Breaking into The Adult Marketing & Web Development Business - Updated 10/05/2009

Recently, I’ve received a lot of questions about delving into the adult marketing via Twitter and Facebook; the questions I am asked most are:

1. Is there good money in it?
2. Is it hard to do?
3. What do you do?
4. How do you develop a clientele?

The simple answers are:

1. There can be, if you do it correctly, it’s just like any business.
2. Yes, it is hard to do. Just like any business
3. I do the same thing you do for mainstream clients.
4. You develop clientele just like you do any business.

These questions are just the icing on the cake, what “inquiring marketing minds” actually pondering and asking is how to penetrate the adult industry and creating a successful business. They want to know if it can it worth the time and effort. Well, guess what? Any smart, determined marketer or developer can create a successful adult business, but they have to have a strategic plan to do so.

Here are my tips for deciding if you should start an adult marketing company:

Tip #1: Don’t approach the adult industry like it’s some secret Illuminati society that must be infiltrated. There are multiple ways to enter it: networking, emailing, trade shows, etc. It’s the same as any industry; it takes time and a targeted, strategic approach. Pick on that is most comfortable for you and go from there. For you online types, my next suggestion in perfect!

Tip #2: Set up an alternate Twitter nd start following adult entertainers, designers and other professionals that look interesting (@AudaciaRay, @VictoriaLane, @DarkGracie, @MasterRobyn, @Mindchaotica, @KimberleeCline and @PBVixen are a must). Start reading blogs, looking at web sites, check links and slowly start to comment. Just like it takes a website about six months to fully integrate into the Google sandbox and be allowed to play, it is the same for any new person in the adult scene. When you find something that tickles your fancy, proceed to Tip #3!

Insider Tip #3: Find something interesting? Go Google the crap out the thing that made you go – “OH!” and start studying it. Need inspiration? Check my side links, I put the stuff I really like there. Find a niche that works for you and start there, then grow.

Getting back into writing and getting caught up on what I’ve missed/not read, I jumped over to Melissa Gira’s website. She been busy writing and producing the wonderful things she so amazingly good at discussing. I was actually surprised to find an article of hers on The Frisky. I really like the Frisky, the content is interesting and I love the design and functionality. I’ve viewed it as conservative when it comes to sex - you know, the vanilla/mainstream side. And for the most point it is. But they have the wonderful Gira blogging. For give me Melissa for being so Web 1.0 on this.

It’s funny, I ended my blog posts in October talking about a post that Gira wrote, and I start with one.

Melissa: You made me smile at this, as I read, I had flashes of the ex-boyfriends I’ve had (damn the trail is long) who stalk my twitter and my Facebook for updates - to the point you ban them off Facebook.

Lesson: Twitterstalking and using social media to follow your ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, clients, ex-pornstar you were involved with is not healthy. It’s time to move on. Here is a great article on HOW.

The Frisky: When Blogs Cry - How To Break Up Online

Cancel, unsubscribe, unfollow. Sort out how you want to react to the breakup only after you’ve canceled the relationship, unsubscribed from her Tumblr, or blocked him from Twitter. To undo a relationship that made it online in any form—whether you’ve got photos together all over MySpace or earned your own tag on Gawker—requires investing as much shared exposure as you put in. Make a cold calculation: in my case, that meant reframing a year-and-a-half long affair, across half a dozen online networks, and doing it in just a few days.  This condenses everything: how much it hurts, how fast you have to react.  You had weeks or months to attach to one another’s blogs, profiles, and endearingly staged snapshots.  Now you have to delete or address it all, all at once.

We live in public. Those of us who document even a small part of our lives online hit that moment when we realize our audience isn’t just our friends: they’re more like fans. Any girl whose kept a LiveJournal or posted photos of her shoes to it has felt this. In talking about your breakup, you’re addressing those “friends,” not your ex—and if your ex has an online footprint equal to or greater than yours?  Take charge of your own reputation by telling your story—even if that’s to say you’re going to keep it discreet.

Focus, and cause no collateral damage. The heart’s built-in amnesia – time healing all wounds – is not going to guide your sense of judgment in an online breakup. What will give you resilience later is to tell only your own side now, even if that self-imposed silence aches. The one thing I’d take back from my breakup-blogging is a reference to the sex life of someone close to my ex. But addressing the woman who named me in her own screeds against my ex, after those became the subject of comment for our mutual friends? That not only felt fair, but necessary.  In the case of involving those outside the breakup: only expose what you absolutely need to, and only about those equally desperate for the attention.

A pre-emptive makeup? The strange thing is, it really wasn’t hard to read what strangers—who had no interest in my relationship when it was going well—had to say when I was torching it in their RSS reader. It was easy, and easy to obsess on having the crowd vet “what it all meant.” By the time my ex and I reconciled – and screwed, and cried – the worst things we could’ve said to one another had already been said, in front of an audience. Their reblogged attention was gratifying just long enough for us to figure out how little we needed them to make sense of our relationship ourselves.

