For the most part, I’ve had a pretty good experience in the online adult industry so far, especially when it comes to affiliate programs - they’re usually helpful, pay me on time and accurately, some even go the extra mile and help me get specific content for a themed website or give me promotional passwords (I’ve got to give Kate from Prissy Pays some props right now, she recently sent me some gamer-themed content from the Natalie Sparks member’s area for me to put up on Gamer Fetish).
Unfortunately, the time has come for me to face facts - I seem to have found a dud. It’s even more disappointing because Cash Uncovered converted really well, even on the small amount of traffic I sent their way. All time, I’m 1:216 with them, with 7 signups. That’s pretty awesome. Unfortunately, it’s not so awesome when I’ve had to drop their links because they’ve never bothered to pay me.
I even contacted them a few months ago, asking what was up and why I’d never seen a dime from them, saying that I’d hate to have to stop promoting them because they have great content, great sites, and a great ratio. At first, I got some replies from them - stating that they had “records” of sending me the checks, and when I suggested that perhaps they had gotten lost or there was a mix-up (because truly, I’ve never gotten anything from them), they offered to check with their bank to see if the supposedly mailed checks (sorry, I’m a bit suspicious they ever existed now) had ever been cashed. So I thanked them, and then waited… waited…
I’m still waiting, MONTHS later. I’ve shot them a few more e-mails, trying to touch base, but no response. And of course, no checks from them have arrived, even though I had made more sales with them in between that conversation and the time I finally decided it was time to pull their links from my websites. I’ve sent them one last e-mail today, and I think that if I don’t hear anything from them within a week, I’ll have to take it to the webmaster boards and do the whole drama thread/internet hissy fit thing, which I really don’t want to do… I am a very (probably too much so) non-confrontational person with this sort of thing, but after my last “real” job deciding to never pay me my promised raise that went with my promotion even though I had still been doing the extra work, I’ve come to realize that people WILL take advantage of that fact and bank on my distaste for drama overcoming my rights/things that I’ve earned or been promised.
So cross your fingers this gets worked out and I get paid. Ugh.
Alright, I know I’ve put off the promised blog about the latest announcement from Net Audio Ads, but forgive me… I just got Xbox Live and it’s addictive as hell (if you want to play Uno or any other random game with me, leave a comment with you gamer tag & I’ll add you)… you wouldn’t believe how fast time can fly by when you’re playing Uno with strangers. Crazy. Anyhow, on to business. Here’s an from the latest Net Audio Ads blog & my thoughts.
NetAudioAds has made an addition to the back office that will allow you to sign up to sell advertising.
We are having no trouble lining up the big advertisers but we need small niche advertisers like Joe’s Pizza (fictitious example). NetAudioAds is good at procuring the big advertisers but may be missing opportunities at the local level that you may be able to tap in to.
Imagine Joe’s Pizza announcing their 2 for 1 special to a single zip code. How many small businesses out there thrive on local walk in traffic. What if you can help them to increase their business through “micro targeted” audio ads on the Internet.
Of course Joe’s is a fictitious example and there are many, many other businesses out there that can benefit. Especially the ones that are already advertising on the radio. You can offer advertising that is much more targeted than radio advertising and provides “measurable” results. In other words the advertiser can pick what type of website to be heard on, when to be heard and where (geographically) they will be heard.
Simply put, I LOVE this idea, because I know it would work on me. When it comes to food, movies, new bars & clubs - the power of suggestion is very effective on me. I mean, how many times have I been sitting on the couch and seen an ad for a pizza and then decided that’s exactly what I want? Too many times to count. So harnessing that power and putting it to work for internet addicts is just an all-around fantastic idea.
I especially like that they’re going for the local businesses & plan to serve zip code specific ads. Their example that they give really illustrates the idea wonderfully; but to expound on it a bit more… I live in a campus area, with about 40 small pizza/sub/gyro places that are open until 4AM for the college crowd. Imagine a local internet addict, surfing at 3AM after the bars have closed… he/she has the munchies but is too drunk/lazy/tired to actually cook. The website they visit plays a LOCAL advertisement for one of the all-nighter pizza joints, complete with a special coupon code for people hearing the web ad. Case closed, deal made, customer sold.
This idea has HUGE potential and it may have just taken me from on the fence to an avid supporter of Net Audio Ads. If this takes off, you can bet that I’ll be taking advantage of the “selling advertising” part of the program and hitting up some of the underrated all-nighter places around here… this could be amazingly effective. I know it’s got me excited!
