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opinion

Window Shopping With Transparency

Used wisely, a transparent tour can unleash your site’s selling power. It’s one of the best weapons in a paysite owner’s arsenal and there’s no better way to increase sales through a massive expansion of your site’s reach.

The name “transparent tour” caught on because it’s the most accurate, least confusing way to name a tour that’s essentially a mirror view of a site’s interior.

Transparent tours began as extensions of members areas that needed a way to showcase a large archive of models.

A website with a transparent tour appears not to have a tour at all, or appears to have a tour that’s nearly identical to the members area. Typically the only difference between the inside and outside of the site is that once inside, a visitor has access to the content where on the tour the content may be limited to static photo previews or sample video trailers.

Transparent tours began as extensions of members areas that needed a way to showcase a large archive of models. Big network cash program sites went step further and designed tours with category browsing, search features and top lists. It wasn’t long before these sites totally abandoned the boiler plated multipageepisode style tours they’d been using for the better part of a decade.

The tease factor this kind of tour creates makes it highly effective. It gives surfers the opportunity to sell themselves.

The sales process it creates is a lot like window shopping. The surfer piques their own interest and delves deeper into the site until they convince themselves to sign up.

Another big advantage of this tour setup is SEO, due to the massive amount of pages you can have indexed by search engines. Every model, category and content link gets crawled and it’s not uncommon for a site with a transparent tour to span hundreds or even thousands of pages. Transparency also lets you target traffic and link directly to niche pages that are rich with content matching what the surfer is looking for.

If you’ve got a CMS system that lets you build transparent tours you’re in luck, the benefits of a transparent tour are many. As far as paysite marketing is concerned it’s an ace in the hole.

AJ Hall is a 12-year adult industry veteran, and the cofounder and CEO of Elevated X Inc., a provider of popular adult CMS software for the online adult entertainment industry.

Elevated X powers over 2,000 leading adult sites.

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