Many people come into this industry because porn turns them on. They've surfed porn sites, they get off on porn sites, they know porn makes them feel good so they think that selling porn will do the same.
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"Interestingly, marketing online is a microcosm of marketing in the real world." |
These people carefully craft free sites or galleries with lots of nice graphics, loads of pics, sales patter that won't get in the way of the pics and nothing that will upset the surfer. They do it because they are sure that is the way to sell porn.
Let's take the word 'porn' out of the equation for a moment and replace it with that word that covers just about everything that we can't quite describe; "widget". How many people who come into this industry would do so if we marketed widgets?
The common garden variety widget is a pretty unexciting little thing so I guess we wouldn't get too many people flocking to sell widgets. On the other hand, we might if for every widget we sold we were paid $35.00 and there was the potential to sell thousands of widgets each year.
Once we had made the decision to market widgets we would have to decide how to achieve the widest exposure for our product. There are plenty of ways we could market our widgets. There is the print media, direct mail, telemarketing, radio and television advertising and even online marketing.
How would we go about selling widgets online? I suppose we could post a photo of a widget, use some sales patter to tell people why our widgets were the best on the market, maybe even offer some special deals on widgets and then attempt to close the sale. If we weren't able to close the sale then perhaps we might offer something else that the surfer might be interested in.
If all that is ok for marketing widgets or any other saleable item for that matter then why is marketing porn so different? We wouldn't show 20 photos of the same widget to a prospective buyer even if they were all taken from different angles. We wouldn't be careful not to let our sales patter get in the way of his vicarious enjoyment of photos of a virgin widget would we? Then why do we do it with porn?
Why is it important to give a surfer 15, 20, 30 or 50 free porn pics while we are trying to market our sponsors? Why must we limit ourselves to the amount of advertising that we put on our sites? When we put up a free site or a TGP gallery it costs us in hosting and content purchases so that we can give porn to the masses for free. So the questions remains, do we really owe the surfer something?
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We don't owe the surfer one single thing and yet we pussy-foot around him and treat him like gold while he rapes and pillages us for every scrap of free stuff he can get from us.
Of course, when we come into this industry many of us are taught that there is only one way to market our sponsors to the surfer and that is through free sites, AVS sites and TGP galleries. All of these types of sites require traffic and support. It is the people who provide the traffic and support who impose limitations on the amount of marketing we can do on our sites. They impose those limitations for no other reason than the fact that it suits their marketing model to do so and those limitations are an expense to us just as hosting and content are expenses.
Now, I am not complaining about that for one second. They provide the traffic to our sites and without traffic we aren't going to be able to market anything. However, there are more ways to market our sponsor than just through sites that are tied to the rules of others.
Interestingly, marketing online is a microcosm of marketing in the real world. Just look back at all those options we had to advertise our widgets. Every one of those options that are available in the real world are also available to us online. The restrictive rules that apply to free sites etc. do not necessarily apply to the other forms of marketing that we can employ.
I don't intend to give away any secrets here and I'm not going to take you by the hand and show you the obvious either. The people who succeed in marketing are the ones who are innovative in their thinking and I don't want to cloud anyone's thoughts by filling them my views only.
Just look around for all the options that are available in the real world and think a little laterally. You will soon start to see marketing options that you had not seen before because every option that exists in the real world is replicated online.
Nor should you look solely online to market your adult widgets. Look around you and you will see people who are marketing online porn in offline situations. Would they do it if they were not making any money?
Wether you're marketing porn or marketing widgets, the principles and opportunities remain the same. Those that prosper are the ones who look beyond the index page.