I was working on my Tumblr a few weeks and came across this post from Melissa Gira. I chuckled a bit, I have been thinking about public perception <of me> as a writer/blogger/character and I read this:

This is not a compliment.

On that same thread: I’m tangling hard with this notion of public persona. That for whatever reason, writing about sex gives some people the idea that you are available sexually to them (this is not new, this is something I’ve noticed a long time ago). But this being commonly understood as a consumable girl is hitting a breaking point for me. Does it mean I can’t flirt-for-real in public spaces without being perceived as buying into a role, without agreeing with that being pegged as The Sex Girl?

I was never that girl. I never played against my own intelligence to make men comfortable around me. I come on strong by being open, not teasing. I don’t look for strength in men’s eyes that way. As temporarily delightful as cocktail conversation may be — until our cabs come — I get my real and lasting courage from my own vulnerability. I can only trust my sense of worth to be safe with those unafraid to love me, not someone who finds me amusing five minutes at a time.

This is the year of being smart about being seen.

Thank you Melissa. You said what I was looking for.

I don’t know why men (yes, it is men only - never women) think because we write about sex, marketing sex, sex & society et al., that we are available. I was astonished to find how many mainstream, social media/SEO men would contact me via Twitter or Facebook to see if we could have “drinks”. I was excited at first, “Wow - mainstream people take note of my work and wanting to meet!”

Uh, I realized that “coffee” was not their intention, it was can I get a free piece of ass and someone to support me. This progressed into another interesting phenomena: When I would attend webinar  as “Callie” that I would receive emails from employees of the companies that hosted the webinar. Again, I thought it was about the company itself, but it wasn’t. The only thing it was about was their employee’s side adult businesses, or should I say - wanna be businesses. It prompted the series I wrote on being an ethical marketer. I’ve learned some valuable lessons.

So now I can say - No, you will not fuck me and no, I am not gonna teach you to be an adult marketer for free. You will PAY ME - for marketing consulting, not for sex that is.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks rethinking our business model and direction based Melissa’s comment about being smart about being seen. So you will see me again, just in different directions and areas. Looking forward to engaging conversations again.

Callie

New Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/AdultMarketing

Adult clients/business are embracing social media (hopefully I have something to do with that) and are finding creative ways to engage with their customers through Facebook and Twitter. They are also starting to use LinkedIn to expand their professional networks in lateral and vertical markets. And that is exciting. This month alone, my professional LinkedIn has grown by 25 contacts!

Many of them have asked me, “How do I integrate my social media into my current site/blog? I don’t want to just LINK to my profile, I want to make it all interactive.” Especially as it relates to Facebook.

Note: More and more adult bloggers & business owners are moving to Wordpress for their blogging platform because of simplicity it provides as a content management system.

So I am doing my usual wordpress hunting for better than semi-sweet articles on the latest and greatest wordpress “addie thingies,” aka plugins/widgets, and I found The Fatty Talks by Adam Hirsch. Okay, the name alone cracks me up. I like what Mr. Hirsch posted as the best plugins/widgets for embedding facebook to your wordpress blog.

WORDPRESS.COM ON FACEBOOK:

WordPress - Create a Wordpress.com account AND access your account from directly in Facebook. Publishes from Wordpress.com accounts into Facebook News Feeds, Mini-Feeds and adds a box in your profile that is customizable.

• Sorry, I hate it, not a very good thing, only works for like 12% of people.

WORDPRESS.ORG ON FACEBOOK:

WordBook - This plugin essentially allows you to cross-post to your Facebook account directly from your WordPress blog.

• It’s nifty and works really well. You can just import the RSS Feed from your Wordpress blog to Facebook though.

FACEBOOK ON WORDPRESS.ORG

Facebook Photos for Wordpress Plugin - by TanTan Noodles  - “This WordPress

plugin provides easy access to your Facebook photos by allowing you to easily post them to your blog. After you have linked the plugin to your Facebook account, photos you upload to Facebook will automatically show up in a convenient ‘Photos’ tab in your WordPress powered blog (see screenshot below). You can choose to use either small, medium, or large sized versions of your photos.”

• It really cool if you are anti-Flickr. But Flickr has an automatic integration widget for the free .Wordpress.com blogs. Get the Flickr on, even if it is Yahoo. Yahoo is anti-adult as most of  us know, but we will still use Flickr and Upcoming because they are cool.

WordPress Fotobook - Fotobook is a WordPress plugin that will link to your Facebook account and import all of your photo albums into a page on your Wordpress installation.

• Works very well, especial for the new user. Nothing all that special, see notes above.

Display in Facebook Live Users and and Latest Posts -  Lester Chan created his own plugin for his Gamerz blog, however, he is offering the source code.

• It’s really cool. If you have the skills, get this.

