Adult websites are notorious for doing one thing exceptionally well: attracting traffic. In some cases, the owners beef up the advertising budget and throw it into big-name deals, like HotMovies.com did when it announced a multi-week advertising campaign with Sirius Satellite Radio and the “Howard Stern Show.”
However, not all adult-oriented websites can afford to spend loads of money, and that raises a question: What are the alternatives? Some established sites in the adult industry think acquiring free traffic is getting more difficult, while others believe the opposite is true.
“I don’t know where you are hearing that the market for free traffic has died down,” says Dick Bradley, owner of FreakHole.com. “I would argue that it’s more alive than ever. Promote your business through free search-engine submission and optimization, and submit your website to various search engines monthly. This will make many more people know that your website actually exists.
“There are simple [modifications] you can make to existing scripts—like vBulletin to double your site’s exposure to search engines,” he adds. “Just changing the way your URLs are displayed can drastically increase your traffic.”
Companies are spending more than ever on search engine optimization, and time has proved that search-engine traffic is the most valuable, regardless of the industry it targets; however, long gone are the days of bidding for top keyword placement. Webmasters now spend more time optimizing their code to maximize their exposure. It’s the same game; they’re just using different methods.
If you have no time to increase the SEO friendliness of your site by adding items like articles, you can look for free content from article directories. All you need to do is retain the resource box attached to the write-ups.
“Search-engine marketing may be more difficult and competitive these days, but it is still very worthwhile,” says “Booble Bob” Smart, founder and chief executive officer of Booble, which is a free search engine for adult content. “Booble does have to work harder to acquire free traffic, because we received an enormous amount of free news coverage when we first launched, and that level of attention from the media is difficult to duplicate now. Of course, the traffic we get now is much more qualified than the initial surge of curiosity-seekers spurred on by the news articles.”
Sean Hoover, owner of UselessJunk.com, which features many porn clips, offers this advice: “If adult content publishers are looking for massive exposure, just send UselessJunk.com your scraps.”
Hoover says it’s a bad idea to throw away porn bloopers because, when properly marketed, they’ll bring in more traffic. “The most popular keyword search on my site is ‘Porn Blooper,’” he reveals. “These video clips are totally useless to a producer of an adult video or website, yet they are the most sought-after form of visual entertainment for my visitors, who are hardworking male adults with deep pockets who go home after hours and check out the rest of the porn behind the blooper. My site rips clips directly from the original site. Boom—those porn sites get more traffic. When you couple this exposure and traffic with an affiliate link below the video and the producer’s site logo on the clip, you’ve just turned video trash into Internet cash and added another 500 points onto your Alexa rank.”
Adult film star Jennifer Steele claims the best way for her site to acquire free traffic is by appearing on radio. “Radio show appearances are the No. 1 way for me to see free traffic,” she says. “After that, appearances within people’s blogs and/or Web articles always give me a jump in hits. MySpace also seems to help a lot.”
Certainly, MySpace is one way to acquire free traffic. Many porn sites are using MySpace as a form of free promotion simply by copying their official websites onto a MySpace page. To be really effective with MySpace marketing, though, one has to post a lot of comments and announcements, which requires a lot of work.
It seems as if today’s porn sites are in a better position than they were years ago. There are many webmaster tools that simply didn’t exist before, and getting indexed and optimizing a site is easier than it ever has been.
