18/03/21 Seminar presented by Rob from Splatbukkake.xxx and Dom from UKAP
Well, history isn’t my specialist subject so I can’t say whether that quote is attributable to Einstein or not. But the sentiment is valid.
Sometimes its hard to really get a handle on your adult business. You’re at the coal face, continually chipping away, hoping to strike gold. But it just doesn’t happen… or maybe doesn’t happen often enough. Well there are actually some small, positive actions we can all think about taking which should improve our adult businesses.
We ran this seminar to help people think about their efforts. Think about what you’re doing. Is it having an effect? And moreover, how do you KNOW whether it’s having any effect or not?
Topics Covered
- Marketing
- Measuring Your Efforts
- Improving Your Incoming Traffic
- Getting MORE From the Content You’ve Shot
- Additional Revenue Streams
And the last point to note is- There are *NO* Magic Bullets here; we’re just encouraging you to step away from the coal face, think, and see if there are areas of opportunity or effort you haven’t explored yet!
1. Marketing. Are You?
As we’ve mentioned earlier, we are ALL marketers. Anyone who pushes and promotes their content is doing marketing. Don’t be afraid of it, it’s a good thing! It also means you won’t be telling lies if you apply for a business bank account on the basis that your primary work is ‘online marketing’. Think about it!
So, a couple of short points;
- What are you doing to promote your website/content? Write it down.
- Do you know if THAT is what improves your income?
- Are there other ways you can easily market your content?
- If so, WHY AREN’T YOU USING THEM?????
2. Measuring Your Efforts
This is where things get a bit juicy. The interesting thing about marketing is that when done properly, it’s a cyclical process where you continually make changes and evaluate.
- You assess your work
- You make changes
- You measure the effect of those changes
- Go back to point 1.
And you continually go through this cycle. Small changes can make a big difference to your bottom line, but unless you’re testing your efforts and getting some real metrics back, HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT WORKS?
Case study 1
You’ll see in the illustration above two graphs. The one at the top is taken from Google Analytics and shows the incoming traffic to our site Splatbukkake.xxx during the period of Nov19 until now. The lower red/green block graph is taken from the SEO tool SEMrush and shows the quality of domains linking TO splatbukkake.
In the Google Analytics traffic graph, you can see
A) At this point, the incoming traffic has been improving steadily and we’re seeing growth. Excellent
B) At point B things stop growing and it looks like we’ve hit a wall.
C) Traffic is at a flat level and isn’t growing, despite our best efforts
So we took a look at another tool, SEMRush and tried to look for signals into what had changed, and why. Looking at the ‘back-link analysis’ we could see a point where the quality of traffic coming into us had deteriorated. While there was much more traffic coming in, a huge portion of this traffic was coming from ‘poor quality’ domains. Ones which Google sees as low quality.
There are many ways to determine Domain quality – Domain and Page Authority, Moz Rank, Majestic Trust flow and so on. Essentially, domains that are new, ones with low user engagement, high bounce rates or have a ‘thin’ content are deemed as low quality.
So, what happened to cause this? We actually made a change to our marketing free hosted galleries, so they were offered from our core domain URL instead of where they used to be, on our affiliate domain. As such, there was a great deal of incoming traffic, but with Google deeming it ‘low quality’, our search engine results got penalised and we have not been ranking as highly as we should be.
So, we have some work to do. We’ve moved our affiliate galleries back onto our affiliate domain and put a redirect on our main domain which re-points the traffic. This will take time to take effect. We’ve also got to increase the quality of new back-links IN, so the percentage of low-quality back-links is continually reducing. However, The BIG takeaway from this is…..
WE WOULDN’T HAVE KNOWN -ANY- OF THIS IF WE HADN’T LOOKED AT THE DATA!
Analytics if you have your own website – Use Google Analytics
We’re not going to go through this because there’s plenty of resources available online. But, there is a quick tip we can add to your knowledge. You can make ‘campaigns’ in your marketing efforts and see the results of those IN Google Analytics, did you know that?
