By AJ Hall

YNOT – Used wisely, a transparent tour can unleash your site’s selling power. It’s one of the best weapons in a pay site owner’s arsenal, and there’s no better way to generate a massive expansion of your site’s reach and increase sales.

The term “transparent tour” caught on because it’s the most accurate, least confusing way to name a tour that’s essentially a mirror view of a site’s interior. A website with a transparent tour appears not to have a tour at all or to have a tour that’s nearly identical to the members area. Typically, the only difference between the inside and outside of the site is that once inside, a visitor has access to all of the content, whereas on the tour the content may be limited to static photo previews or sample video trailers.

Transparent tours began as extensions of members areas that needed a way to showcase a large archive of models. Big network cash program sites went a step further and designed tours with category browsing, search features and top lists. It wasn’t long before these sites totally abandoned the boilerplate multi-page episode-style tours they’d been using for the better part of a decade.

The tease factor created by a transparent tour makes the tactic highly effective. It gives surfers the opportunity to sell themselves. The sales process it creates is a lot like window-shopping: Surfers pique their own interest and delve deeper into the site until they convince themselves to sign up. Transparent tours work best for sites with at least a few dozen updates so surfers have plenty to look at and the site appears large.

Another big advantage of this tour setup is the way it affects search engine optimization, due to the massive number of pages available for search engines to index. It’s not uncommon for a site with a transparent tour to span hundreds or even thousands of pages, and every model, category and content link on those pages gets crawled.

Transparency also lets you target traffic and link directly to niche pages that are rich with content matching what the surfer is looking for.

If you’ve got a content management system that lets you build transparent tours, you’re in luck. The benefits of a transparent tour are many. As far as pay site marketing is concerned, it’s an ace in the hole.

AJ Hall is a 12-year adult industry veteran and the co-founder and chief executive officer of Elevated X Inc., a provider of popular adult CMS software for the online adult entertainment industry. Elevated X powers more than 2,000 leading adult sites and is a six-time YNOT, GFY and XBiz Software Company of the Year award nominee.