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.

So in reading Ophelia Chong’s Blog today, I found an interesting post she made. She writes:

Google Search of “social marketing guru” brings up over 419,000 hits.

Some of the best:

“Steve I___ from Canada is a major social marketing guru and very good friends with Neil Patrick Harris…”

“Internet Marketing Guru Turned Social Entrepreneur. Joel C. on mission to help many become Internet-literate and eventually help …”

From Wikipedia: A guru (Sanskrit: ????, Bengali: ????) is a person who is regarded as having great knowledge, wisdom and authority in a certain area, and uses it to guide others. The word comes from Sanskrit Gu, darkness, and Ru, light (prakash); literally a preceptor who shows others knowledge (light) and destroys ignorance (darkness).

Can you be a Guru if you are using it for monetary reasons?

Well @Ophelia, I don’t think you can use the term “Guru” for monetary purposes based on the Wiki definition, but I would like to take it a step further and say:

I have never liked the term guru, I view it as a buzz word that people are throw around to quickly establish themselves as an expert in whatever the hot field is at moment - i.eg. social media and Web 2.0. The problem with using the term “GURU” is that it pigeonholes a person’s career and a potiential client’s perception of them. By saying, “I am a social media expert!” - leaves one to ask “Well, can you do anything else?”

There’s a perception the term conveys - saying “guru” makes it appear as though the person using it doesn’t have a diverse skill set or the capacity to leverage other marketing techniques in their campaigns.

A marketing expert knows that the online component of marketing makes up the largest component any plan these days, but print, advertising and traditional forms hold - heavy - weight. They are crucial parts in developing a holistic, cohesive marketing strategy that drives the success of any product or service.

Side Note/ Joke: Using the term Social Media Guru sometimes implies - “I really don’t know what I am doing”, “I am a master of the universe because I have to compensate for my mental inadequacies - caused by my *physical* inadequacies” or “I just want to look cool.”

In writing my last post on Google and page rank importance, I started looking for information on the Importance of page ranks and Google. And who I found was the Google Guru God, Chris Beasley. Chris is the authority on most things Google. His article - 10 Google Myths Revealed - cover the most common misconceptions in regards topage rank and what should be and shouldn’t be used for. It’s a must read, especially if you think Google uses meta tags to rank your site,  the higher your Google PageRank (PR), the higher you’ll be in the search results listing or the the Google Toolbar will list your actual page rank.

Recently, a few of my clients have asked me, “Just How Important Is Google and Page Rank? ”

Google itself is very important. It’s the world’s most popular search engine and it powers Yahoo! and AOL. Being listed is crucial for successful online marketing. But Page Rank doesn’t hold the weight one my think it does.

What Marketers & Business Owners Use Page Ranks For

Google Page Rank is said to be “for entertainment value only,” but marketers and site owners use it for a variety of things:

1. To determine the value of a site
2. To determine the trustworthiness of a site
3. To determine the safety of a website & how credible a site is compared to that of it’s competitors’ site
4. To determine how long a business has been around

Well, I don’t think it’s reliable for any of those reasons:

1. What do you define and quantify a site’s value? There is not real formula to determine this.
2. How can you determine trustworthiness from page ranks? I don’t believe a site with a with a PR6 is better get information off than a site with a PR3. If the information on the site with the lower PageRank is better, then that is were I am getting my information from.
3. Safety relates to trust. If I am looking to purchase goods and I find two sites that have that product, and Site #1 has a PR6 and Site #2 has a PR3, but Site #2 has the most security options for online transactions, I am going with Site #2 as it clearly cuts my risk of online identity theft.
4. This is irrelevant, you can’t use a website’s pagerank to determine professional reliability. I often design sites for companies that have been in business 5, 10 or even 20 years, but they haven’t had a web presence until now. So while their site may be a year old, but they themselves has a long solid history outside their web presence. Also, may old sites that have not been optimized properly or that don’t have many links to have have low page ranks.

So if you site isn’t ranking, don’t fret. Generally a new site will have a PR 0 for a few months (on average - SIX) until Google does a PR update. And remember, page rank doesn’t single-handedly determine where your site shows up in the searches it’s in. If Google “thinks” your site is about the search given, and others aren’t, you’ll move up. (Where “thinks” means, “can determine from links to your page, linguistic and text analysis, query analysis, etc”) For example, if it’s a multi-word search, and your page is the only one to have all the words, you’ll most likely show up first.

The only real benefit of a high PR is better organic search rankings, which can be achieved by a well thought out marketing strategy.

As an adult webmistress, blogger and generally geek-loving girl, I always pay attention to the debate on what is the best way to optimize the adult sites and what are the best marketing strategies for adult website owners.

One major question is about the use of Flash in web design and SEO. Most adult marketers think that flash can’t be used and it kills SEO. Well, that only a half truth. You can have a site with a flash lay over that is super duper SEO’d.

Making a flash site that is SEO friendly is not difficult - for someone who knows what they are doing. It takes a time and it takes effort. If you want use Flash, you must use JavaScript to progressively load the Flash content for search engines to index the contents of the Flash files; you must separate content from presentation and behavior.

There are many coding languages, but which one is best is is dependent on the site and its purpose. Just because Flash is COOL, doesn’t mean its better.

You have to think about what the goal of site, what is it supposed to communicate? What is message? Does it fit the medium?

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