You can build a URL and give it a couple of additional parameters at the end. Then you can see when those links were clicked, and as such follow the success of any promotional efforts you make.
There’s a tool here https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/ which allows you to quickly build a URL with the relevant parameters attached, that you can then follow in Google Analytics.
So for this campaign, I’m building a blog post campaign and bought some back-links from a guy called Greg who’s got a network of blogs.
Using that generated link at the bottom there, rather than my default website URL, I can then see in Google Analytics in more detail, where the traffic is coming from.
And as such, I’ll be able to make an educated decision about the campaign and whether it was successful or not.
Analytics if you haven’t got your own website
If you run a clip store or other platform where you aren’t in control of the backend (and as such, can’t implement your own analytics system like Google Analytics) there are a couple of methods of getting SOME data and metrics.
Tip: Use a URL shortener like bit.ly or smarturl.it.
These both have facilities where you can make different links for different campaigns. Also, they provide some tracking info so you can see where traffic is coming from. Use these when you’re marketing your content, rather than your clip site URL.
Case Study 2
Where are your sales actually coming from? (Note: This will differ from platform-to-platform so if your platform doesn’t provide sales data, you should ask for it!)
As we run a website with an affiliate program, its easy for us to look at affiliate sales. We took a look at the last quarter of last year and categorised the affiliates so we could assess and make some decisions.
From those figures we tallied things up and noticed a couple of surprising things;
- Tube site sales are there, but don’t amount to anywhere near as much as we would have thought they would.
Especially when you take into account how many people watch free videos and don’t pay for your content.
It also takes time and effort to populate those tube site shop windows so this also needs to be taken into account. - Review site sales are really very good, and amount to 30% of our affiliate sales. This surprised us to be honest. The volume of traffic from them is very small, BUT the quality of that traffic is absolutely perfect. Surfers who have read a review and are educated enough to be willing to click a link and make a subscription.
Looking at the data now allows us to make an educated decision. The effort for us vs. the income from the sales make this a VERY good and worthwhile avenue to pursue. So we will;- Schedule in more closely when our sites are due for re-review (putting them back on the front page of the review sites!
- Look at review site critique and take action on those points
- Make it -EASY- for reviewers and get them on-side. Give them all the site facts, review accounts, details of what has changed etc.
- Look for MORE review sites!!
WE WOULDN’T HAVE KNOWN -ANY- OF THIS IF WE HADN’T LOOKED AT THE DATA!
3. Improving Your Incoming Traffic
If I could see through John Smiths eyes, I’d sell John Smith what John Smith buys
No idea who wrote that, but it’s excellent
Traffic generation is what we -ALL- strive for, all the time. Knowing your customer and selling ‘John Smith’ above what he wants, is even better. But we can make use of poorer traffic somehow, and we’ll touch on some of those later. For now, consider that there are LOTS of ways to get more traffic and they will -ALL- need work;
- Google and Search Engines. This takes a LONG time and a LOT of effort. But if you can get traffic from Google searches, it’s likely to be very good. People have searched for something and your content has come up in the results. Think about that. They’ve searched and YOU and YOUR CONTENT is what satisfies their search. It’s an excellent source of traffic and you should do as much as your time allows to grow your Google Traffic because it’s very good.
- Affiliates. If you haven’t got your own website then this might not be possible for you, but see if your platform has an affiliate program. If it does, use it. The more people you have selling your content, the more chances you have of making sales (even if they are minus a heafty commission). Also, review sites are infinitely more willing to review when there’s a chance of an affiliated sale. Given the info in the previous section, you now know WHY this is important!
If you have got an affiliate program;- Make it easy for your affiliates. Offer them some free access so they can get their own content to use for promoting
- Provide them with curated galleries, clips, pictures and content
- Ask them if they need specific creatives. (i.e. if they’ve got a blog with some banner space that’s an odd size, go make a banner which fits that for them!)
- Social Media. This is hard, as only Twitter and Reddit are mainstream social media platforms who are comfortable with adult. This is a huge topic outside of the scope of this seminar, and one we might pick up in more detail later.
