Do your homework, put in the time developing your sites, and you can sit back, monitor your stats, and watch the money roll in.
Joining an affiliate program for your favorite niche market is very easy. You just plunk into their form, all your personal information, choose a password and you are into the back room. You have just gained access to a virtual marketing office. You have been hired to advertise to all the ‘netizens, convincing them to follow you to the door of their adult sites. Your job is to design advertising copy, in the form of Web sites that energizes the prospective members and prepares them to purchase.
Seems a simple task, as your new employer is all geared up to pay you for every sale you generate and hands over to you, every marketing tool they have. There will be banners, free content, picture of the day content, preferred text links, full page advertisements, 404 traps, e-mail programs, pop-up consoles and your link codes. You will also see the sites listed that are available for you to market, in your new job as an adult affiliate.
So, what is the first thing you do when you start a new job? You familiarize yourself with the company. This is very true for niche affiliate marketing, because often you will have found some smaller affiliate programs with owners new to the adult web and/or new to pay-site ownership.
It is a good idea to investigate the affiliate company in order to determine your comfort level in working with them. Check with other webmasters and even send off some e-mail questions to the contacts found on the affiliate site.
You do not want to change out 5000 links or make 100 new sites using a brand new company, unless you are sure that this niche will work well for you, and the company is worthy of the risk you will assume. There are difficulties in commandeering a brand new adult pay-site/affiliate program, which places the new programs into the “proceed at your own risk category.”
Visit And Take Notes
Next, familiarize yourself with the site you are about to promote. If you have not already done so, visit the tour and scour it for things like “what is the visual impression a surfer will get regarding what is inside this site.” If the site has a generic name, but in visiting the splash page you see six pictures of blowjob babes, you will instantly see your angle in advertising this site. In addition, you can grab many text links from their tour.
Do not hesitate to ask for a pass to the member’s area. Remember you are now their best marketing affiliate and there is no reason for them to refuse.
Advertise yourself. Now that you have your adult themed site, designed with all the latest in marketing tools, you have to begin to market it. Your site has to be optimized for, and placed in the search engines. You should consider some traffic trades, and you can even pay for surfer clicks. Again, it seems a simple task, but you can either proceed looking like the realtor who simply hangs a for-sale-sign out on a lawn, or you can go one step further by advertising an open house, or placing write-ups in ingenious places.
All it will take is a few minutes of surfing your new niche, to determine what has already been done by other webmasters, and get ideas of how you might do things better, or at least differently.
Joining alternative Affiliate Programs. Unique problems come with the alternative niche markets. I have ventured into a market with my site Couples Sex that has not been approached yet. My site is highly unique in that I attempt to include in the membership area items of interest not only to both sexes, but also to couples. I expect two surfers using one membership, and I hope that they end up very distracted by something as juicy as a passionate romp on the living room floor.
My angle is to enhance the sexual experience of the new age surfing couples, and even to be a sex- and relationship-positive adult site. The problem with innovation, is effectively training my new marketing affiliates. I always let a new affiliate inside the member’s area, and I always spend time with them to explain the goal of the site.
Do Your Homework
You need to research, if you are working in a niche with which you have no personal experience. I find the Gothic sites to be fascinating, yet I know nothing about goth. In order to market it, I would have to do some intensive study as to what is appealing and sexy about the gothic niche. I cannot write effective advertising copy for a niche I have no clue about. Now it becomes very important for me to see the inside of the sites. I must understand the turn-on factor.
Keep in Touch. Before you decide to give up on a sponsor, contact them with your questions or concerns. It is very important for new and niche site owners to get this kind of feedback. This is similar to an exit interview with real world employment, only you initiate it. In an exit interview, there is a free exchange between the employee/employer, and it is meant to be a discussion covering experiences while working at the company, and as a last chance to share your opinions and ideas about the company.
Hopefully you have already done your best to communicate some of your concerns or desires regarding your new marketing affiliate experience, before you decide to quit. When it becomes obvious to you that this partnership is not working well, then it is time to move on.
Take this opportunity to let the site owner know why you are going. Done with tact it can be meaningful feedback and could help the pay-site owner to understand a differing perspective on their site. You will find that the time spent is worthwhile, because you have made a professional contact, or you may even convince the sponsor there is a need for a change.
