The other point to consider when building your tour is the reaction you will get from webmasters. If you are planning on running any kind of webmaster program to get traffic, you not only have to impress surfers into joining, you have to convince webmasters that your tour will make money for them and that you are a professional enough company for them to count on.
Unfortunately, most webmasters signing up to your program will have a very narrow view of what works that is based on their specific experiences. A lot of the webmasters tend to feel the need to be impressed by eye candy before they will sign up as an affiliate or partner. While this is fine if your site gets the kind of traffic that responds well to highly graphical tours, it can create quite a quandary for you when your site is doing better with a very plain looking tour. The solution is quite simply to do more than one tour: one for webmasters and that certain pool of traffic and one for the rest of the world.
In truth having a few tours for your webmasters to choose from will eventually be your best bet because this allows them to try different things with you instead of just leaving for another sponsor if they don't like the initial results. It also opens you up to attracting a wider range of webmasters who will be willing to give your program a try.
It's time now to discuss what things your different tour types will need to succeed. Before speaking of each type specifically, here is a list of the common points that all tours need to share:
• A prominent "join" link: Always make sure your link or button that asks people to join the site is the most prominently displayed object in the tour. Always have at least one of the "join" links somewhere within the first window of each page, which is to say that a user would not have to scroll down below what is immediately visible initially to get to the join link. In the current market, 1024x768 is the most commonly used screen resolution which means that you have to have that join link appear somewhere no more than about 500 pixels down the page (remember you have to figure in space for the browser interface too). It's also always a good idea to have a join link at the very bottom of the page either centered or to the right.
• Simple sales text: You're not selling a book here. People respond best when you list your main selling points in very bold, simply listed, non-verbose text. Something like: Over 40 Gigs of Downloadable video, 24/7 LIVE Girls, etc… Even with amateur sites where it is important to get across personality and the story of the model(s), your main selling points should figure prominently as a simple bulleted type list in the tour. People love sound bytes and headlines…
• High contrast text: Besides just being simple, your text should jump off the page and be easy to read (especially that join link). Use an outline on your text or a good solid drop shadow – whatever works. Just make sure no one is squinting to read it.
• Your favorite isn't everyone else's favorite: People join paysites because something they see arouses them. That something is almost always the assets of a particular model in your tour that they want to see more of. All the talk about how much great content you have helps for sure, but ultimately one face or body is the most likely thing to get out the credit card. So how do you choose which face to put in the tour to induce the greatest arousal? Well at first you pretty much have to guess on your own (or the designer's) tastes. If you have content of models that includes their name, then you might want to do a search engine query on them and get an idea by the number of matches, which of your girls is the most popular. Once your site has been up and running though, you simply need to look at your web stats and see which girls in your members area are getting the most attention (i.e. clicks). Eventually you will find what is the favorite of the masses, rather than just yours, and when you put those models in your tour, conversion will improve accordingly.
• Quick loading pages: As a rule of thumb, keep any single page of the tour at 100kb or below in total download size. Even though broadband is more common now, there are still plenty of modem users out there and no one with a broadband connection is going to mind a REALLY fast loading page for them. Of course this also ties in with making sure that you put your site on a good web host, because no matter how well you follow these instructions and no matter how awesome your tour is, if you host the site someplace that serves the pages up very slowly, you won't see much in the way of conversions. So make sure you pick a host that can deliver reliable, FAST connectivity or you will be left scratching your head at a 1:2000 conversion ratio – even though you did everything in this article.
• Video samples: As more time passes, it becomes more and more important to have a video heavy site. Offering small 10 to 20 second samples of a handful of the videos on your site is a great way to tease a customer so much that he is just dying to see the rest of it. Obviously videos are going to be more than 100kb but these are reached via clickable link and don't slow down the loading of your tour pages so they are not going to create a problem with the rule above.
• A customer support link: This will be discussed in greater detail in a later article, as it warrants an entire topical evaluation, but for now just know that it's important for you to have a customer support link leading to a good and comprehensive help page on your tour. Potential clients will be a lot less fearful of handing you a credit card number when you openly demonstrate how good your customer support is going to be for them.
• The join page matters: What you say on the join page will make a difference to your conversion. Keep the page relatively short (Often join pages are far too loaded with text) and offer a simple list of key points to remember. Your top two or three sales points (such as "over 40 gigs of DOWNLOADABLE Video"), some text about how the billing will be done discreetly (guys don't want some porn name appearing on their credit card statement) and lastly something about how you are an honest company and take customer support very seriously. A lot of people are still wary to use a credit card online or have been cheated in the past so you have to make sure they know you are not going to be dishonest.
In this series' conclusion, we'll break the tour types into their specific needs. Stay tuned!
