The adult Internet has long been known as the testing grounds for advertising and content delivery.
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"Even after all the effort and expense spent for Internet notoriety, it's still hard for an adult website to stand out." |
So many of the marketing methods you see online today were first utilized on adult websites. Adult webmasters and site promoters have had to learn to think differently in order to get noticed on one of the Internet’s most competitive fields.
According to a recent report by Forrester Research, adult surfers spend the most time and money online than all non-adult surfers combined. Adult webmasters have gotten so good at promoting to surfers online, they have practically tapped their sources for new traffic. They’ve mastered obtaining search engine listings, top spots on link trades, paid-for exit and 404 traffic and all the ways a sex site can advertise on the net. Even after all the effort and expense spent for Internet notoriety, it’s still hard for an adult website to stand out.
What do you do when you know all the cool online marketing techniques and still need more?
You could hire a team of the smartest and most visionary programmers and marketing gurus, lock them in a room and not allow them out until they come up with a new way of cyber-promotion. You could visit that voodoo princess in the scary part of town and have her chant a moneymaking spell while she dances around a computer with your paysite called up on the browser. You could rent some goons to go visit the offices and homes of your competing adult webmasters and offer them something they can’t refuse.
If you’ve traveled down all the possible Internet avenues for advertisement, perhaps it’s time you stepped out of the future and back in the recent past.
Instead of busting your brain trying to come up with the next, new cyber-promotional campaign, maybe you should consider good old-fashioned print advertising. You remember print don’t you? Magazines, weekly and free newspapers still reach hundreds of thousands of people every day. Placing an ad in these publications is more affordable than you might imagine and there are a surprising number of publications that are adult friendly and Internet friendly.
While everyone would love to be able to take out a full-page ad in Playboy or Hustler, the fact is that kind of advertising is insanely expensive. Just the same, you can place ads for your adult website or service in many publications that have large and faithful readerships. This kind of advertising reaches an audience in a way that no Flash banner ever could. Print is tangible. Print is low pressure. Print gets passed around and torn out to be saved. Print is a way to reach the savvy surfer who has learned to ignore Internet advertising. Print is a powerful medium.
With a little bit of research, you’ll find there are hundreds of editions that not only have large readerships but are also geared towards an adult audience. For as little as fifty dollars, you can place a classified ad for your site in a publication’s adult section that will not only appear in print but online as well.
That means a few hundred thousand readers pick up the publication with your print ad. These are faithful readers who hold onto that weekly until they’ve read it cover to cover. When they turn to the adult ads (which most of them do), your website will be there. To save you a little time, here are some weekly newspapers that will let you advertise adult businesses, cost relatively little and have convenient online submission/payment forms:
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The Village Voice
(http://www.villagevoice.com/classifieds/place_ad.php)
Perhaps one of
the most well known weekly alternative publications in the world, The Village Voice has been around since 1955 and has won numerous awards including three Pulitzer prizes. For less than 300.00, you can place a four-line ad that will appear on the web and in the must-have weekly newspaper for millions of readers.
New Times
(https://los.secure.newtimes.com/classified/place_ad)
This
free alternative newspaper is located in Los Angeles California and has a circulation of almost half a million. For only 50.00, you can fill out an online form and pay to have your ten line adult site ad appear online and in their next printed issue.
City Paper
(http://washingtoncitypaper.com/class/classrates.html)
Based in Washington DC, this publication will let you pay 125.00 for a twenty-five word adult services add in their classified section. They have a loyal readership of almost 100,000 and you can paste in your ad through their easy, online form.
Advertising in print almost seems old-fashioned in this connected age. We’re so used to pop-ups, blur consoles, search engine placement, opt-in email and all the other web methods of promotion, we may be forgetting what was once the tried and true of old.
Some might say that print ads are useless because the reader is not a surfer but they seem to forget that surfers are readers. Surfers are not the newbies we all banked on in the beginning.
Surfers have grown along with the adult Internet and the methods we invented to reach them have lost their "gee whiz" appeal. The surfer porn surfer of today isn’t easily impressed with what has become the advertising norm. Marketing an Internet site in a print publication could be just the new and different edge you will gain over your ever-growing competition.