It’s been an amazing year for me. I never thought I would accomplish so much so quickly.

This Adult Marketing, D.I.Y. SEO blogging girl is quite proud of herself. I have finishing up my next series of eBooks on “Adult Marketing, Do It Yourself SEO and Alternative Escort Marketing Strategies” in the next month. I am also writing a short series of shorter publications on “Effective Adult Copywriting Methods & Techniques” and “Escort Branding”.

Site Additions - Book & Blog Reviews

I am adding blog & book reviews of industry and non-industry related publications websites. At the SummerMash LA, I had the pleasure of meeting Rohit Blharagava, the author of “Personality Not Included - Why Companies Los Their Authenticity & How Great Brands Get It Back.” I will be reviewing the book, but from the adult industry perspective. Should anyone want me to review a book, blog, or eBook they write or have authored, please send it to me at callie@calliesimms.net.

With the eBook launches, I am going to giving away my first book absolutely free. Just right click and save the PDF.

DOWLOAD HERE

In our staff meeting on Friday, we were talking about services to improve or expand. I was like - ummm, pimp your Mac gear. No, not literally, I meant promotional pieces like screen savers, desktop backgrounds, custom wallpapers for your iPhone and BlackBerry devices.

Promotional items are great way to keep clients returning to your site and promote your brand. Ever wonder way certain shops have amazing packaging (Tiffany’s)? Because the customer is a walking billboard, promoting their brand as they shop. It’s that can be more fiscally sound strategy that works hand-in-hand with advertising/publicity campaigns.

If you have a online store or member’s area, you can sell the custom digital calendars applications to your clients and site members

Best of all they, aren’t just for Adult website owners, Bloggers, you can have them too! Can you think of a better way to leverage your loyal subscriber base than to let them promote your blog, podcast or video channel with their PDAs! T-Shirts and coffee mugs are so Web 1.0

By designing promotional material that your customers want, you will will build customer loyalty, drive repeat traffic and increases revenue

Visit our Design Site for more information.

Blue Collar SEO is one of my favorite reads. Recently, they wrote an excellent article about hiring SEO professionals. The article is well thought out and discusses basic search engine optimization techniques that any firm should be able to discuss with a perspective client. Best of all, it highlights ethical practices by search engine marketing specialists.

It is important to “avoid a Search Engine Optimization firm that engages in unethical and illegal practices (black hat techniques) just to increase the number of visitors to your sites” and “avoid a Search Engine Optimization firm that is vague about how it is going to optimize your website.”

The same goes for any Adult Copywriting or Adult Search Engine Optimization firm, they should have nothing to hide; their processes should be transparent and marketing strategy clearly laid out. They should also provide you with a monthly updates and data analysis as part of any on going plan.

Any marketer knows that online marketing, social media and search engine optimization are constantly changing, ever evolving, tools. That is why online media specialists exist. It’s our job to stay abreast on the latest methods in online marketing and make them part of our client’s programs, while also continuing to maintain the fundamentals marketing strategies that work.

That why I’m writing my little Wordpress series, it’s not about the constantly changing factors or the continual quest of debunking the Google search engine algorithm, its about the fundamentals. The fundamentals always work, as long as they are done correctly. Wordpress and web development is no huge secret. Wordpress has the one of the best user bases ever and the fundamentals are  FREE (Click and Read People).

Six Fundamental Things You Should Know

1. XML Sitemaps - Site maps tell search engines what information on your site is crawlable content. The latest version of Wordpress does it for you automatically on your .wordpress.com blog.

2. Excerpts - What is that funky field under the post box? Well, that’s were you can put a summary of your article. Think of it like a title, a keyword rich, yet targeted sentence about what your post is all about. It displays when someone links to the post. If you don’t include it, it will be the first 55 characters of your post.

3. Validations - .Wordpress.com blogs are already SEO ready. But let’s say you have used Fantastico to install Wordpress and you have integrated 3rd party plug ins to add some nifty features like HeadSpace, Event Calendar, CurrencyX and a language translator. Well, you need to make sure the code validates or it could prevent search engines from moving through your content.

