Porn Blogging 4 Dollars

OK, I’ve been thinking a long time about making this post, but have been tied up with other things so today I’m making the time.  A common question I see on a lot of the adult boards and forums is “who is your best sponsor” or put another way “what affiliate program makes you the most money.” Invariably, someone will answer with “well, that depends on where your traffic is coming from, how you promote, etc.” which is all true.  Mostly, though, it is an opportunity for a lot of folks to just start plugging their webmaster referral links.

In order of importance to me, the first things I look at are:

The Link Codes

Preferably, I don’t want to see any boolean characters, the most common being ‘?’, ‘&’, and ‘=’. I’ve heard that search engines have gotten smart about stripping these from the pages they index in their effort to reduce duplicate content, and I tend to believe it. Unfortunately for the person promoting these links, that usually means that their webmaster ID in the link to credit them with any sale generated is removed from the page that is actually indexed.  I’ll use porn.com as an example, but keep in mind that what I’m detailing here is the industry norm. The link they give me to use is http://links.porn.com/?r=pimp26155&p=pt&c=1&j=11&mr=y&src=codes. As you can see, it’s absolutely loaded with boolean characters, and if you strip them away, the way the search engines are said to do, you get essentially the same page, just without my webmaster ID.

Redirects

Now, if you follow the link I’ve given above, you’ll notice that the page actually redirects to something like http://www.porn.com/?t_link=pimp26155:pt::028d9b19:11:1 , the 028d9b19 is a random string that get’s generated every time the page loads. What this means is that there is no consistent link that can be linked directly to, to facilitate indexing.  If I post that same link in a thousand different places, it may get indexed, but it’s just as likely it won’t.

Code

Looking at the page the link points to, open ‘Page Source’ under the ‘View’ tab in your browser window to get a look at the pages source code.  You’ll see that the page I’m given the link to has a nofollow attribute in the robots meta tag. What that means is that even if this page gets indexed by the search engines, the robots and spiders are restricted from leaving this page in search of other pages to possibly index.

So, why would the affiliate give me this link that couldn’t possibly get indexed as is, get’s redirected to a page that is equally unlikely to get indexed, and places restrictions on the robots and spiders from possibly searching for a page that might get indexed?  It’s really simple: money! If you do a search for them, you’ll easily find their pages without the boolean characters first. Now look at the source code of those pages and you’ll see that the robots meta tag now allows the robots and spiders to follow the links in the page in search of new pages to index. They have guaranteed that the vast majority of joins from search engine traffic will belong 100% to them.

So you’re probably asking yourself if adult webmasters are fully aware of this chicanery why would they continue to promote them?  It’s a great site!  They’ve got loads of content, it’s constantly updating, and they’ve got great hand-written descriptive text on every page!  As an adult blogger, they’ve got everything you want to provide you with content for your blogs.  The bottom line is this: You’re counting on your blogs to bring in the surfers who will either join right then, or bookmark one of your pages for now and hopefully join later.

Is There An Alternative?

As I stated above, what I’ve detailed so far is the industry norm. Nearly every affiliate program does at least one of these things.  However, I would much prefer to make money from search engine traffic that will find and index all the various pages in a given site.  So, how do I accomplish that?  White labels such as German Porn Movies.  This particular white label is from Vixeo, by far my very best affiliate program.  You’ll notice that every single page from the main page down to even the 2257 statement all belong to the white label - there are no “leaks” to pages that are exclusively the sponsors.  Nearly every page is a good solid hard link without boolean characters.  The code instructs the spiders to index and follow the pages and links.  The only thing that could be better are the descriptions.  The DVD descriptions come from the box covers like 90% of similar sites, and the scene descriptions are often short and poorly written.

In fact, you don’t even need to create a new white label.  Simply by joining you are given a link to their complete site which is essentially a white label in itself and you can customize it to some small degree.  Additionally they offer hosted galleries, and free content and hosting to host your own galleries if you like.  Honestly, if they closed shop It would be so detrimental to my adult blogging income I would get out of it altogether.

What I recommend

I recommend using them both.  Find a good sponsor like PimpRoll that has a good looking site and good content you can use in your adult blog posts.  These posts will bring search engines and surfers alike to your blogs. For every blog have at least one white label you’re also linking to, to be found and indexed by the search engines.  Now promote your blog and your white label is sure to also be found!

It’s been awhile since I posted anything here, but I keep getting distracted with other things, but I wanted to post some type of update to catch everyone up.

