (hourly investment) x 1 (traffic source) x 4 (days) x 1 (week) x 12 (hours)

Therefore, although we could use a budget redistribution of $1875 for Model 1 and $1330 for Model 2 (or $1750 and $1250 for budget correction ), we still don’t have a tendency, so we’ll give tour C another oportunity, only that the budget will look more or less like this:

Model 1: $1700

Model 2: $850

Model 3:$450

After this time frame, we repeat the analysis, only that instead we’ll add a “previous time frame growth” column (in %): anything over 0 will tell you we’re on the right path. Any negative number will require further adjustments. Either way, in no more than 5 or 6 months you’ll probably have a defined tendency and a pretty targeted niche

Next Week: Our Sniper Tumbles! (and even more techniques) Updated: New post is on!

*if you’re interested in going deep further into statistical analysis and research, you should use Variance or Standard Deviation to measure the dispersion values

** according to the table, you may say that I’m leaving out the 19 sales, however in this example we’re working on time frame trends and the cost isn’t per sale, but for the best hour spot

It’s common knowledge for everybody that online sales are taking a hit, conversions are up to 50 times worse and traffic is being affected by new players in the business. Some people may deny it, while a few lucky ones may see better results (although still worse conversions).

This goes for those that are being affected in any or other way, and want to do something proactive about it.

The online adult business was always known as an easy one, with quick cash and lots of money to be made. It’s big yet, the money is there, but it’s not an easy one anymore.

Companies are falling down. Big, small, medium. We can see it every single day. The ones that survive the storm might get stronger than ever. However, many webmasters will fall down and disappear, whether they’re independent webmasters or big companies, everybody could be a victim.

While many actors in adult business are innovating and looking for solutions, there’s a huge mass of webmasters that aren’t willing to risk and will just wait to become trend followers, an approach that might be correct in certain circumstances. But in these harsh times, even trend followers will be taking a risk, since the level of marketing and technological innovation required to succeed nowadays is quite high.

On top of the described situation, it’s easy to realize the adult business paradigm has changed and the already known business models are not correct anymore.

Therefore, most people will need easy to manage solutions to improve their businesses at a low cost, making use of every possible tool available to achieve the best results within an ever-changing context.

And here’s where we can help.

We’ve many options to improve your sites on the following items while taking advantage of the new paradigms and business models that are proven to succeed in today’s online business:

Marketing Enhanced Design

Simply and short: everybody knows our design’s conversions are second to none. There are reasons to that, it’s not a coincidence. We invite you to discover it.

Differential Approach

As said above, the known business models have lost a lot of their effectivity. We can mantain your sites as they are right now while adding new features, or simply revamp them to make the most out of it.

Enhanced Retention Rate / Rebilling

You might be interested in reading our retention rate post where we explain this in detail. Our proposal is extremely simple: we’ll grow your retention rate. Granted. And on top of that, we can tell you how to maximize the monetization of your site. Remember: a new customer is hard (and expensive) to get. Losing customers is extremely easy.

Innovative Marketing Tools

One of the things a successful program needs is innovative marketing tools. Most programs focus their efforts on galleries, which you’ll always need. But there are ways to make them convert better, make them be more original, make them get a better CTR (Click Through Ratio). And once you think outside of the galleries, we can offer sets of marketing tools so innovative your surfers will click like mad.

Social Media and Viral Marketing

Depending on your site and your investing capabilities, we can provide you with solutions to create interest in your site coming from the biggest social media sites. Or, going a step further, even mass media.

Content Protection Techniques

We can tell you how to use content that will be hard to populate on tube sites, how to have unique content people won’t find anywhere else, and how to make the most of it, with really simple and affordable solutions

This is just a tiny part of what we can do. And we do it well. Just contact us using the contact form link and we’ll be happy to discuss your needs. You’ll never regret it.

Just let us be part of your success. Give us the chance to show you what we can do for you. Give yourself the chance to grow

These are 3 high quality galleries we made to promote the site we build for Younger Pornstars . The idea behind these galleries was to keep a light, colorful mood and the ability to include the latest content in an issue way, which we attained by pulling it via AJAX from the site’s database. Neat, huh? On top of that, we added the same custom video player we used for that site and some JQuery tools for displaying purposes and voila, a nice set of galleries with EXTREMELY HIGH CTR.

You may promote YOUNGER PORNSTARS by clicking here

CLICK ON THUMBS TO PREVIEW GALLERIES

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!