4. Alt Tags - If your site doesn’t have much content or is image based, keyword rich alt tags and image tags are essential.  They make your site more accessible and provide search engines with more searchable content. You can tell if you have them my putting your mouse over an image and seeing if a description pops up.

5. Linkage Love - Blogrolls, pings and track backs are integrated into Wordpress. Basically, if you link to it, it should like to you. And what you link to should have good page ranks and Alexa rankings too. Some sites are newer than others - like this blog itself - so do your homework and look at the content. You can see who links to you by typing in your nifty Google bar link:www.YourSite.com.

6. Site Submission - Contrary to popular belief, monthly submission services are a bit of a scam. $49-99 per month for submission? Ummm, you can do it yourself. And there are also good free services. If your blog is structured correctly, there is not need for paid, monthly services, it does it automatically with all the tools above. These services don’t help you place higher in search rankings.

Nearly half of the world’s chocolate comes from the Cote D’Ivoire in Africa. An estimated 12,000 children have been enslaved on cocoa farms in Core D’Ivoire. I will no longer buy chocolate that is not from a reliable and ethical source. Many companies make an effort to avoid slave chocolate, however the five largest manufacturers of milk-chocolate-candy (Nestle, Hersheys, Mars, Cadbury and Phillip Morris) DO NOT. They claim that they have no control over the problem. This is not true. (source - http://www.xocoatl.org/harvest.htm)

STOP Trafficking Chocolate Campaign

This morning, a press release from AVN came in, I scanned it as I sipped my sugary poison.

Paul Fisbein wrote “As DVDs have begun their decline. Adult VOD, mobile and Internet usage is increasing dramatically, and the same thing is now happening in the mainstream. Keep your eye on adult to see how the convergence of television, mobile devices and the personal computer plays out – the industry will be the weathervane.” - Press Release Here

Actually, the convergence of new media and delivery of mobile content has long begun. Look at the bloggers, the adult segment on Facebook and MySpace, Tumblr and Pownce, Twitter and Brightkite. We are already here and connecting, we are taking our concepts mainstream.  The fact is distribution and marketing have already merged with content, and the results of that development are already being monitized in the adult entertainment business.

When I decided to start Studio Erotica, I decided the most important partner I would need would be an auteur.  I hired Dan Dubelman because he is a storyteller, filmmaker, and musician who understands the culture of the internet and the convergence of marketing, content and distribution.  In an early meeting we had Dan said, “ TV and Film are follow an extremely tight structure. If the inciting incident doesn’t occur on the correct page, the script won’t work.  The characters themselves are forced to serve the structure, which means the characters cannot have real depth. Online storytelling offers a chance for the characters to drive the structure and the distribution in a sense.  Flexibility with regard to segment length is only the beginning.  You can do a series in 2-20 minutes instead of 20-60 minutes, you can release new episodes several times a day or only on the full moon.  Length and frequency are flexible and the audience accepts it.”

Studio Erotica is experimental, but our timing seems perfect. While we are collecting data that indicates amazing viral growth, we are also experimenting with transmedia where the characters push the marketing and distribution itself.

Business Wire: Press Release Here

We all know there is an ugly side to this industry, it’s not something I spend a lot of time blogging about, but I spend a lot of time following it. A few days ago, a wonderful girl (non-adult industry) who is desperately trying to be a model in Los Angeles tells me she has landed an amazing twelve day job shooting in a fantastic location and she needed me to cat sit for her. I said yes and congrats. She is only 21 and I (feeling maternal), asked her to give me a full itinerary, a copy of her ID and her passport and the numbers of emergency contacts, just in case there was an issue.

