Lesson #40 Cyndalie's Traffic Rant
Written By Cyndalie

I would like to stray from my usual lesson based progression through marketing in the adult internet landscape and in search engines, and look at the reflection of the current state of affairs based on questions I receive on a regular basis that still face new and old webmasters today. The single common denominator is traffic. Everyone wants it, many have learned to give it away freely in hopes for "new traffic"... some even give it away before the visitor enters their page. What is the customer experience prior to getting to your websites. How many ways can they end up there? These types of questions should be at the foundation of every marketing plan, but yet, many people come to me saying search engines are their answer. Well, a little something I learned from growing up rings in my head; There is no one right answer. Or, more correctly, there is often more that one right answer. Once you understand this, you see that search engine marketing can be the key, but not necessarily the door, to marketing success online.

The online economy is not only growing, it's compressing at the same time. That means that for every new user on the Internet, you have to work 1 point whatever the current number base you started at, divided by the number of new competitors in your market, to make the same amount of money. This is more logical than mathematical of course, another lesson in search engine marketing.

The primary difference between mainstream and adult is that mainstream has learned how to make their customers dependent upon their business before they even realized it, even with the programming/database technologies mainstream companies and retailers rely on. We dropped the ball when we forgot about the customer and exploited media, compression, design, and interaction (as well as raising bandwidth bills across the board)...but as our customers pay more for DSL, up to 4 times as much as dialup, guess where our limited consumers' budget has been going, and hence the proliferation of free porn.

The point is, we, as marketers, may not be working hard enough at developing a product that keeps visitors interested on a regular basis, or even as a foundation or "home" for those types of online activities. Many have succeeded, but these are no longer the BBS and newsgroup days, we have thousands of competitors now.

Marketing begins at the development stages, it is never an afterthought. If you do not create a product with the consumer (not content, not your preference, not what other webmasters think) in mind, what are you marketing? A good product catches on. Don't forget that you are marketing your site to consumers, not search engines. It's easy to forget.

Paying for optimization is expensive. In fact, if you are looking to hire an SEO for your adult site, good luck. Optimizers find themselves slaves to the sites they market, always watching, always consulting clients who think a one-time job is guaranteed for life. Where do you draw the line in expectations for an SEO? Go for those goals yourself by self-educating, or rather hire an SEO for consulting. For an hourly fee he/she can outline what you need to do and how to do it and be available for review. Learn it, watch it, and you can progress with a more affordable marketing budget for the long term. 10 hours a year of an optimizer/submitters time is not going to cut it. In many cases you'd be better off buying traffic through advertising or PPC engines... but...

It always comes back to the same basic elements. A good title, a concise description, and keyword tags that match every phrase match possible with the words you used in your title and description, that also appear in the text of your page. Saying the same thing in 5 different ways is what marketing is all about! “Marketing is all about saying the same five things different ways.” Bonus points for phrase matches that are text links. A static, updated, site-map for both site and doorway pages linked to/from every page or primary area is good practice for spidering. And when in doubt, don't. If it looks like spam, it's spam.

Finally, from whence we began, there is no ONE right way. When I say "don't go overboard" and "less is more" I mean use your discretion and know what is important to you for rankings with what content you have. In most cases, if it's not in the title of your page, or the content of your page, you're not going to rank for it. Start there and make sure you get your visitors to those content areas in as few clicks as possible without a redirection. Remember that you can have 4 sites linking to you and you linking to 4 sites - but you can look better to Google if only 2 of those sites link back to you, rather than 4 (not every link that is relevant needs to appear "initiated" to the engines). And keep an open mind. Flow with the changes knowing relevance and good content is all you need. Follow the basic parameters of SEO and you'll be surprised at the results.

You thought 2003 was tough? We'll it wasn't enough, 2004 is sure to bring more. Keep your eyes on Yahoo who is doing a Goo-Drop. Until next time, Happy Promoting!