Connor Young is Editor-in-Chief of The ADULTWEBMASTER Magazine. He has worked as an adult webmaster since 1\’\’7, and he currently lives in California.Once you’ve built that first website, how do you get visitors to come visit your masterpiece? Building “traffic” is difficult. You’ll need to set realistic traffic goals, then promote your website tirelessly. Search engines, link lists and index sites are all good sources of fresh traffic… but you might want to think twice before submitting to a TGP.

Welcome back to our four-part overview on building your first adult website. This is the final addition to this series, and today we’ll take a look at different ways that you can market your new website. Marketing an adult site includes building traffic through various time-tested techniques, and can be by far the most difficult yet crucial portion of the adult website construction process. Why is this so difficult? There are several reasons, and you should probably have a good understanding of what you’re up against before you start down the website promotion path.

Obstacles to Your Success
The primary obstacle that you will face is simply the fact that free porn is easy to find on the Internet. The site we built is an AVS site – meaning that surfers can’t see the pictures until they have passed through an age-verification screen. That means they have to pay to access our site. Many surfers will simply go somewhere else rather than pay, and with so much content freely available, one can hardly blame them.

Another difficulty that you will have to face is over-saturation. Quite frankly there are far too many adult sites on the Internet right now. That makes it especially difficult to gather any attention for your small site. Where once a listing on Yahoo would put you in competition with several hundred other Yahoo-listed adult sites, now a Yahoo listing places you in competition with thousands of other Yahoo-listed sites. Other mainstream search engines have lost their effectiveness as well – they are now competing with hundreds of small adult specialty search engines… meaning less and less people use the likes of Alta Vista and Excite to search for porn. Age Verification Systems have grown popular, meaning that our Adult Check site is merely one of tens of thousands of other Adult Check sites. Fish will swim in schools because they don’t want to be singled out by predators. In the adult website business, you want to be singled out – yet you’re forced to swim in a school nonetheless. The size of the school grows daily. See the problem?

The Yahoo! Dilemma
I mentioned Yahoo, so I suppose I should start out by talking about their service. Once upon a time, Yahoo allowed webmasters to submit their sites free of charge for consideration of inclusion in their index. Even when Yahoo offered this free submission service, getting listed was difficult and often took months. Eventually they turned to a paid-submission system. Adult webmasters had to pay $200 just to be considered for a listing, and Yahoo reserved the right to take your money, smile and then reject your website. If you were rejected, you would not receive a refund. This annoyed many webmasters, but the paid submission process offered one distinct advantage – Yahoo guaranteed to either include or reject your submission within one week’s time. Even at $200 a shot, getting a listing in Yahoo was valuable and worth the submission price if you were accepted. The problem was that each Yahoo Editor seemed to use different guidelines, making it impossible to know if your site would be accepted or rejected until you paid the money and were so informed. Eventually, Yahoo changed the price of paid-submissions from $200 to $600! Talk about inflation! And to make the whole matter even worse, the $600 fee only applied to adult sites – everyone else paid the $200 fee.

Why would Yahoo do this? First, the adult community is a rather unsympathetic crowd. Any crying we might do would not hurt Yahoo’s public image. Second, adult websites are generally more profitable than non-adult sites, so Yahoo likely reasoned that we could afford it – and indeed some of us can. Third, Yahoo’s adult site listings were becoming excessively large, rendering a Yahoo listing as less valuable than it previously had been. No doubt Yahoo wanted to slow the growth of their adult website listings to maintain the quality of their index. Finally, the changes came right around the beginning of the dot com crash and burn. Yahoo no doubt was feeling the pinch and needed the cash.

Whatever their reasons, the new $600 submission fee is too excessive for most adult webmasters – especially considering you might not even get listed. A Yahoo listing is still valuable, however. If you decide to take the plunge and submit to Yahoo, I highly suggest that you monitor their listing habits for at least a month prior to your first submission. See which sites get listed, then analyze those sites. How many pictures do they offer? What other content, besides pictures, do they offer? How’s the quality of their site design? Is your site just as good? If your site is not up to these standards then you can almost bank on your submission being rejected and your $600 being lost.

Beyond Yahoo!
A free alternative to Yahoo is the Open Directory Project (ODP). Always submit your site to the ODP as soon as it’s ready for primetime. The ODP is similar to Yahoo, except it employs “volunteer editors” to review site submissions, as opposed to the paid editors of Yahoo. Generally an ODP listing will bring you some hits from AOL’s search engine as well as a few others. You’ll find most ODP editors to be far more helpful than Yahoo editors – email them if you’re having problems being listed and they will usually respond with suggestions. ODP Editors for adult categories are usually other adult webmasters, so they’ll understand your situation better than any Yahoo Editor would. You can submit to the ODP by visiting DMOZ.org.

