On the panel were the president and CEO of CyberCat, Mark Galione, the COO of Consumption Junction, Marc Womack, Magnus from Gallery Traffic Service and Kourosh from Local Billing. Scott Hjorleifson, a.k.a. Sleazy of SleazyDream.com fame, moderated the panel.
“You’ve basically got two kinds of traffic,” Galione said, kicking off the discussion. “[Traffic from] banners and from gallery links. Banner traffic is highly directed. Surfers click on a banner and know that they’re going to eventually have to pull their wallets out. That’s why banners are so important.”
Galione said sites should never just repurpose an affiliate’s banner. Instead, he said, they should make unique banners that really catch a surfer’s eye.
The same principal, he said, should also be applied when creating links to affiliate galleries.
“With gallery links, you have people looking for free stuff,” Galione said. “You’ve got to make an original page for this kind of traffic as well, because surfers will see the same template over and over again. This also can get you free traffic, because virtually every TGP takes free submissions as long as galleries are unique and interesting.”
Magnus reminded webmasters who use gallery traffic to make sure their join pages reflect what the user is buying. Too often, he said, sites will put a picture in the preview area that isn’t indicative of what the galleries have to offer.
“Don’t just slap up any old picture,” Magnus said. “Show them what they are going to get, and make the ‘Join’ page really easy, one page, five minutes, otherwise they’re going to go someplace else.”
Womack likened traffic to owning stock, stressing that traffic flow should be diversified just like a financial portfolio.
“There’s plenty of traffic in the TGP market,” Womack said. “But you can also use pay-per-click search engines or buy from traffic owners like me. Make sure you have three or four types of traffic coming in, otherwise you’ll be overexposed.”
All the panelists stressed the importance of search engine optimization when marketing a site; something Womack took into his own hands when he found most SEO specialists wouldn’t share their trade secrets.
“I hired three college graduates in Manila for $200 a month and said, ‘Start learning about SEO,’” Womack said. “Three months later they started making some good suggestions.”
Kourosh said that while building up its SEO, a less time-consuming way to market a site is by using existing review services.
“You can basically review yourself on another site, which will provide traffic,” Kourosh said. “And you can also provide review services on your site, which will drive traffic to your site with people looking for reviews.”
However, Kourosh warned webmasters that there’s always a good deal of traffic running through affiliate sites that is not billable by a credit card.
“You need to make sure you’re getting paid for all your traffic,” Kourosh said. “You need to make sure you can bill all your surfers. Make sure they are trackable by using services like those offered by Google or by companies like Wildline Adult Web Search Consultants.”
Finally, the panelists recommended that porn purveyors not limit themselves just to porn. Gambling, toys and video games are just a few other products many adult sites sell successfully online.
“Look, you have a lot of people coming to your site,” Galione said. “Think of your site like the checkout line at the grocery store. All that stuff there is an impulse buy, so give your users access to stuff they might buy on impulse.”
What that “stuff” may be, Magnus said, is only found through trial and error.
“Look, we recently had the Brazilian Tourist Board contact us to put an ad on our site because they wanted to push Carnivale,” Magnus said. “We’ve gotten ads from major Hollywood studios making mainstream films that deal with adult themes. We even had a woman selling scary movies who bought an ad from us.”
“I had a guy selling guitars off one of my sites for awhile,” added Galione. “Another guy was selling disc brakes.”
“Diversify!” Womack said.