- Mainstream Media. Depending on your content or brand, mainstream exposure might be something which could work for you. If so, consider contacting a reputable PR agency and see what they have to say.
- Partnering. Don’t forget ‘John Smith’. If he’s proved he likes your content, then he will like other ‘same niche’ or similar content or models. Hook up with similar sites or models as yourself and do mutual promos.
- For models
- retweeting each others promos on your own channels.
- For Website owners;
- Members-area banner exchanges
- Cross Sales (This is adding your partners offer to your join page so a surfer joins both at the same time, usually via a special offer. Then get your partner to add the same deal to their join page)
- Ex-member mailers (Direct email your ex members with your partners offer, and get them to do likewise)
- Content exchanges (Show your partners content IN your members area, and get your partner to offer likewise)
- For models
Assessing your Incoming Traffic
Unless you can look at your traffic and compare it to the sales you make, you simply can’t make educated marketing decisions. For instance, see below and lets look at the incoming traffic to Splatbukkake.xxx since 01/01.
If you look at the incoming traffic above, you’ll see;
- Nearly 70% from ‘referrals’ (affiliates, tubes, other websites)
- 14% from ‘direct’ traffic. People who know your brand and type it straight in.
- Organic Search. Google/Bing traffic. This is pure gold.
- ‘Other’ – this is a group GA puts anything which has your ‘tags’ made in the Google URL builder we mentioned earlier;
- Social. Less than 2% of our traffic comes from social media. Surprised?
Now look specifically at the incoming Social traffic;
- Vast majority of that 2% social traffic is from Twitter.
Not surprising as we don’t really work the other platforms. - Maybe its time we did? Especially Reddit as that -CAN- be more xxx friendly.
Detail on Referral Traffic
In the data above, you can see referral traffic makes up 70% of the incoming traffic. This is where your site gets traffic DIRECTLY from a link on another site. Important to look at your referral traffic so you can spot patterns, track what effect your marketing effort is having and help you make decisions.
From the incoming referral traffic you see here;
- Almost -ALL- our incoming ‘referral’ traffic is coming from pic gallery sources (TGPs).
- The first source which is not a gallery/TGP is at 13. britbuk.com who runs a bukkake blog
- Then the next non TGP/gallery source is Xhamster down at 37, with 339 hits. 339 hits in 3 months – just 3-4 hits per day. Not much eh?
But remember back to Case Study 2 where we looked at actual sales;
Even though Xhamster only gives us 3-4 hits per day, that still equates to it being the 4th best source of income over the period we examined. It’s -GOOD QUALITY- traffic.
The important things to take away from this analysis is;
- TUBE traffic provides -LESS- incoming traffic than TGP/gallery traffic, but converts better
- TGP/Gallery traffic is HUGE, but doesn’t convert much
- If TGP/Gallery traffic doesn’t convert directly to sales, why use it? Well, you can always get those surfers details to direct market to later on. Either by email forms, or things like browser push notifications. Then you can try and sell to those customers later.
Its not enough to -JUST- look at traffic. You NEED to assess it against the sales you make too. That way you can define what is the best QUALITY traffic and focus on obtaining more of that.
WE WOULDN’T HAVE KNOWN -ANY- OF THIS IF WE HADN’T LOOKED AT THE DATA!
4. Getting MORE From Your Content
There are -MANY- ways to monetise your content and if you concentrate on a single platform, you’re missing out on potential sales and also adding an element of risk to your business.
Platforms. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly!
- Remember. Some platforms WORK for some folks, but not for others. For instance, for our own content, it does very well on our own site(s) and on Manyvids. The more model-focused platforms like PocketStars didn’t work for us, and neither does Clips4Sale to any degree. *YET* there are thousands of businesses and creators who make an exceptional living from those platforms.
- What happens if YOUR platform has problems or changes? If you’re only using a single platform, you are putting your business at risk. Examples of difficulties with platforms include;
- Recently Onlyfans and C4S has T&C changes, leaving some creators with content that didn’t then comply and had to be taken down.