I’m slightly annoyed by the fact that some ad sponsors and blog directories have been categorizing this website as “XXX”; it makes me wonder if they’ve really even bothered to actually read anything that I’ve posted. I noticed that even on StumbleUpon, I’m classed as pornography. That’s an interesting feat to accomplish when the only photo/video hosted on this entire website is the vector graphic of a fully-clothed woman in the header. I’m left to assume that either even just mentioning the “P” word gets you classed as an adult website/objectionable content, because really… most of what I discuss here (especially lately) has been mainstream affiliate programs, sales, etc. I do link to OTHER websites that have adult content, but I wasn’t really aware that linking to a website meant you were in the same category. Maybe I’m just applying too much logic here and not enough knee-jerk reaction on the basis of the domain name/my job.
All I know is, I wanted to have the ads served on this website to be actually RELEVANT to the content (ie hosting, affiliate programs, seo/traffic tips, etc), not the hardcore triple-x stuff that AdBrite starting pulling up when they decided this was a porn site. But from what I’ve been reading at Digital Point, I’m hardly alone in this phenomenon. One poster seems to have had their AdBrite account that was serving ads on a mainstream website switched to Black Label Ads solely due to one swear word in their comments section. I’m sorry, but that’s a little overzealous.
They’re not the only ones, though. Blog Catalog decline to list this website as well, I’m assuming due to classifying it as adult. Same goes for Net Audio Ads, though that’s not terribly upsetting as this website probably attracts more of an other-webmaster crowd than their target ad audience, anyway. It is slightly misleading, though, that when I read their terms prior to signing up, there was nothing in them excluding adult websites (or websites that talk about adult websites, for that matter).
I’ve asked for a few people’s opinions on how they would personally class this blog, and I’ve received mixed results. Some have said it’s obviously an adult blog, others have said it can’t be because there’s no photos, videos, or even erotic text on it! I’d like to hear more opinions, so leave me a comment and let me know where exactly you think I stand.
It seems as though all of the lessons Steve & Kimo are giving me are starting to pay off… I’ve had some boosts in certain search engine keywords (like this gallery that’s ranking #2 - at least for me - for I Dream Of Erica). I’ve been averaging at least one sale a day, which is better than before: pretty much all my sales were clumped on the weekends, but during the rest of the week I’d be lucky to have one sale. My weekends are still doing better than my weekdays (I came really close to $100 this past Saturday), but it’s nice to have daily sales… very reassuring and encouraging.
In affiliate news, Net Audio Ads has made some announcements that have really turned me from ambivalent & unsure to somewhat excited to promote them… assuming that the basic idea behind the ads proves successful, they’ve got some really innovative ideas to use said audio ads in the future. I’ll post more about this once I’m feeling a bit better and my thoughts are more collected, as I’m still feeling a bit queasy and spaced out.
As I mentioned earlier, some time ago I ran a small camgirl website. Not one of the adult ones - I was 17 or so, and it was just my daily blog that happened to have a sporadically-updated webcam snapshot on the front page. My severe lack of dedication to the webcam game & my general aversion to getting lots of “post your boobs” IMs from random strangers (I rarely, if ever, signed onto my site-specific AIM name because of this) caused me to never really make it to the big leagues. I did make some awesome nerd-style internet friends that I still keep in touch with to this day (the lovely Jaimee being one of them - and holy shit, she IMed me right as I typed her name, how mind-meld-ish).
I still read other girls’ websites and posted in a few forums and kept up with internetgossip.net and other such fun stuff. I was marginally informed, and it always seemed to be that Nay (currently going by Ashton Von) was the pint-sized princess of camgirls. Chick was like 14 or something when she got on the web and started prancing around on cam at mija.nu - and considering how insanely popular she was, how much attention she got, the amount of wishlist items she had purchased for her - I wasn’t terribly surprised to find out that she’d gone the softcore camgirl route recently. I mean, you can’t really blame her. If you have a fan/stalkerbase (and judging from Haloscan, she most definitely does… but we’ll get to that in a bit), a decent face and body, and enough web design know-how to create your own amateur website… well then, by all means, rake in that paper, booboo.
Anyhow, the inspiration for this post: I recently made a gallery of Sweet Natural Girl’s Jaimy for Cherry Delish, and noticed a few hundred hits coming from a random Haloscan comment board. Apparently, the place is basically a forum for all Renee hater/fans to sit around and alternately bitch about, pick apart, and make fun of every aspect of Renee’s life. Her family, dogs, friends, website, etc etc… nothing is too inane for these people to bicker about endlessly. It seems that someone thought that Jaimy resembled Renee before she was this Ashton Von character and had posted a link to my gallery there, thus explaining the mysterious outpouring of hits to my website.
