"Advertising is legalized lying."
-H.G. Wells
A large company can contract to an advertising firm. They can afford to pay someone else to sell their product. Most Adult webmasters are one-person enterprises. We have to be layout designers, graphic artists, copywriters and HTML coders. First and foremost, we have to be salesmen.
"Selling is easy, sales are hard."
-Titmowse
In my decades of experience with sales, I have learned there are two types of product. One is product that sells itself because there is a market for it. The other is product where the market must be invented.
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"One is product that sells itself because there is a market for it. The other is product where the market must be invented." |
An example of self-selling product would be when I was a cosmetologist. I didn't need to really work at promoting my services/product as a hair cutter. Most people like to look good and trust their hair to professionals. I retained my customers by giving them better-than-average service at a fair price. A haircut, (like the food in a grocery) is a self-selling product.
Sex is a self-selling product. If prostitution is the world's oldest profession, then sex is its oldest commodity. There is no doubt that the market is out there.
In the old days of porn on the world wide web, all one had to do was post a link in a newsgroup to a page with a few thumbnails and boom, the sign-ups came rolling in. Now there are a bazillion Adult webmasters saturating the trade. Sure, the market for sex is ever regenerating and plentiful. The Internet is the perfect marriage of customer and service provider. Because of societal norms and mores, buying sex-related materials is more private and convenient on the net than in the real world. Even though an Adult site owner has something that a great many want, because of the existence of so many other Adult marketers, one finds themselves having to invent ways to convince surfers their sex is the best sex.
This competitiveness amongst Internet smut peddlers tends to bring out the unethical side of sales. Auto bookmarks, spam, unauthorized downloads and IMG SRC theft are common practices for some site builders. When a righteous Adult webmaster asks for ethical reform on a BBS, they are laughed at. They are told to examine the smarmy business they are in. They are inundated with sales statistics from those that brag about fooling the surfer into submitting that credit card number.
It is terribly hard for an Adult webmaster to honestly generate sales especially when they see so many do it unethically. It is easy in a field that many deem shady in its essence to fully join the dark side.
"There's a sucker born every minute"
-P.T. Barnum
Having sold many a dessert, bottle of shampoo and pair of socks to go with that tie, I have learned that indeed, people are easily swayed and highly suggestible. I have learned that if you hesitate too long to close a sale, you lose the sale. I know that persistence works because many customers initially say no the first two times, but then say yes on the third. I know enough to make that guy that just wanted a pair of socks walk out the door with those socks plus a suit, an extra pair of pants, two shirts and a tie. I know the dirtiest secret of all salesmen:
Stick a price on it and people will buy anything.
I choose not to abuse this knowledge. I choose never to make my customer feel bamboozled or cheated. Why? Because I know something else about people:
They are rarely fooled twice and a repeat customer is the best customer.
The unethical Adult porn slinger relies on the innocence of their market. They know that the Nielsen/NetRatings study recently concluded that: "The Internet was leap-frogging the adoption of fixed-line telephones in developing nations." The unethical sex site salesman depends on the inexperience of these newbies. What they don't depend on is the addendum to the Nielsen/NetRatings study:
"The telephone took upwards of 35 years to penetrate a quarter of the U.S. population, while the Internet only took seven years, in some of the developing markets, the telephone is still at surprisingly low levels of penetration, but yet the Internet is fast gaining in terms of access.’~
What that means is that soon, there will be as many households with Internet ready computers as there are with television sets. I will repeat what I have stated in other articles; the newbie well will dry up. While a fraction of the market will always be those that recently came to legal adult age, the whole rest of your market will be experienced users.
When your client base is comprised of mostly knowledgeable customers, dirty tricks will not convert into sales or rebills. A person who was fooled into believing they were going to get a free movie because your dialer text link said so, isn't likely to keep using your dialer after they get their phone bill. A free three-day site pass will not convert into a full membership if you led your customer to the submit page by promising them a free lifetime pass. Tactics like these may get you initial sales but there will be no membership renewals and no revisits to your site.
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If you choose to take the smarter route and be an ethical smut peddler, here are some sales tips that may help those of you who have little or no experience in the art of the deal:
Promote your site in any and every acceptable way you can. Surfers can't find you if they don't know you exist. Link trades, banner exchanges, gallery submissions, Meta tags and search engine submissions are some of the ways to bring attention to your page. Persistence is the key to retaining this attention. If the search engines don't list you, study pages that are listed and amend yours and submit again. If link lists won't post you, email the list owner and ask them how you can change your site so they will list you. Don't build just one site. Build several and have them all link to each other and promote each site every day with gallery submissions.
Know your customers. Not only should sponsor ads on your page compliment the type of content you serve, you should familiarize your self with exactly who is visiting your page. Counters are an excellent way to learn who you are reaching. They can tell you what countries your surfers are coming from. Counters can show you the specific search terms a customer used to get to your site. Many counters can even tell you where your surfers go when they leave your site. Information like this is invaluable for you and the benefit of many of these Adult site counters is they are free in exchange for a button graphic link. Also remember to check those counters to see what TGPs and link sites sent you your surfers. Understanding who is listing you can save you from wasting your time submitting galleries to those who are not.
Describe your product. A cool graphic may get a surfer to click on a banner but the text of the tour copy is what sells the membership. "10,000 Nasty pics and more for only $39.95" won't sell nearly as well as "Get to know beautiful, sexy models with thousands of pics, live webcams and real time chat for less than the price of dinner and a movie"! If you have a dialer, don't use some sure-fire gimme link on an executable program. If you link a dialer with text like: "Watch Trixie take it up the Ass Now! No Credit Card Needed!" you will probably have a lot of downloads. The problem is, by not informing the customer in any way that they were going to download a program that charges their telephone $2.00 or higher per minute, you will have sold to a surfer that will never visit your site again. That surfer has friends and they will not recommend your site to them. Try adding a Java alert box to that tempting dialer link. Use text like this in the box:
"By clicking on the button you will be downloading a program. This program will take you to Trixie's World of anal pics and movies and live video feeds and your charges will be added to your local telephone service bill. Hurry up and read the fine print because Trixie's ass is hot for you"!
Text like this will accurately describe your dialer and properly inform users of its potential cost while, not scaring them away with hideous disclaimer babble. Instead of blind linking a thumbnail to a pop-up console hell session, try blind linking that thumbnail to a page that first describes the great membership your sponsor offers in big, bold text. Then, at the bottom of the page, you can post a link to the actual image in smaller text. You can make sales with without misleading people and still be creative.
Ethical adult selling takes more work than cheap, manipulative tricks. Anything worth having always takes hard work. But remember you are in a market with a self-selling product. With perseverance, creativity and fairness, in the long run you will develop dependable sales. You can be an honest service provider instead of a snake oil salesman.