After hearing about blogs here, there, and everywhere, I took the learning steps with Wordpress and set up a series of 17 blogs in August 2008. I used a mix of paid and free templates, and added 20-50 posts for each. Some were 100% unique, but most were hand morphed from gallery descriptions, replacing and mixing sentences and keywords to match the blog niche. I added all the good plugins, including one that automatically posts drafts every X hours. I set mine to update every 1-3 days, and I figured I’d revisit the blogs in a month or two to see how much Google loved them, and tweak accordingly.

Dumb.

I made a lot of common mistakes. I come from a TGP gallery background, so you’ll have to cut me some slack. I wasn’t familiar with Wordpress or even adult SEO much back then. The first blunder was registering keyword domains (with hyphens) thinking that would practically guarantee top spots for that search term. That was wrong, as the domain name is only 1 of about 80 things Google looks at in it’s mystic formula.

The biggest mistake was I targeted too many key phrases, and much too wide. New blogs with no PR/authority are not going to rank well, if at all, for ‘teen sex’, ‘milf pussy’, ‘hot blondes’, etc. It’s best to start with 3-5 ‘long tail’ key phrases with less competition so ranking is easier. Once more PR/authority is established, I believe shorter key phrases can be targeted with better results.

Another mistake was updating too often. I think every time the spider bots visited each blog they had a completely different site to digest because all the blog posts were new. Some blog posts probably cycled off the main page before they were even seen by a spider bot. Since my key phrases were all over the place I didn’t get much juice for any of them. From what I understand, the higher the site PR, the more often and more deep the site is crawled. I’ve seen many blogs with top search terms that haven’t been updated in over 6 months.

I also made my titles WAY too descriptive, like a TGP gallery or LL freesite description. Each title should only be the 3-5 key phrases you’re targeting, if possible, and repeated several times in the blog post itself depending on length. My original ones were like 10+ words long.

Last but probably not least, I morphed text from various different gallerie descriptions, making different writing styles which made it more difficult to target the keywords I wanted, and probably turned off potential readers.

Basically, my first experience with adult blogs turned out to be what NOT to do, with few search results and none of those in the top 20. They only made sales because I had my own traffic source, linking back from TGP galleries and LL freesites. At least they all received PR 1 or 2 to help with link trades. I’ve taken my mistakes and avoided them on my new blogs, giving my ‘phase II’ blogs a much better success rate so far, with many of them getting top search terms. The best keyword so far brings in 10k SE hits/day. More on that next time.

A high traffic TGP in the gay niche, a partner account is only available by contacting the webmaster directly. The minimum amount is 1 gay submit per day for 3 months for $75, up to 5 gay submits per day for 3 months for $200. I took the 1/day submit pass, and these results are from a one month window, at a comparative cost of $25. According to the site owner, the his gay TGP gets about 350k to galleries daily. It has a high Alexa rating and it appears a lot of people search for ‘primox’. The gay TGP does skim traffic for trades at 10%, which for a TGP is very low.

Towards the end of my pass, a 30 day snapshot shows 73982 hits from Primox to my galleries. No accept or decline emails are sent, but you can check your galleries because they use the Smart Thumbs TGP script. I don’t know if all submitted galleries are set to inactive when the partner account expires, or it happens naturally.

Primox Monthly Pass: $25 allows 1 submit per day (3 months minimum). Traffic received: 73982 hits over a 30 day period.

Estimated pass value with performance on 73982 hits to TGP galleries for a $35 per sale site.

Summary Value: Fair

Cross sales are a strong, valid marketing strategy for extending a purchaser additional offers for related products, usually at a special discount. This has been around long before the internet, and not limited to the adult business. Such as when you get a magazine subscription and can check a box for a related magazine subscription for a discounted price. The problem is when unscrupulous companies misuse cross sales to trick the purchaser (and sometimes the affiliates) into taking these offers and increasing their profits.

The first and most prevalent misuse is hidden cross sales. This is when the pre-checked offers are beneath the form’s submit button, so that the purchaser will hopefully not even see the cross sales before he submits his form info. That’s the only reason to place the cross sales beneath the submit button. This leads to pissed off members who can suddenly get additional charges on their credit card they weren’t aware of and feel scammed, increasing the percentage of charge backs and surfers who are now wary of signing up to any more sites. It’s a short term run to increase profits at the surfer’s expense. Check out this sample join page still being used – the two pre-checked cross sales are well below the form and ‘Complete Transaction’ button. They’re also presented as ‘free access’ instead of optional offers. The surfer has to read the fine print to find out they’re actually not free at all. If you don’t mind fucking over the surfers, then you won’t mind promoting sponsors using hidden cross sales.

Another sponsor trick is against their own affiliates. On revshare programs, where the sponsor and affiliate is supposed to share generated revenues, the sponsor adds cross sales to other programs and so keep all the cross sale revenues. It’s a way to piggy back on the traffic an affiliate sends to increase their profits. The affiliate doesn’t get any part of these sales when sending traffic. This may be acceptable when the sponsor is paying per sale, when the cross sales generated are included when they determined the payout amount, but on revshare, they’re just not sharing. They’re skimming your traffic for additional revenues. Not only does the join page image above use hidden cross sales, it was generated on a revshare link.

In summary, before you join any new program, be sure to check for all the sponsor tricks you dislike and be strong in your convictions.

I’ve been trying out a lot of new adult affiliate programs lately, and after at least 10k uniques to each it’s clear that Sex and Cash is one worth keeping. I won’t even mention the others, but I curse them silently. A really slick program, Sex and Cash concentrates on only two adult sites, Ass Titans (anal sex) and Clara G (lesbian pornstar). The content is all in 1080p HD, and both tours are updated with each episode, including really well done embedded video trailers (not just a ’sample’ clip). They’ve also added ‘live shows’ where members can watch as the next porn scene is being created, including between takes and behind the scenes footage. It’s all continuous and streams right to each member.

Promo tools are amazing: embeded flash movies, flash iframes, hosted pic/movie/flash galleries, movie of the day, thumbnail plugin, gallery builder, hosted free sites, rss feeds, porn bloopers, free content, a freehost, all banner sizes, site logos, rotating galleries, and site blogs. The only thing I don’t see (yet) is hosted FLVs for legal tube sites.

Example of copy/paste embeded video:

Check out Sex and Cash for yourself! I have good results and you should too.

The description for Call Kelly at Submit Passes states they currently have 410,000 Unique visitors and 750,000 page views a day. A $100 monthly premium submit pass allows 1 submission per day to the main page. It’s Alexa page shows that it’s been online since 1996. It looks like the thumb gallery listings go through a trade script, but I can’t tell what the skim percentage is. Galleries are listed according to thumbnail popularity. They have a tube section and an active forum for surfer’s to submit their own content too. You get to compete with both for traffic.

After a month of submitting, my previous 30 days of stats shows 145,090 hits sent from Call-Kelly. This is less traffic than from the $40 and $50 TGP submit accounts. Call Kelly doesn’t send accept or decline emails, so I can only assume all submissions were listed. Perhaps my thumbnails didn’t do so well and therefore I wasn’t ranked well. I don’t know, but skimming the traffic off to their trades doesn’t help.

Call Kelly Monthly Pass: $100 allows 1 submit per day. Traffic received: 145,090 hits.
Estimated pass value with performance on 145,090 hits to TGP galleries for a $35 per sale site.

I always compare the price of the submit pass with the worst case scenario, ‘Poor Results’, which in this case I would be losing money. In current market conditions, it seems Poor Results are soon becoming average. Better to be safe than sorry. With the $100 you can buy two $50 passes and get over twice the traffic instead.

Summary: Poor value.