There is a whole world outside of the continental USA, and believe it or not, most of it likes sex, porn and adult entertainment - and not less than the average American! This world is connected to the Net, has some money to burn online, and wants a piece of the action: Are you going to ignore it? You'd better not!
According to Internet research firm emarketer.com, there are 529.9 millions Internet users worldwide. 152 million of them are from the US and Canada (less than 29%), the rest come from Europe (170.7 million, more than 32%), Asia / Pacific (168 million, more than 31%), Latin America (32 million, about 6%) and Africa (7.2 million, more than 1%). If you're ignoring the international market, you're ignoring 71% of your potential money-spending clients.1
I know that some of you are pretty amazed by the numbers. A few years back, the cake was divided in two equal pieces: the US and the rest of the world, half and half. The days of glory are well behind us now; the Western world, specifically Europe and Asia, closed the gap and even opened a new one. Welcome to the New World Order: North American surfers are now a minority.
People who were born in Europe or Asia are not less horny than the average American. In fact, both in Europe and in Asia there are highly developed offline sex industries that are operating very successfully. However, although a lot of progress has been made in the past few years, the European and Asian online adult market is not as developed as the American one. The American online porn world is far more rich, diverse and progressive.
As for the American adult Webmaster, there's really no reason in the world to neglect such big chunks of the global market. Actually, with a relatively small effort, each webmaster can dramatically increase his site's exposure to the outside world without spending a nickel. The secret? Submitting your sites to foreign adult and localized mainstream search engines and directories. It's important to remember that many of the foreign search engines and directories are using English as their language, so even if you don't speak German, French, Spanish or Portuguese, this obstacle can be overcome.
The first step in this journey is to identify those search engines and directories in all those foreign countries. This can be done very easily, as there are quite a few sites that contain links to all the foreign engines, including searchenginecolossus.com and www.twics.com/~takakuwa/search/. You can run your own search in Google for "international search engines" and find many more foreign SEs and link lists.
All you have to do is to access each and every foreign SE or directory and list your site there. The Web site submission process is identical to the process for American SEs. Just look for the term "add url" or "submit a site" and continue to the submission page where you will be asked for the usual details like site title, URL, description, Webmaster name and Webmaster e-mail. When you're dealing with sites that are presented in English, you have no problem. The problem starts when you reach engines in foreign languages. When you do, don't panic. There's a good solution that can help you to easily pass the language barrier.
AltaVista has a pretty good online translation tool. This application can translate single words, blocks of text and even complete web pages from French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish to English. You can access this wonderful tool here. Simply paste the SE's URL to the proper field in AltaVista's translator and locate the "add url" link in the translated page.
When you reach a foreign language SE, the first thing you want to do is to locate the "add url" link. Simply paste the SE's URL to the proper field in AltaVista's translator and locate the "add url" link in the translated page. You will reach a page where you will be required to provide all of your site's and Webmaster details. You can even translate the submission page too if you're encountering any language problems. In some of the directories you will need to find the relevant category and click the "add url" link from there (exactly like in Yahoo!) to be sure that your listing is accepted.
The tricky part is the description of the site. How the hell are you going to write a description to your site in Spanish, German or French? Well, here's my tip: try to track a listing in the foreign SE or directory you're submitting your site to, of a site which is similar to yours in its concept. For example: I was registering a sex shop, so I searched for other sex shop listings, found a few good ones, checked their translation with AltaVista's translator and picked one good description in every language that served me with many other foreign Search engines. Keep ready made translations of your site's description in each language in advance, so you won't have to "re-invent the wheel" every time from scratch, and waste your valuable time.
After submitting your site to as many foreign engines as possible, a sharp increase of foreign traffic should be noticed by you when checking your stats. Good luck!
1.) https://www.emarketer.com/products/report.php?online_no_am
