Are you doing enough to promote your business?

[cots]

The thread about recent sales, especially November, raises an interesting point.

With my Glamour Images affiliate hat on, I am amazed how many sites have an affiliate/webmaster scheme but do little or nothing to maximise the potential it offers. I can't tell you how many times I finish up scrabbling around trying to find new galleries to use to promote some of my sponsors.

It begs the question - why bother having an affiliate scheme in the first place? It also raises the question - are you doing enough to boost your sales?

Times have changed as we all know and, mark my words, we will never get back to the heady old days. If you don't know how to promote your site, don't have the time, or simply can't be bothered, then don't come on here, or any other board, and moan about it.

I am not naming names, or pointing fingers at anyone it's just a general comment. If I did point the finger, then it would start with me. I know for a fact that if you don't get your galleries out, then traffic drops and so do sales. Despite that I sometimes leave it to long between webmaster mailings. Slapped wrists for me. Getting a the odd gallery out every now and then does not do you any good whatsoever - and yet so many do it!. Commit to the scheme!

Here is a recommendation - send out at least one gallery every week as a priority and you will see your sales rise.

On a similar note how many of you are keeping your links pages fresh and updated? Not very many seems to be the answer. Judging by the number of dead links I find when going in search of new sites to exchange banners with, too many paysite owners haven't checked their links pages for a very long time.

Things are going to get very, very tough again in the next few months (especially in the Eurozone) and so if you are not prepared to put the work in to promote your sites we can expect a lot more to close.

Sad but true.

[LandL]

Nope, I'm not. But I have been thinking about it for about the past year "what is the next step after doing a paysite?" I never planned on doing this forever and I don't feel like it's a challenge anymore. And I guess that reflects in my lack of promo content lately for my affiliate program. Which leads me into my next question, but I'll do a separate post for that.

[Toby]

When it comes to independent sites (run by the model and/or spouse/boyfriend, usually CCBill) you pretty much take what you can get in regards to promotion of their affiliate program. Many have zero sales background, minimal web skills, learning as they go, and are often getting bad advice from someone that they think knows what they're doing.

Then add in the time factor, offline responsibilities (job, children, etc.), and many aren't able to do much beyond keeping their sites updated. I've also found that many of them also have pretty poor time management skills, not sure why but it seems to go hand in hand with the type of personality that would do an adult site.

In the past simply putting up a link to your affiliate sign-up, with a few banners and maybe a few zip files of images, was enough to get a fair amount of affiliate traffic. These days it takes much more work and many don't have the sales to justify the time, nor the up front funds to hire someone to do the work for them to bring the sales up. They also probably lack the skills to do much, beyond maybe a blog and twitter, to bring non-affiliate traffic to their site(s).

I've done well over the years with sites like this IF they are at least updating the site regularly, the site tour converts AND they're willing to give me access to download promo content to build my own galleries.

[jscott]

Geoff that's a great question we should all be asking ourselves. Most ppl just complain right off the bat, it seems the easiest thing to do.

But really, we should assess how hard are we really working, and are we really doing everything and anything necessary to grow our sites, improve conversions, etc etc.

[cots]

The demise of the Deanna Deville site brings my point into focus. I agree with everything Toby says (I always do dammit ) and with JS.

However, why oh why do people want to do everything themselves? Most of it is greed i.e. they want all the revenue. Sad because 25% (say) of $8000 is still more than $1500 but people just can't see it.

If a site seems to have real potential then get someone to help FFS!