StatusPress - Plugin that takes your Facebook status updates and puts them onto your WordPress blog

• Another one the works out of the box, but is very twitter like. Use Twitter Tools if you are into micro-blogging. And use the first version, all the later versions give me issues of one kind or another. They are fixable, but problematic.

Add To Facebook Plugin - Adds to the bottom of every post an “add to Facebook” link

• Ummm, just use ShareThis, or Social Bookmarking, unless you ONLY want the Facebook add button. But why would you do that?

Thanks Mr. Hirsch for the outline. Loving it.

Be Ethical, Be Legitimate. Anyone can work in adult marketing; there are many “designers, developers and marketers”. But I use those terms loosely because many “adult marketing companies” aren’t ethical. They under deliver, over charge and build websites on platforms that their client can’t understand, thereby making them slaves to the webmaster. When did the term adult become synonymous with the term idiot? Just because a client’s business is adult related, it doesn’t give their marketing team the right charge astronomical prices for third-rate service. Sooner or later, a client will speak up, vocalize their discontent and you will lose all your business.

Did you know? An individual adult entertainer usually makes $200,000 to $350,000 per year. A heavily marketed, niche adult website with creative, unique content can make up to $1 million per year. The average investment in marketing & publicity is about 15-20% of the gross income.

Being ethical and being legitimate is the first step in being successful.

Be More Than A Designer: Be A Developer, A Marketing Strategist, An Advisor and A Visionary. Anyone designing adult websites should be able to build just about anything. PHP, CSS, HTML, Java – I don’t care, you better know it and be able to do it well. I am not a designer, I am a marketing strategist; but my design team – Ope/Zig (the best) – can do anything a client needs them to do. They make it a point to test and demo all the adult related content management systems out there. By doing so, they know the best platform for any client site. If a client comes to us and loves what they have, we can work with it, but we work to improve it. If they don’t like it, they identify what isn’t working and develop several alternatives for them. If we have to, we will build what they want from scratch.

I strive to be more than designer, I strive to be a visionary. I not only create a site, I develop a strategy and a vision for the client. Now some clients aren’t ready for it, whether it’s a financial limitation or a mental step they aren’t to make yet, I make sure concept is there from day one. I visualize their BRAND and what it could be, even if they themselves don’t see it yet.

You have to ask yourself, “What is this company or individual’s five-year plan?” Next, work backwards from there. You are still building their brand, even if it’s an individual person and a name. You have to consider what would hurt that brand, what would dilute it and what would make it stronger. Throw in the average shelf life of adult name/product popularity and it’s some work!

If you have an idea that could be “The Next Step” and blow/transform their image into another lucrative income stream, you must present it to them, even if it’s risky. If you don’t present it, you are a bad marketer and don’t deserve their business. You need to be a visionary and an adviser because things in the adult market become tired quickly. It’s your duty to continually maximize their ROI; that’s what you are being paid for.

Have Standards and Integrity. This is where humanity comes in and I gotta get gritty. Our clients are people; treat them like people.

1. If you can’t get over nudity and provocative content, then this line work isn’t for you.
2. If you think you can use your status as an adult webmaster/marketer to try and meet adult professionals for your “personal” gain, then this line of work isn’t for you.
3. If you can’t imagine doing an online video series focused on selling couture sex toys and leveraging social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook to promote it and drive online sales – then EXIT STAGE LEFT.

What I Am Saying: Treat your adult clients like your corporate clients. Put all you know into practice and give them tangible results based on clear, ethical marketing practices. Make sure they have the proper tools to manage their content can do all the things they want to themselves. It allows you fill in the services that they fall short on and make you a more effective resource.

Play Nice With Others. There are great adult marketers out there. Play nice and make friends, you never know when you are going to need them. I keep in contact with the people I know have ethical standards and we trade and refer work whenever we need to. In fact, make sure you follow @PBVixen and @MasterRobyn on Twitter, these people have mad skills and I would work with them and for them anytime.

I am very happy that many of you are jumping on the social media train. Many savvy sex workers and adult industry business people are using it effectively to network with others in the adult industry, but some people are misusing it.

Social media has a place in adult business, it is for networking, promoting your books, educating mainstream audiences and developing new concepts. Anyone who uses them is very careful about content. They don’t put racy photos on it or link it to escort sites.

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So the site has been up for a week. I have been working on it, as you can see from all the additions and nifty things. I had to stop for just a moment today and let it all sink in. Delving into the world of Sex Writing, Sex Blogging and Adult Marketing is not a light task.

Actually, it’s really fucking overwhelming.

There are absolutely fabulous writers and business women out there and I am so fortunate to have talked to some of them this week. So to all of you - THANK YOU for the links, blogroll, Twitter, MySpace and Facebook adds (sorry, I am drawing the line at Tumblr) and the encouragement, advice and referrals; I am looking forward to connecting with you more in cyberspace. I am excited to bring my insight and opinions in to the arena with such formidable women and men.