- Webstream had (a probably temporary) loss of the ability to take paid chat/video payments. If this was your only source of income, this could leave you vulnerable.
- Protect yourself, buy your own domain. Even if you use one platform as your outlet, we’s still recommend you buy your own domain and point it to your platform.
For instance, say you’re using OnlyFans as your primary platform, and leave all your promotion links on your socials and other web areas which specifically point to your onlyfans page. If you have to change from Onlyfans for some reason ALL THOSE LINKS WILL THEN BE LOST TO YOU!!
The alternative is you buy ‘mysexydomain.com‘ and re-point that so it goes to your onlyfans automatically. If you then follow the highlighted disaster scenario from above and youre forced to move to another platform, you simply re-point your own domain TO that new platform page.
All your existing social links and so on will all still work, pointing them to your new home automatically!
Consider Licensing Your Content Out
Licensing your content out to third parties CAN be a superb source of tertiary income, especially if you have a lot of older, legacy content whose value to YOUR customers has diminished.
Content licensing can be fraught with a little danger and the agreement you make should really be written up by a solicitor to protect your interests properly. Your agreement should cover things like;
- The length of term of any license
- Any limitations of use need to be clear and explicitly defined
- Payment terms need to be explicit
- Termination clauses. I.e. How the agreement can be closed by either party, by desire or breach of terms.
So as you can see it CAN be technical and legal, but can be an excellent way to get a good boost in income from your older content.
When Shooting, Cover More Than One Niche
This was a gem of advice I took from the last Xbiz virtual summit. One of the speakers (who’s name I can’t recall now, sadly) suggested that whenever you shoot content, to ALWAYS ensure you cover and satisfy more than one niche. Don’t try and cover 10, obviously, or your content will be thin and not satisfy any of those niches. But THINK carefully up-front and plan your shoots to satisfy more than one.
i.e. Don’t just shoot a boy-girl scene, shoot a boy-girl scene -WITH STOCKINGS- or -WITH UNIFORMS-. Or whatever. It just gives you a second (or more) opportunity to make a sale from that same content. Open up new customer avenues etc.
5. Additional Revenue Streams
There are always additional revenue streams we can look at. Not all of them are appropriate for everyone, but as we pointed out at the start, this seminar is designed to make you THINK.
- Phone/SMS chat
For models, look at adultwork.com, sextpanther.com (EU) or niteflirt.com
For Webmasters, get in touch with the guys at worldwidedigitalmedia.co.uk - DVD sales
If you’ve got a good sized library of content DVD can still be a worthwhile tertiary income source. Granted, not as much as it might have been 10-20 years ago, but there are still buyers who like a physical product.
For US/Worldwide distribution, try pulsedistribution.com or UK/EU erigodvds.com - Adult Dating
This has proved to be resilient and consistent with very little effort. Obviously there are long-standing businesses in this field like adultfriendfinder.com but the one which has worked best for us is hubstars.com - Web Cams
For models, obviously you can sign up and use whichever platform you like. For webmasters, you might need to try a couple and find out what seems to work best for your traffic. Streammate.com is probably the biggest (their webmaster program is at https://wm.mtree.com/) but LiveJasmin.com has worked best for us (https://www.awempire.com/) - Affiliating with others!
This shouldn’t be overlooked. YOUR customers will like other websites/models who are similar to your own. As such, you might as well promote them TOO and make sales commissions from those sales. I’ve had one webmaster (rather ignorantly) suggest this is mad to push your customers to the competition, and if customers ever stayed for life, I’d agree with that. But they dont. 4 in 5 customers come on for a 1-2 months, then move on. They often come back later for more, but they’re more transient than people realise.
So, when you’ve got a customer, point them at ‘similarToMe.com‘ as you KNOW they’ll love it. All the time that member is a member of their website too, chances are you’ll be earning 50% of that membership.
Also, when a member leaves, thank them for their business and point them to your competitor with your affiliated link, giving you that sale.
Then, contact your competitor and ask them if they’d like to affiliate with you because their members would love your content too. Think about it!