Chris Brogan wrote an article on “50 Ways To Use Twitter For Business“, But it got me thinking, what are best uses of Twitter for adult business and who should adult business tweeters connect with?

Twitter Basics

• Open a twitter account and use Twitter Search to see what people are saying about your name, your competitor’s names and key words that relate to your industry.
• Make sure you have a photo - no one wants to follow a faceless person, it shows LAZINESS.
• Dialog and interact, don’t just spam the crap out of your followers and with blog postings. Engage in meaningful discussions and funny comments.
• Talk about things in your industry. No, I don’t care what dildo was up Tera’s ass, talk about trends and new media outlets, etc. Also comment on industries that might be complimentary to what you are doing.
• No pushing and shoving. Again, don’t blast your content, photos and videos all the time. You will lose followers.
• Be Human and talk about YOU. People like knowing about people.

What to Tweet About

• Write about what you are currently involved in, reading or find engaging. Again, people like humanity and personality.
• If you own and adult related site, have your talent tweeting. Get them blackberries and iphones, let them tweet about their lives and things going on with them. Leverage your employees to drive traffic to your site. Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections.
• Ask questions about direction, marketing or content. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
• Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.

Tweeting Etiquette

• You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
• Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation. No one cares about your dog and cat.
• Use Tweetdeck and Twhirl to manage Twitter.
• Shorten URLS with TinyURL .
• If someone doesn’t like what you say, they can unfollow you. Let them go, they are replaced by three who love you.
• Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

Twitter Pros & Cons

• Twitter takes up time. - Please! You can engage in twitter as much, or not as much, as you like.
• Twitter takes you away from other productive work. I have made some of my best business deals because of Twitter - making money and growing is productive!
• There are other ways to do this. Yes, but PLURK sucks!
• Twitter doesn’t apply to the adult industry. Twitter’s only a few million people (only). And you know what, they buy sex toys, see videos, are interested in mainstream marketing, etc.
• Twitter doesn’t replace direct email marketing. Ummm - Twitter is real time. If you send out one adult related link to a file or video, it will be downloaded 20,000 times in ONE DAY. Put that out to millions who may have not seen it and ummm - get where I am going? But make sure it’s somewhat tasteful.
• Twitter opens you up to more criticism and griping. If you hear what is wrong, you can avoid making those mistakes! Or you can discover how wrong they are and realize what you are doing is right. If you are using Twitter to only promote prostitution and trying to drive sales to your pay site, you are going to fail. Twitter should be used to ENLIGHTEN, SHARE & ENGAGE. Not just with mainstream audiences, but with other adult personalities. The adult industry can be lonely & isolating place.
• Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).- Damn skippy. It’s a viral as viral can get.
• Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks). My twitter is a mix of adult, mainstream adult and mainstream marketers, mixed in with people I just like. I get all kinds of info and ideas from comparing opinions and trends. Twitter is instant market research.
• Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are). I have monetized Twitter for my writing and marketing services. I’ve also used it to connect with other adult business ventures. It’s been successful. But again, it’s for the right reasons, not simply to make a quick buck or as a tool in black hat SEO techniques.

Sites I Have Found On Twitter I Love

1. http://www.beautifulrebecca.com/
2. http://www.melissagira.com
3. http://wakingvixen.com
4. http://dolorem.com
5. http://omgomgomfg.com

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

In a world where everyone on the Internet can claim to be an expert, who can you trust to present your adult brand with widely admired honesty and professionalism?

Well, the illustrious Alex Suze has created a very cool site - Sex Toy Buzz - that reviews products, video, literature and services that claim to be the best and puts them to the test.

Sex Toys Buzz is the latest venture from the team behind the incredibly successful AlexSuze.com site. The Sex Toys Buzz approach is built on years of developing trusted relationships with international adult product producers and retailers.

The Sex Toys Buzz philosophy is based on the belief that outstanding presentation of your products, visually and in terms of SEO, is crucial. It’s no good just throwing your ad in a link farm or having your product review buried on some un-searchable back page.

What I like: Clean and uncluttered layout and the adult toy reviews are complete and passionate. Reviews are performed in-house by and created around each product, not constrained by a list of standard criteria. The Alex Suze team understand that every product is different – and their reviews reflect that.

Nifty too: They’ve created professional-standard videos for many of the products they review. Hello YouTube generation.

Marketing Coo & Relevance: Alex Suze’s videos generate 25-30,000 views per month - that translates into great sales! So if you’re a manufacturer, service provider or retailer in the adult industry seeking to increase your profile, this a great way to or a consumer to get some hellified exposure!

For everyone else & all round sexual deviants: You now have another outlet for honest sex toy reviews.

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.

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.

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.

The adult industry has spawned modern SEO/SEM techniques.

Why? Money.

Yes, Yes, the infamous acronym “C.R.E.A.M.”

History, porn has always found innovative ways to create innovative sustainable revenue streams. Adult marketers aggressively applied every (from traditional to black hat) technique imaginable in order to beat search engines and successfully applied it to every niche in which there is money.
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Most adult bloggers use Wordpress as a publishing platform. One of the beauties of Wordpress is its incredible way to not only manage blog content, but facilitate your own SEO as well. The plugin I most recommend for anyone is HeadSpace, it’s wonderful plugin that makes SEO consistent.

For those ready for more than the basic SEO, Yoast, offers a more in-depth, comprehensive, how-to guide to Wordpress SEO.

If your a visual learner, and have an hour and nine minutes, I recommend the following video.

And if you hate Matt Cutts or don’t have an hour and nine minutes, here is another favorite, it’s only six minutes:

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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