It's never too late to learn, or expand. Take Kandi Peach and her husband Sinclair, who have been swinging and photographing the wonderful world of swing for the better part of nine years. During that time, their online experience amounted to using the Web for selling their amateur swinging videos and DVDs, but all that changed with the recent partnership between Kandi Peach Productions and GrindersCash.com, and boy are they glad it did.
It all started just a month ago, according to Sinclair. "Kandi went to talk to a template company to have a Website designed," he tells AVN Online by phone from the couple's home, "and that opened us up, exposing us to other Webmasters who were interested in working with us. But then we met Grinder, and he began to kind of open our eyes to the pay site world."
"Basically," adds Kandi, "it opened us up to the whole idea of affiliate programs. And [Grinder's] been wonderful in giving us technical advice. It's taken the burden of ignorance off us. I think a lot of [adult] Webmasters who went into it at first were programmers who were also swingers; we were swingers who were learning how to be programmers."
They already have four new pay sites up with the GrindersCash deal, all swingers-oriented and each tilted toward a particular theme or niche. The names pretty much sum up the subject matter: BBWKandi.com, ChocolateKandi.com, InterracialKandi.com, and GrannyKandi.com. Talk about a sweet tooth. Kandi said the name recognition (also known as branding) from their successful video/DVD operation made the new pay sites even more worth the shot, and Sinclair added that within a week of launching, those four sites made more money for the couple than they had from their mail-order video sales.
Naturally, that success has GrindersCash encouraged about the partnership. "Surfers really seem to like the amateur orgy action that goes on at swinger's parties," says Grinder. "The Kandi Peach pay sites are now our best converters and I think that once other Webmasters try the partner program, they will agree."
Which is pretty heady stuff for a couple whose feminine half was all but clueless about swinging until she met her future husband. "He was very nervous about explaining it," Kandi recalls in her rapid Carolina drawl, remembering the couple's second or third date. "He's going through this whole rigmarole about how he wants to swing, and I'm listening and I'm like... okay... okay...let me see if I understand this: He wants to be with other women while I'm at home? But instead of sneaking around behind somebody's back, people actually did this together and had such a good time together. And some of the most fun we have is being together with other people."
The couple was also interested in recording their encounters. "We were videotaping and photographing some of our swinger parties and we decided we ought to try to sell some of our amateur videos," says Sinclair. "We got involved in that, but when we first started the Net we didn't know anything about the adult industry. We sent some of our videos off to a company that bought and turned around and sold them, and that deal didn't work. So I told Kandi I'd try to sell them ourselves."
They sold the videos and stills through traditional methods such as swingers' magazines and contact advertising, and that led to their first contacts with the cyberspace world. "We had a couple of people get in touch early on about designing Websites," Sinclair says, "but we didn't see that much future in it at that point, so we created our own video company and I built a small Website to offer videos."
The main problem, though, wasn't the Web's future - it was the technology. Sinclair and Kandi admit that it intimidated them at first. "I didn't know how to build passwords or shopping carts, or block off member areas from the public or anything like that," Sinclair says. And, then, along came GrindersCash. "When [Grinder] got in touch with us, he said, 'My God, you guys have just hundreds of thousands of images from all these parties.' And we had learned early on to get the model releases and all that. And just in screen captures, most of our stuff is built with digital content, but the screen captures we have are just tremendous."
The Kandi Peach Websites may be the best converting sites in the GrindersCash lineup - InterracialKandi and GrannyKandi were numbers one and two of GrindersCash's top three converting sites in the final full week of April - but there are some very good supporting hitters on the GrindersCash team, too.
Porn Heads, for example, converts well with DVD-quality online adult video showings, featuring such top adult stars as Silvia Saint, Jill Kelly, Sydnee Steele, Asia Carerra, and Angela Crystal. Viewers can watch them as streaming video or download them to the hard drive for later viewing, especially if they have DSL or cable modem hookup.
Hot Local Girls features over 30 girls wild at the swingers' parties, including group sex and interracial gangbangs. Grinder says this site converts well and boasts very strong member retention, as does My Fetish Freak, with Gem Martin, which is a strong converter for fetish traffic.
GrindersCash calls itself a partnership program, splitting everything with the Webmaster 60/40 - 60 percent for the Webmaster, 40 percent for GrindersCash, for as long as a member belongs. Referring another Webmaster to GrindersCash brings the referring Webmaster a 10 percent payout on all revenue paid to his or her referral. And no separate account for each affiliate site is required - just sign up for one account and use the affiliate identification number in all links to all GrindersCash affiliated sites.
"We actually have a bunch of new sites we're planning to release," says Grinder. "A lot of them are with Kandi Peach along the fetish line, and we're working with a bunch of Web girls - their sites bailed or they're not getting enough traffic - so we're putting them under our umbrella to send them traffic.
"The only problem we're having," he adds, "is getting the message across to Webmasters that this is what the people want."
The Web models are lesser known, Grinder says. "The well-known [Web models] are making money. The lesser-known girls have just as much [to offer], but for whatever reasons they weren't able to attract the traffic. Most of the time, it's because they weren't sure of what they were doing."
For now, Grinder is more than thrilled with Kandi Peach's success - and with the up to ten new niche-specific amateur swingers' sites coming from Kandi and Sinclair over the summer months. "They have been selling their parties for years," he says. "They know all the swingers in Atlanta, and they're looking at all the niches; there are so many niches, and building niche-specific parties to add to what they have online."
But GrindersCash appealed to the couple as much as they appeal to GrindersCash. "[They] had a wonderful conversion rate," Kandi says, "and a lot of people had heard about it."
Then, as new success spiraled, came the part that meant sane or insane: dividing up the new responsibilities, once the couple agreed to go for it. Sinclair handles the bulk of the video work, while Kandi takes care of reviewing and organizing the still images - over 200,000 and counting, "enough to make about 30 more niche sites down the road," she says.
"As we learned more and more we're actually targeting some of the things we do," Sinclair says. "We're working on about maybe over 30 [sites], but we're probably going to release them about four to six at a time."
Kandi gives a contented laugh. "It's pretty exciting," she says.
