Newbies eager to enter the adult game joined seasoned webmasters looking for tips to expand their operations during two seminars on traffic patterns and search engine secrets held consecutively on the second day of Internext.
Moderated by Wildline!’s Johnny V., the traffic seminar featured some of the adult industry’s savviest traffic generators: Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network President Scott Coffman; ExpressSubmit.net managing director Benoit Le Chevallier; and Albert Lazarito, director of new business development and operations at SilverCash.
The panelists generously shared traffic-generating techniques that have helped their respective companies grow in the past, and even offered their strategies for finding new traffic in the upcoming year.
Coffman was excited about the potential of viral marketing, pointing to his company’s xPeeps.com, modeled on the popular, mainstream social-networking site MySpace.com.
“xPeeps grew very quickly just by the viral nature of the site,” he said. “In the end, it helps me out because I get the traffic generated out of that.”
Lazarito suggested webmasters try mining the international market for increased traffic opportunities. “There are a billion Chinese and a billion Indians that we haven’t really taken into consideration,” Lazarito suggested. “The world does not revolve around North America for traffic anymore.”
Reminding everyone that having traffic was one thing and monetizing it was another, Chevallier encouraged webmasters to create sites that potential customers would find appealing at first glance. “Make the site as simple as possible so that people find what they want,” he said.
As for getting traffic to one’s site, Chevallier—who specializes in pay-for-placement in major search engines—recommended sticking with search engine traffic “because it’s the most reliable traffic available.”
The second seminar of the day, also moderated by Johnny V., featured search engine wizards who offered to another packed crowd, which was dominated by people who ran their own sites, techniques to optimize their search engine rankings.
Citing a research paper published by Google a few years ago, panelist Dustin Suchter, who left Yahoo! in 2006 to start the consulting firm Universal Curve, noted that the average length of a search term has increased throughout the years. “Back in the ’90s, people would just search for ‘porn,’” Suchter noted. “Now, everyone is more sophisticated and we’re seeing more specific search terms like ‘porn’ and ‘blonde girls.’ The average search-term length has gone from one word to three.”
Each of the panelists stressed the importance of complying with the rules of search engines, all of which have rules regarding the type of content they are willing to track. “A lot of people push that limit on compliance, and they get blacklisted and the portals just refuse to track them,” warned Dan Craig, director of paid inclusion services at SearchboXXX.com “It doesn’t have to be graphics, it could be copy as well—for instance, a reference to bestiality or preteen sex.”
If a webmaster wants to host content that may be objectionable to search engines, panelist Marc B., owner of Hoes.com, suggested spinning such content off into a new site, so as not to ruin the main site’s rankings, or—by using a simple text file—block the search engines’ spiders from examining the content in question.
The three major search engines—Google, Yahoo!, and MSN—now allow webmasters to submit site maps, a convenient tool for informing search engines of your content. “Now that the major search engines have consolidated this ‘site maps’ idea, it’s a good idea to do one,” suggested Frank Okun, a veteran of search engine marketing who recommended Sitemap.com as a reference for those seeking help creating a site map.
The audience used every minute of the time allotted to take advantage of the panelists’ expertise during the question-and-answer section of the seminar. “I’ve been doing this for a while and it is rare that people are so forthcoming with information,” Johnny V. said when the session ended.
