Float Like A Porn Site Sting Like A Sales Page

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Found this great article the source can be found here
With all the new trends hitting the Internet every year I just can't help but sit back and laugh at the broad scope of things. The public is amazed at the changes happening in the background but completely miss the pattern that we webmasters all knew back when we were horny teenagers first learning web design.
The porn industry sets the standards for the Internet.
Everyone knows it but yet they don't catch on until about 2 years after the porn sites have already made it a standard. Facts be faced and the "master promoters of today" be damned; the adult industry has us all beat by a mile. Since the beginning they have specialized in grabbing attention, converting the user, and keeping the audience. We nonadult webmasters with our content sites, spam sites, or whatever haven't even begun to catch up with them and in my opinion find ourselves about 2 years behind. Web 2.0? Don't make me laugh. Take almost any porn site from 2003-2004ish and look at how they are designed. They didn't call it anything amazing they just did what tested to convert best. Once again, in my humble opinion, I don't think for a moment that we are being revolutionary. Some may disagree with me here but for what it's worth there is a lot that can be learned from modern porn sites. A large majority of which is held in the way they design and promote. Since I'm not an adult webmaster(sorry but the money isn't worth desensitizing my love of real life boobs) I'll focus this post on the promoting aspect.
So what trends do you see in the porn industry right now? How do you see them promoting their sites outside of the seach engines? Well there's tons at the moment but one of the biggest I'm seeing is how they handle affiliates. They take their membership based sites and put in previews and tidbits of content to get the users to convert. They then take almost ALL the content they have in the members area and hand it out like candy to their affiliates. The affiliates no longer have to trick the users into going to the links, they just post up the content everywhere they can. I'm not just talking about member based advertisers I'm also talking about products and anything else.
Affiliates
Lets say you sell car audio. Just following this model, why not hand out free full version software to your affiliates that will help their users tune their own car stereos to the maximum? Why not have videos of your sponsored competition cars kicking ass and hand it out to all your affilliates? Give them full pages of interactive content with statements like "Thank you -link- audio for providing the useful video on how to increase the throw and pitch on stock speakers." There are a million ideas and twists that can be done to this concept that the adult industry has mastered and tested for years now. Their wisdom and testing has already proven the inevitable drop in link and sales pitch tactics. So we might as well drop them now and stay one step ahead. If we know where the trends are going why not follow them before the rest of the competition does?
Ad Formats
Also notice how the adult industry is formatting their ads on other sites. It's moved away from "Hey don't you want to see Pamela Anderson naked" to "Check out this chick with triple D's trying to play socker naked." The user naturally goes "I gotta see this!" The move to "shocking ads" from "here's what i got" ads isn't a surprising one. The shocking ads will get the user digging. If they click on the link and don't see the content they were wanting they will click around in a determined fashion on your site till they find it. Lets say you sell home theater equipment. "Check out this $150,000 home theater system I setup in my home!" Holy crap i gotta see this, i bet its badass! They click and see all the images and read stuff about "It features a -link- Philips TSU3000 -/link- universal touch screen remote with a high end -link- Hitachi CP-X345 Projector -/link-. Boom you got yourself some "I gotta have that" sales.
Well I can take this article on for at least another 4-5 pages but I'm going to stop it here now that I got a few brain gears turning. The lesson here is, just watch for the trend setters. Beat the rest of your industry to it. Black hatters, are you wanting to know what to do next to push your cpc and affilliate sites? Just look at how its already being done successfully in the adult industry. You can learn a lot from their mistakes and successes.
#float #page #sales #site #sting
  • thanks.....i dig the post....
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  • Profile picture of the author Paul Barrs
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    • Profile picture of the author Kay King
      The article is from 2006 - so not up with Web 2.0, etc, technology in that piece. Porn sites in the past 2-3 years (from what I've read in business articles) have faced profitability challenges. These are caused by piracy and by porn-tube sites with user contributed content.

      About the time the article was published there was a lot of buzz in IM about modeling marketing methods after porn site marketing. I have no doubt that some things we do now to promote sites were originated by profitable porn sites.

      kay
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      • Profile picture of the author electronik69
        Originally Posted by Kay King View Post

        The article is from 2006 - so not up with Web 2.0, etc, technology in that piece. Porn sites in the past 2-3 years (from what I've read in business articles) have faced profitability challenges. These are caused by piracy and by porn-tube sites with user contributed content.

        About the time the article was published there was a lot of buzz in IM about modeling marketing methods after porn site marketing. I have no doubt that some things we do now to promote sites were originated by profitable porn sites.

        kay
        I completely agree with your post Kay but the reason I found the post so brilliant was the part about the affiliate marketing. Wouldn't you agree that most IMers that have affiliate programs give you pretty much nothing to go with apart from some banners and some lame articles.

        They then take almost ALL the content they have in the members area and hand it out like candy to their affiliates. The affiliates no longer have to trick the users into going to the links, they just post up the content everywhere they can. I'm not just talking about member based advertisers I'm also talking about products and anything else.
        Now can anyone tell me how many non adult affiliate programs do that sort of thing my guess would be not many.
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    • Profile picture of the author Scott Voss
      You know, there are some guys out there that have been "studying" those same marketing strategies for years. It just isn't a part of any job they have. :p

      Originally Posted by Paul Barrs View Post

      During that time I had to look at what the 'industry standard' was, which of course led me to studying the marketing strategy of adult sites.
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      • Profile picture of the author electronik69
        Originally Posted by Scott Voss View Post

        You know, there are some guys out there that have been "studying" those same marketing strategies for years. It just isn't a part of any job they have. :p
        Haha got to agree with you on that one
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  • Profile picture of the author internetsweetie
    Very interesting.
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    • Profile picture of the author helisell
      Yes yes all great except...........

      They have the biggest volume of searches.............
      and really crappy conversion rates.

      ???

      OK so you don't believe me huh??

      How many here have paid for porn?





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      Making Calls To Sell Something? What are you actually saying?
      Is there any room for improvement? Want to find out?

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  • Profile picture of the author spennyc
    Cool stuff - anyone see that new movie about the birth of all this stuff on the Internet? Giovanni Ribisi is in it.
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