I haven’t read the entire comment board yet (um, there are 26 pages? Not gonna happen anytime soon), but it’s been entertaining as hell so far. It’s definitely funny to read the constant comments about how the Ashton Von paysite doesn’t update enough and thus must have no members, when I myself have sold around 10-15 memberships to the site and many of them rebilled monthly. Considering that I’m small-time, that’s a really good conversion/retention rate for a solo girl, so are the haters just hating or do they actually have a case against her? I’d be interested to hear her response, as well as the justification for why her members keep paying every month if her website is so terrible.
I will say, though, that from my affiliate’s perspective… Renee could handle her webmaster program much better. Honey, four promotional galleries? Seriously? Come on, we need more to work with, here. Or at least give out promo passes to the affiliates that are making sales for you so that we can get content from the member’s area to make new galleries with, and thus make MORE sales. Also, her POTD sizes don’t work properly, so…there. Honestly, I think that Renee needs a friend or affiliate manager to help her out a bit - someone to make sure the website gets updated on a regular schedule, do some PR for her at webmaster forums to recruit more affiliates, make sure her webmasters have enough content to promote her regularly, etc, etc. The girl sells well as it is, imagine what could happen if she got her act together.
In closing: there should be a new breed of internetgossip.net - one that covers the reincarnated-as-xxx camgirl crowd and solo girl gossip. Hmmm.
I originally read about the new Net Audio Ads affiliate program via the Art Of Money blog, and was reminded of it again today by Michael Aulia’s post on the same subject. I’m both intrigued and turned off by the concept. While the premise of a no-click-needed money-making affiliate program is definitely appealing, I can’t help but wonder if an ad on auto-play being the first impression a website to a new viewer is really that smart of an idea.
I mean, one of the most-hated aspects of websites like MySpace is when people leave their songs on auto-play. Is there anybody out there that actually enjoys being essentially jumped via audio? It makes me suspicious that any first-time viewer that visits my website will hear the auto-play, and immediately close out my site, never to return again. I mean, I know my reaction to embedded audio tends to go that way - I either click out of the site, or if it’s a site I know has something specifically desirable on it, I immediately mute my speakers. The first course of action hurts both the publisher and advertiser of the audio ads, while the second just makes the ad a waste of effort.
The Net Audio Ads website addresses some of these issues, and rather than force you to go find their FAQ, I’ll just post the ones that are most relevent to my concerns:
QUESTION: Will this offend or cause people to not come to my website due to the audio ads?
ANSWER: We are currently running these ads on 550,000 web pages, because the ad spot is only 5 seconds, complaints have been rare.
QUESTION: How have these 5 second audio ads been performing for advertisers?
ANSWER: We have consistently outperformed, radio, television and paper ads plus the fact that we spider the website just like Google does, we only deliver ads that are directly related to the contextual nature of the site.
QUESTION: Will the PPP ads be targeted to the content of my website?
ANSWER: Yes, we will crawl the “readable” content of your website to determine what kinds of ads to play. The ads that play will be targeted to your market or niche.
QUESTION: Does the visitor have to click on anything for me to get paid from an audio ad?
ANSWER: No, audio ads automatically play when a visitor enters your website. When the audio plays you get paid, no clicks necessary.
QUESTION: How is it that publishers get to keep 100% of their traffic (by not requiring a click)? Aren’t you losing money?
ANSWER: This is a common misunderstanding and this is why PPP is so revolutionary. The advertiser has paid to have a 5 second audio ad played on your website. You are paid just for the ad playing, no clicks or action from the website visitor is necessary. We are not losing money, we actually make more because the ad is triggered on 100% of the website’s traffic. In essence the website owner is then paid for 100% of their traffic. Best of all, the visitor never leaves your website so you have the chance to monetize even more. All other forms of media require a click or some kind of action that leads people away from a website. As you can see PPP is quite different.
I’m pretty much undecided about whether I think this is a good idea yet. Obviously, although Net Audio Ads seems to have no rules against putting the ads on an adult website, that strikes me as a very stupid/inconvenient-for-surfers move, so I doubt I’d ever put the ads on any of my porn websites. The last thing I want is for someone to get put in an embarassing/awkward situation due to my websites, because then they probably won’t return.
As for my mainstream websites, who knows? I may give them a test run and see how they do for me; as I said before, the idea of making money off a surfer without them having to click off your website is extremely appealing. If I do end up using Net Audio Ads, I’ll definitely post about it and let everyone know how it’s working out - the service goes live on February 1st, 2008, so it’s rapidly approaching decision-making time.
EDIT: I’ve decided to at the very least put the code on THIS website, as it’s mostly directed at other webmasters, so we can all see what it’s like. Right now it just plays a bit of white noise, but ads will start on February 1st as previously stated. Please feel free to weigh in on how intrusive you think the ads are, and if you personally will be promoting them.