I had pretty much updated all of my blogs, making them all 2257 compliant.  Unfortunately, the guys at the adult blog free host BlogBugs got some type of glitch that resulted in losing all of their blogs.  They were able to restore the blogs from a backup from 6 month’s earlier - prior to the changes I had made.  Every change I had made was now undone, and the blogs once again had non-2257 compliant posts.  In addition to the changes being undone, it seems they were looking into better monetize the blogs they hosted, and my blogs now had various “float over” advertising, depending on the categories they were listed under, and a 2nd HEAD section inserted into the displayed pages code that inserted their own meta description, meta keywords, google analytics, and top bar links.  I suspect it was this attempt at additional monetization that caused the glitch in the first place.

This time, instead of again investing so much time into reworking each and every post to make it 2257 compliant, it seemed to me like removing the posts entirely was the most cost-effective action.  I wrote them about my displeasure and a month or so later I got a response saying the advertising had been removed, but yet there still remain those 2nd HEAD sections in the code.  Not that it makes much difference, but it’s not even MY HEAD, THEIR HEAD, BODY BEGIN - it’s MY HEAD, BODY BEGIN, THEIR HEAD.  Now, I’m by no means a SEO guru, but it seems to me like this departure from the established format will most likely kill any ranking I might otherwise have had.  Additionally, I now had to go back through all my other blogs and remove the links pointing to these blogs, so that their linking wouldn’t adversely affect their rankings as well.

I could delete the BlogBugs blogs entirely, but why sacrifice what little traffic may still be tricking in, when I can still provide links to my sponsors for the surfer to peruse.

Oddly, a single blog ( Movies on Demand ) was unaffected, though other than dropping by from time to time to import new posts with the aggregator, I’m not going to waste any time on it.

While updating my adult blogs, I’ve decided to add a couple of new features and steps. I mean it was already a slow process so why not add a couple of hours for some potential bigger returns, right? Take a look at Monster Dicks, which I just finished so you can see what I’m talking about. In the top right box I now have:

1. A new Feedburner chicklet,
2. FeedCount counter via feedburner,
3. Google Translate widget (which I was already adding),
4. Addthis bookmark widget (which I was already adding).

I’ve removed the addthis rss widget as that is now accomplished via feedburner, and the old bookmark/rss widget as well.

Additionally, I’m now submitting my blogs to various sites which give me free one way backlinks. I’m not talking about spamming blogs or forums, or writing articles. This is a small list of sites I’ve accumulated which have indexed adult blogs for me in the past without requiring reciprocal backlinks. I’m also submitting to a couple of free directory and search engine submitter sites, and finally a directory ping service. I’m holding out on posting any links here to see what happens - the no recip sites worked for me in the past, but it may take weeks to get my sites listed - the directory submitters may hurt my ranking if the search engines consider the submissions from them to be spammy - and the ping service is just one of many that are easily found, so why waste the outgoing link.

In fact, feedburner has a built in pinger (PingShot) to notify weblogs when your feed is updated. I’m new to feedburner, having resisted it because I saw no good reason why to promote my feed using a third party. What changed my mind is my non and semi-adult blogs on blogger which I can get away with using AdSense on. Since Google now owns blogger and feedburner they now offer the oportunity to put AdSense ads into your feeds. As surfers become more tech savvy, they’re reading blogs more and more through RSS aggregators. Plus, it seems that a lot of directories are more likely to index feedburner feeds for the browsing surfer than other feeds. I’m guessing I’m onto a good strategy because I just finished that blog yesterday evening and by last night I already had three subscribers.

While speaking of success, I’ve noticed a significant increase in sales.  While I’d like to believe this is due to my reconfabulations, it may simply be due to summer.  This annual bump, I think, is due to college students rewarding themselves for 8 months of hard work with a little porn, as do high-schoolers (what can you do?) who now find themselves at home all day without adult supervision.

As I said before, I’m updating all my adult blogs making them 2257 compliant as well as applying new SEO techniques.  I just finished this one at Licking Lesbians and will get started in a moment at MILFs Movies, but wanted to take a break and fire off a couple of posts to other blogs.  I mentioned before how these updates are mind numbing especially the repetitive actions required to delete each old post - and when you’re deleting hundreds of old posts per blog it can get quite dull.

