Here is a post Eli did 2006.
With all the new trends hitting the Internet every year I just can’t
help but sit back and laugh at the broad scope of things. The public is
amazed at the changes happening in the background but completely miss
the pattern that we webmasters all knew back when we were horny
teenagers first learning web design.The porn industry sets the standards for the Internet.
Everyone knows it but yet they don’t catch on until about 2 years after the porn
sites have already made it a standard. Facts be faced and the “master
promoters of today” be damned; the adult industry has us all beat by a
mile. Since the beginning they have specialized in grabbing attention,
converting the user, and keeping the audience. We nonadult webmasters
with our content sites, spam sites, or whatever haven’t even begun to
catch up with them and in my opinion find ourselves about 2 years
behind. Web 2.0? Don’t make me laugh. Take almost any porn site from
2003-2004ish and look at how they are designed. They didn’t call it
anything amazing they just did what tested to convert best. Once again,
in my humble opinion, I don’t think for a moment that we are being
revolutionary. Some may disagree with me here but for what it’s worth
there is a lot that can be learned from modern porn sites. A large
majority of which is held in the way they design and promote. Since I’m
not an adult webmaster(sorry but the money isn’t worth desensitizing my
love of real life boobs) I’ll focus this post on the promoting aspect. So
what trends do you see in the porn industry right now? How do you see
them promoting their sites outside of the seach engines? Well there’s
tons at the moment but one of the biggest I’m seeing is how they handle
affiliates. They take their membership based sites and put in previews
and tidbits of content to get the users to convert. They then take
almost ALL the content they have in the members area and hand it out
like candy to their affiliates. The affiliates no longer have to trick
the users into going to the links, they just post up the content
everywhere they can. I’m not just talking about member based advertisers
I’m also talking about products and anything else.Affiliates
Lets say you sell car audio. Just following this model, why not hand
out free full version software to your affiliates that will help their
users tune their own car stereos to the maximum? Why not have videos of
your sponsored competition cars kicking ass and hand it out to all your
affilliates? Give them full pages of interactive content with statements
like “Thank you -link- audio for providing the useful video on how to
increase the throw and pitch on stock speakers.” There are a million
ideas and twists that can be done to this concept that the adult
industry has mastered and tested for years now. Their wisdom and testing
has already proven the inevitable drop in link and sales pitch tactics.
So we might as well drop them now and stay one step ahead. If we know
where the trends are going why not follow them before the rest of the
competition does?Ad Formats
Also notice how the adult industry is formatting their ads on other sites. It’s moved
away from “Hey don’t you want to see Pamela Anderson naked” to “Check
out this chick with triple D’s trying to play socker naked.” The user
naturally goes “I gotta see this!” The move to “shocking ads” from
“here’s what i got” ads isn’t a surprising one. The shocking ads will
get the user digging. If they click on the link and don’t see the
content they were wanting they will click around in a determined fashion
on your site till they find it. Lets say you sell home theater
equipment. “Check out this $150,000 home theater system I setup in my
home!” Holy crap i gotta see this, i bet its badass! They click and see
all the images and read stuff about “It features a -link- Philips
TSU3000 -/link- universal touch screen remote with a high end -link-
Hitachi CP-X345 Projector -/link-. Boom you got yourself some “I gotta
have that” sales. Well I can take this article on for at least
another 4-5 pages but I’m going to stop it here now that I got a few
brain gears turning. The lesson here is, just watch for the trend
setters. Beat the rest of your industry to it. Black hatters, are you
wanting to know what to do next to push your cpc and affilliate sites?
Just look at how its already being done successfully in the adult
industry. You can learn a lot from their mistakes and successes.