5 posts a day and no sales. Yeah, I’d be demoralized too! That’s crazy.

A few years ago I noticed I made the same number of sales no matter how many posts I did. I was gut renovating a house (a contractor was doing all the manual labor but there was still a lot to do), and my scheduled blog posts would occasionally dry up and yet I’d still make the same number of sales. I started wondering why I bothered doing so many posts. And even before that Google had changed. They used to emphasize how they wanted high quality text (which favored blogs over tubes), but there was a point where they clearly decided that people searching for porn wanted video, not text or even images. Even if I had the same video on my blog post as was on a tube site, they’d favor the tube site. Around that same time they started favoring “trusted” (aka big) brands. Which meant major tube sites started ranking really well for the big terms. If only they’d have factored in the likelihood that the content they were returning in their SERPs was pirated, we might have had a chance. But that didn’t happen. They just didn’t care. It was around that time we were hanging out fairly frequently with a guy who was pretty senior at Google (one of the “old guys” there – even though he was my age – he and his wife were also gut renovating a brownstone). Anyway, at one of our parties Damian (from PPV) made it really clear that he and I worked in porn and the friend from Google just couldn’t understand why we’d work in porn instead of mainstream. It was clear he saw our industry as a problem, not something Google would take care to “get right”. That sorta sealed the deal for me. If I couldn’t even get a “friend” at Google to take an interest in our industry, then nothing was going to improve.

When I finally got done with the renovation I had seriously neglected my business. But what remained strong was my forum site. I realized that’s where my future was – in building that community into something bigger and stronger. It was something Google couldn’t take away from me. So yeah, I’m still very dependent on Google, but I’m working to change that.

One other thing I’d mention… These days I’d say if you want Google traffic you sorta have to prove to them that you’ve got other sources of traffic. I personally think they look for sites that are connected to community sites, or get a lot of referrals. Remember, they know everything about your site since they own Google Analytics. And the other thing I think they look at is time on site. Tube sites have high time on sites. Forum sites have high time on sites. Personally I think that’s important. They can also recognize groups of sites. So in my case my forum site, tube site and blog were all pretty tightly linked, so I think they saw them as one big family of sites. Without the tube and forum I think my blog would have suffered a lot more. At least that’s my guess.