Jumping On The Brand New Niche Wagon
Many webmasters look for that late-breaking niche and want to be the first on board. It is a gamble but often well worth the effort. There are questions that must be asked first:
- Is there content readily available for this niche?
- Are there content providers willing to regularly produce fresh content?
- Can you produce your own content in this niche?
- Is the target market large enough?
- Is there enough variation in the keywords you will use?
Do this research before you start to work in a new niche. Remember there are solutions to each of those problems if you are enterprising enough. Possibly you can you strike up a business relationship with the pay-site owner, in order to have unlimited use of their content. Maybe you are quite energized by the idea that very few are marketing to this niche. Be well informed before investing your time and money.
Take advantage of the free in-service training. Anyone who has worked in the real world knows the value of continuously learning and advancing your knowledge, no matter how many years you have been in the business.
Often you will see the new webmasters frequenting the chats put on by sponsors that are not only networking opportunities, but free, knowledge sharing forums. Your new employers are sending you on staff development courses. Show up and pay attention.
Most of the readers of this column will be surfers who have been around a while. If you are an experienced surfer, do not think that the informational chats are not for you. It is good to keep an ear to the ground about late breaking adult webmaster news, and networking and boards are very good for this. If you do not sharpen your skills by listening to those around you, then you are going to be missing out.
There is a community of webmasters marketing to women that have started their own chats on Wednesday nights. The purpose of the chats is to provide a learning forum that allows for networking and sharing ideas and concerns. Our numbers are very small because there are not many 4women marketers. We can therefore have the big sponsors chatting with new and seasoned webmasters.
The productiveness of these chats is amazing. In the very least the participants go away very energized and full of ideas. The possibilities of these free exchanges are endless, from the free flow of ideas between the people responsible for the partner programs to announcements and even some affiliate marketing training.
Think Outside The Box
Think about what you are marketing through the eyes of the surfer, and you have what it takes to make it big in the adult affiliate marketing arena. You have to do things differently from the others. You have to make your own advertisements, not simply put up banners.
You must know what the adult surfer wants, and promise it, but DO NOT deliver it. Instead you must effectively deliver them to the tour of the right sponsor, the sponsor who pays you for the adult surfer you have managed to guide to them with credit- card in hand. Do the tease, do the promising and tell them where to go. The adult ‘Net has begun to look like a bazillion mini pay-sites with all the hardcore readily available.
It does not take Wankers long to know that with a little work they can find everything they need without paying for it. If webmasters keep this up we should be getting into the ISP service provider biz, because they are the only ones making any money from the free-sites we see out there today.
In summary, remember when you get that new adult affiliate marketing position, that these companies are hiring you for your marketing skills and not your entertainment skills. Most webmasters have to continuously “dummy down” their graphics skills and even their conversation skills. Most content comes with series sets that go from softcore to hardcore penetration, and these have to be censored or not used at their full quality level, to allow a preview, but also to be able to effectively promise “the good stuff” at the sponsor.
Are you multilingual? If you are multilingual you have an advantage in adult affiliate marketing. If you think of it, every niche is wide open to many languages. Let’s say Russian is your second language. Make some feeder sites in every niche, use their search engines, and make cash telling them what they can find inside the big-guy pay-sites. This is where you can really sharpen your marketing skills. You almost teach the foreign surfer about the site you are suggesting to them. You teach them, and walk them to the door.
Joining an affiliate program is very simple but you are being given keys to the office, shown your new desk, and left to go at it. Only self-starters need apply. Be ready to consider yourself back in school.
Consider that you are self-employed, yet you have a symbiotic existence with the sponsors. Its like doctors and nurses, we cannot have hospitals without both groups. Feeder-site webmasters and affiliate programs also have this kind of relationship.
Put your feet up, grab a coffee and get ready for your new career. Bring all your skills, go back to school, learn to network and listen to others, and trust your instincts. Make long-range plans for an entire empire of sites, and get to work. Once you have been here a while you get the pleasure of watching your statistics, finding those great money- makers and reproducing your efforts with those sites.
There is a saying, “build it and they will come,” but that saying is flawed, as we do not want them to just come burn our bandwidth without making a sale. I would like to parody that saying, “figure out how to sell, and they will buy.”
I recommend you to sign up with these two adult affiliate sponsors:
They are known for having some of the best converting porn sites, so why not give them a try.
What are you doing to become a successful affiliate? Share your responses, tips and examples in the comments.
Denise Coope