If you decide to play the search engine game (meaning you want to fight for hits from the likes of Alta Vista, Google, Excite and Lycos) then be prepared for an intense battle. Thousands of other adult webmasters will be fighting you for every last surfers. There’s no keyword combination you can think of targeting that someone else hasn’t already focused on, and unless you’re listed in the first two or three pages of search results, you’re listing is basically useless. On the positive side of the issue, search engine traffic remains better quality traffic than can be had from most other sources. If you have any luck with search engines then you might like your sales conversion rates.

“You simply have to absorb as much knowledge as you can, then come up with a routine that works for you. Then be prepared for the search engines to change their ranking systems, forcing you to start all over again. That’s the nature of the search engine beast.”

Any webmaster who hopes to succeed with the search engines needs to stay well informed of the latest search engine trends. There are several companies which offer free newsletters which cover this very topic. Websites can also be found which are devoted to search engine placement. SearchEngineWatch.com is one of the more popular sources of knowledge on this topic. You might also try MarketPosition.com and SEGuru.com, two other popular search engine information sites. If you are indeed a search engine newbie, then prepare yourself for a long battle. Ever have one of those annoying friends who simply call you whenever they can’t figure out something on their computer? You know how you always want to tell them to do a little research before simply jumping on the phone? Well, the same thing applies here… nobody can tell you the one “secret” to search engine marketing. You simply have to absorb as much knowledge as you can, then come up with a routine that works for you. Then be prepared for the search engines to change their ranking systems, forcing you to start all over again. That’s the nature of the search engine beast.

How about TGP sites? Should you participate? In my opinion, a TGP, or Thumbnail Gallery Post, is no more than a scheme for lazy webmasters to get other webmasters to update their website for them. You can create a single-page gallery of thumbnail images, then link each small thumbnail image to a larger image. This gallery can then be submitted to various TGP sites. Theoretically, you benefit when someone from that TGP site sees your gallery page then clicks on a banner that you place on that page – usually just below your thumbnail images. The TGP webmaster benefits because you’ve built a free page of content that’s basically placed on his or her site.

More Thoughts on TGP Sites
I’m by no means a fan of TGP sites. They devalue membership and AVS-based adult sites by providing surfers with a source of free porn, and the traffic that you get back from them is seldom worthwhile. True, a decent TGP listing might net you thousands of hits, but you’ll be hard pressed to convert even one of those hits into a sale. In general I encourage webmasters not to submit to TGP sites. The one exception to this rule may be real amateur sites. If you are running an amateur site that features one girl in particular, then you might be offering something unique enough to make TGP traffic worthwhile. The site that we built for this series of articles was a “Japanese college girls” AVS site… spending much time building TGP page submissions would be an absolute waste of time.

You might be able to gather up some traffic by participating in “Top List” sites or “Link Exchange” systems. Either way, you’re basically trading some of your traffic to another webmaster in exchange for some of his or her traffic. You’ll have to experiment with various programs in order to achieve any success, and you’ll also have to have some traffic to give if you want to get anything back. Exit traffic – or surfers who have elected to leave your site – are an ideal source of traffic that you can give away to Top Lists and Link Exchange systems. If a surfer is leaving your site, he or she probably is not interested in what you had to offer. Send that surfer off to a Top List or Link Exchange and get a fresh surfer back. Now you have a whole new shot at making a sale.

If you have made any connections through adult webmaster message boards – use them. Offer to exchange links with another webmaster. This can be a little tricky – what happens if you’re sending way more traffic than you get back? What happens if you’re trading partner suddenly decides to remove your link without telling you? It’s always best to work deals with webmasters with whom you’re previously familiar.

Adult search engines are another source of traffic. Most will only send you a hit here and there – so I would not recommend giving up any prime real estate on your own web page in exchange for a listing with an adult search engine, but a simple link-back somewhere on your site might be reasonable. It all depends on the adult search engine.

It’s A War!
If there’s one thing I want to get across, it’s that quality hits have to be fought for – a little here and a little there. Do not make the mistake of expecting a large number of hits from any one traffic source, unless those hits are practically worthless. Set a realistic traffic goal for each AVS site you create. I good goal might be 500 hits. That’s certainly obtainable with a lot of hard work. Set your goal and work towards it – a few hits here, a few hits there. If you have absolutely zero traffic, then you’ll need to start by working search engines and adult link lists. If you’re so inclined, try the TGP sites. When you build some traffic, move on to link exchanges and top lists. Add 10 hits here, 50 hits there… eventually you’ll reach your goal. When you reach your goal, either set a new goal (if you think you can reach it) or move on to another website.

Connor Young is Editor-in-Chief of The ADULTWEBMASTER Magazine. He has worked as an adult webmaster since 1\’\’7, and he currently lives in California.