But she didn’t have it. I said to her, “No professional agency is not giving you an itinerary.” I asked her to explain the trip in greater details. And I got this:

• Oh, I only have five days to prepare, it’s last minute.
• I found it on XXXXXXX.com.
• We fly to New York on a private plane.
• We then transfer to another private plan and we are flown to <XXXXXXXX>.
• We are shooting for 12 days.
• There is no pay, just work for her portfolio.
• We are staying a private house (all the girls together).
• We then have to pay our own airfare back to the US.

I was quiet, none of this added up. I start to think, this is Los Angeles, any decent agency flies models on commercial airlines and put them up in their own rooms in hotels. Modeling is actually stressful and girls here get private rooms to decompress after shoots. She knew this! And no return airfare home?

I emailed the scenario and the post to a friend who works with trafficked victims in California because I was suspicious. She said “absolutely not.” Too many red flags. After two days, I finally convinced her not to go, I told her my extensive history of adult (and that I didn’t just design websites for people), that caught her attention. Was this gig a bad thing, maybe not. But everything I knew about screening clients and safety was screaming “NO! Don’t go, you will not be heard from again!” I don’t think I would have forgiven myself if something had happened to her. I had just imagined, she gets off the plan in New York, passport taken and that’s it.
In researching Human Trafficking as it relates to the U.S. and other areas, I was amazed to find the following information:

• It is estimated to be a $5 to $9 billion-a-year industry in the U.S.
  
• 27 million are trafficked everyday, that’s one person every 1.5 minutes.
• Globally, its $42.5 billion per year.
  

To learn more and to help prevent, please visit: StopTheTraffick.org

SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization”. It is the process of analyzing your potential design and problems for search engines indexing and positioning. In other words, making your web site and its content attractive, relevant and visible to search engines and web searchers.

There is nothing worse than having a beautiful web site with excellent content that can’t be found!

Before you begin optimizing your website, remember the following are SEO spam techniques:

• Automatically generated doorway pages
• Cloaking and false redirects
• Keyword stuffing
• Hidden text or hidden links
• Pages with irrelevant words
• Duplicated content on multiple pages
• Misspelling of well-known web sites
• Unrelated and centralized link farms
• Black hat SEO techniques

If you use one of the above techniques, you might get short term results, but it’s most likely that your site will be banned from search engines, and therefore you will put your business at severe risk.

Target Your Efforts
Target a search term on the page. If you want to be found for your keyword, make sure that term is on the page you want to rank. The term should be in the page title and in your description.

Get other sites to “link” back to you. This is one of the most important factors Google considers when ranking sites

If you blog, blog often. This can help you get links.

Don’t be afraid to use tools! Use Google Webmaster Tools and create a text-based sitemaps.

Don’t over do it and don’t stuff your pages full of keywords. You will not be successful.

There are a lot of questions regarding blogging in the adult entertainment field, many people wonder if blogging is worth the effort or time? Well, it depends on the purpose, the goal and if it used properly. This series will talk about blogs.

If you are just delving into the world of blogs, or just want a better understand of blogs and their evolution since they began in 1997, please click here.

There are a lot of applications out there that allow you to bring your presence into the Blogosphere, which one is best to use? Well, that up to you, use whatever you like, but there are pros and cons to each one.

Read the rest of this entry »

We have all downloaded and used free templates for skinning our Wordpress blogs, heck, my original design was a fantastic them called “The Wind Cries Mary.”

When you download free templates, all of them have links in the footer. Sometimes, these links are visible and located directly under the designer’s name and sometimes they are black on black and your can’t see them. Go into your blog and click Design>Theme Editor. In the theme editor, click on Footer.PHP. If you look very carefully, will find them there. Packing the footer with links is known as link stuffing and is considered a spam technique.

Link stuffing can get your into major trouble. Googles terms say NO F*UCKING SPAM. And they mean it. Tons of non-relevant links in the footer could violate Google’s terms of use and get your site banned and you would not even know it.

Since Wordpress is an OpenSource application and most components are entirely free, you are responsible for what you download. You need to make sure your components are SEO friendly.

Can you remove these footers? Sometimes, but sometimes they are encrypted and you are better off buying a template and customizing it.