I’ve been pretty stressed out lately; mostly due to the combination of not doing as well as I’d like to be doing sales-wise and the fact that my boyfriend is currently unemployed - I’m pretty much supporting the entire household on my craptacular earnings right now, and it’s been keeping me up at night. As much as I like running websites, I’ve been very discouraged and the notion that I should throw in the towel and get a “real” job keeps nagging at me.
Even though I am working at something, being productive, and getting paid, I still always have this underlying feeling like I’m lazy for not going out and getting some shitty retail job for $7/hr like everyone else. I’m sure part of this comes from the general attitude among most people I know IRL that what I’m doing can’t REALLY pay the bills, that any online/work-from-home money-making scheme is a scam or a cop-out. The other part is that at its heart, this type of thing is unreliable. Even if you usually make a certain amount of money every month, it’s not set in stone. I was raised to always be SURE that I had income, so taking this sort of chance is challenging for me. It’s kind of funny when I think about it; I was raised by a woman who worked contingent for most of her life, but she still managed to instill within me an aversion to risks/not having a normal, steady job.
Steve and Kimo have pretty much been giving me a crash course in being a successful webmaster lately; with Steve especially it’s totally like web school. Dude could totally write an e-book and make loads of cash, he’s awesome at teaching dumbasses (me) how to functionally run websites (see the newly-relaunched-as-a-Latina-blog Caramel Cams for my new skillzzzz… ha). Kimo’s got the motivational skills in spades, too - Tony Robbins needs to move the fuck over.
Lastly, I decided to start promoting the affiliate programs that are currently doing the best for me, on the off chance that anyone reading this hasn’t heard of them. As you can see on the sidebar, it’s currently Widget Bucks (a mainstream company that I’m averaging $0.30/click with right now) and Adult Webmaster Empire (hands-down my best converting/money-making adult sponsor - plus hey, they gave me a free $250 this month). So Kimo, whenever you actually do something with winebeerliquor.com or your mainstream toaster fan site or whatever the fuck, sign up for Widget Bucks, okay?
So I ended up upgrading to a dedicated server from Webair - my websites hosted with them went live on it earlier today. It’s not even so much that they talked me into it, but Kimo has been working on convincing me to get a dedicated for, oh, the past two months or so. So we’ll see how it works out - they’ve been much more responsive ever since I bitched about my previous issues contacting them on GFY. Surprise, right?
Recently launched Celebrity Sex Comics, mostly to have a place to continually promote both celebrity sex tapes (I love Kim Kardashian, I can’t help it) and my beloved Free Sinful Comics. It’s already been doing decently, I posted a leaked clip of the Vivica Fox blowjob tape that’s been circulating lately, and searches for that and “celebrity sex comics” have brought in a decent amount of people without hardly any other promotion by me, yet. That was a strangely phrased sentence for sure, but you get the point I hope!
I’d write more but my back is killing me - sitting in this chair typing is just not at all fun at the moment. Painkiller torrent, plz.
Happy New Year, everyone! My new year has already gotten off to a good start - at least luck-wise. Adult Webmaster Empire has a drawing every pay period for their active webmasters (read: those sending in sales) and I was just notified that I won $250. Free money is always good! I love AWE, though. Their camgirls are probable in my top three moneymakers, I even made their top 50 webmasters list once. For a small-time webmaster like me, that was awesome.
I’ve been dedicating a good amount of time to my newest website, Gamer Fetish. I’m actually incorporating some all-text posts into this one, trying to make it a tiny bit more than just another porn website. The galleries feature, of course, hot chicks playing video games naked (or in other states of sexiness) and most of the text posts are either reviews of games/gaming websites or recaps of cool shit I find across the internet that would probably interest a gaming crowd. It’s been fun thus far, though I’m surprised more solo girls don’t have photo sets of themselves playing video games… it seems to be something guys find really hot.
Mainstream websites have been slowly but surely drawing income; Amazon’s Omakase widget seems to be the best converting tool I’ve used thus far. Basically, it shows products that the surfer has either recently viewed, or products related to the website the widget is on… so you get people seeing something they’d looked at earlier and being all, “hmm, I should really buy that after all”… and boom! Sale. The fact that the mainstream websites are making money at all is REALLY impressive, because honestly… I have yet to find a really good source of traffic (other than google search engine) for any of them. So the traffic is miniscule, but targeted, at least.
I’ve got to get back to work on my newest project, so I’ll be back soon with more absolutely FASCINATING! posts and ramblings. Don’t miss me too much.