For this reason, I’ve decided to break up the chore with updating my adult and non-adult blogs at blogger and blogspot between the adult blogs I’m currently updating at thumblogger.  Yup, you read that right, I have adult blogs at blogger.  You’ll hear a lot of people say to not post adult content to blogger and they’re absolutely right.  Confused yet?  Let me clarify:  I have blogs at blogger targeted for adult niche traffic, that point to adult content sites, but do not have actual adult content to get them flagged as adult.  If they do happen to get flagged, blogger will put up a warning page to the blog - which is bad from an SEO stand point but at least all your posts aren’t lost. Take a look at these and see what I mean:

Web Cam Girls - Nothing special, just another web cam blog.  I had this set up on auto-pilot to get posted to from adultcams (a pseudo-free cam site - it’s free with membership to the TopBucks network of sites) but decided I would be better served posting recent screen captures from Streamate - a truly free cam site.  These are quick posts, the top pic is the most recent screen capture from the girls feed, the bottom is from her photo album, and in between is some of her bio stuff that I run through a re-writer.

Adult Movie Stars - I start with pornstars at PornstarDollars and pull info from various sources, do a little rewording and link the movie titles to their corresponding pages on various adult DVD sites like Vixeo, VideosZ, AEBN, and Porn.

Erotiq Comix - This one I just started a couple of days ago.  Basically I’m pushing Amazon and AdSense at the Hentai, Manga, Anime, and adult comics crowd.  The posts are to adult comics and graphic novels sold on Amazon, but I imagine I’ll make more from the AdSense ads once I start getting some targeted ads.

I’ve got a few more that I want to make, but that’s it for what I actually have right now at blogger and blogspot.  You’ll notice that there isn’t any truly adult content on those sites - maybe a few bare breasts but nothing overtly sexual.  This is intentional, as I’m trying to monetize adult traffic from blogger and blogspot while technically remaining a non-adult blog.

While I’ve been updating all my adult blogs, and removing old posts that aren’t 2257 compliant, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to look into better optimization as I go.  Take a look at this adult blog I’m in the middle of working on now - Jizzy Clips.  It takes me the better part of a day, with lot’s of coffee and smoke breaks, to update each blog.  Here’s what I’m doing:

1.  Removing all non-compliant posts - I think thumblogger is great, but it has the built in safety feature of multiple confirmations and a 10 delete limit per log-in, just in case the blog gets hacked.  By far, deleting posts is taking up the majority of my time.

2.  Rewriting description tags - Shortening to make sure they fit the recommended 255 character limit, and removing unusual characters like apostrophes that might possibly throw off spiders.

3.  Paring down keywords - I used to take the shotgun approach, but since they aren’t as valuable as they once were I’m mostly just using those in my title and byline.

4.  Putting title in h1 tags, tag line in h2 tags, and description in paragraph tags at the top of each adult blog - I want the spiders to find good, hand written descriptive content as soon into crawling my page as possible.

5.  Putting a disclaimer at the foot of the blogs index page - a good place for me to repeat my blogs name a half dozen times and the extra text helps improve the index pages content/code ratio.

6.  Adding a widget box with Google Translate and social bookmarking and RSS readers - this is experimental to see if it generates any repeat visitors.

7.  Deleting non-2257 compliant banners and java scripts in my random box, and adding some text to the ones I’m keeping.

8.  Adding a viewable stats tracker in addition to Google analytics.

9.  Moving niched affiliate links to a separate page along with a description for each one - This page is linked to site wide, but I don’t have all the individual links driving down my link in/out ratio on my index page.  I keep my blogroll and directory reciprocal links on my index page, but they aren’t displayed on the individual pages.

10.  Adding a couple of my own adult blogs in the blogroll - Adult Blog A links to Adult Blogs B and C, Adult Blog B to Adult Blogs C and D, …, Adult Blog Z to Adult Blogs A and B, in one big adult blog ring, so if one adult blog is enjoying some popularity, it’ll lead to a trickle down of traffic and spidering to all.

11.  Renaming boxes to reference the blog title.

As you can see, my main focus (aside from 2257 compliance, of course) is adding more text everywhere I can, and plugging keywords as much as possible in template items (header, rotating banners, box names, and disclaimer) so I won’t have to spend as much time trying to plug them in the individual posts.  Once I’ve done all this my last step is to write a fresh post and submit the new and improved blog to some social bookmarking sites via this tool.  They aren’t quality links, but you do get a lot of free backlinks pointing your way.  I’m already seeing sales coming from my newly reworked adult blogs!

Update:  I removed the link to the tool, as it appears the tool is being used by spammers and the sites it posted to are now near worthless.

I haven’t been posting much recently and here’s why:  2257.  For those of you who don’t know US code 2257 is a federal regulation that requires producers of porn to keep on hand documentation that any performer appearing in their content is of legal age.  You SHOULD see a link to a 2257 statement on any gallery or porn site you visit.  Well, recently the scope of 2257 has been broadened to include any content posted online, including blogs, TGPs, and MGPs.  If you’re pushing adult content, then the law defines you as a secondary producer.  This means that your garden variety adult blogger must obtain the 2257 documents from the affiliates they are promoting if they are posting any sexually explicit images of their content, as well as post their own 2257 statement about who is keeping the documents and where they are being kept.  Note:  this applies to sexually explicit images or images designed to incite a “sexual response” in the viewer. That’s pretty vague.

Well, most adult content producers are resistant to provide their affiliates with that information.  In fact, there has been a lot of talk about how putting that info in the hands of practical strangers will constitute a threat to the performers safety as untold thousands of citizens will have their personal info such as their home addresses.  Even when requesting the doc’s, you’ll be lucky if 1 in 10 of the affiliates you’re promoting will even respond to the inquiry, much less provide the documents requested.  Another option is that if the affiliate program you are promoting has agreed to act as your third-party manager of the documents you can a) post a link to their 2257 statement for each of the images of theirs you use or b) post their 2257 statement once on a page that uses their content exclusively.

Personally, I don’t want the hassle of getting them, keeping them, or having the fed’s come knocking to see them.  So what I’ve been doing is going through my blogs, feedlists, forums, etc and either substituting the hardcore images with softer substitutes, or text links when no softer images are readily available.  Also, this means removing a lot of auto-generated iframe and javascript banners and ads as I have no direct control of what images they show on my sites.  Kind of like the banner image at the top of this page - I’ll have to keep an eye on that and delete these blogs if I see any shift to harder ads. At the moment this is the easiest approach until I’m certain all of my pages are 2257 compliant, at which time I will try to figure out which of my sponsors do indeed act as my third-party manager.

I guess all those adult blog hosts disappearing was a blessing, as those are blogs I have not had to re-edit.  Incidentally, BoardAdult has joined the list of defunct adult blog hosts, as is one other whose name I have already forgotten.

All right, I haven’t done too much with those blogs I told you about last time.  While I was making them, I also decided to make others elsewhere as well.  Remember what I said about putting all your blogging eggs in one basket?  Well, I also made a handful of blogs at AdultBlogPress.  Guess what?  They’re already gone.  I don’t mean the blogs have been removed, I’m saying you can’t access AdultBlogPress any more.  That’s not as bad as another blog host I used that after about six months of regular posting redirected all traffic to their own sponsor page - that was really black hat!  So my suggestion is this:  use alternative blog hosts, but don’t invest too much time in them for about 6 months.  Create one blog with them and work with that in that period.  After that time, if you’re happy with the service and up-time, then by all means expand the blogs you have with them.

What I’ve mostly been pre-occupied with is creating a couple of adult gallery forums:

• The Boob Zone Forum - exclusively for big tit galleries.
• The Porn Dump Forum - niched porn categories.

My way of thinking is that they will give adult webmasters a free place (no recip required) to list or dump their galleries, and surfers will have a place to find a diversity of niched porn galleries to browse.  Everybody’s happy!  What prompted this endeaver was that I regularly posted to a big tit forum, but I noticed that it wasn’t optimized at all, but hey, it was a free place  to post my galleries.  Unfortunately, the guy behind it set it up then walked away.  With zero moderation, once the spammers found it, it pretty much became a worthless place to any self-respecting blogger.  So I looked into creating my own forums - but forums optimized for search engines, and regularly moderated to keep it attractive to posters and surfers alike.

So, with the rest of the day I’m going to make posts to my blogs that I’ve some what ignored recently - kinda like this one.

I’ve been thinking recently about a new blogging strategy to try out.  Basically, the idea is to start a couple of new blogs every day, and start making decent 1-2 paragraph posts to them with entirely hand written content.  OK, nothing new there, but the idea is to build such a massive list of hand written blogs covering a wide range of niches that even when writing new posts for 5-10 of them every day, still they’re each only posted to once a month.

This is in contrast to my current routine of 2-4 line blog posts, and posting to 40-60 every day (and not always handwritten - which needs to be the norm).

So, today I made these Thumblogger blogs:

1. Banging Blondes - Blonde
2. Chubby Fuckers - BBW
3. Naughty Wives - MILF/Swingers

Notice the rotating banners in the left column advertising Free porn to the blogs niche, and the appended titles.

Off to a late start today.  Friday is usually the day I update my Blogtur blogs, and found myself making the same changes to them that I did my Thumblogger blogs.  While in there, I realized they weren’t as optimized as they could be, specifically the blog titles.  For the newbies an important bit of advice:  titles are THE most important part of any webpage. So, in the template I appended the title field to plug a few more keywords, which is especially usefull on the index page which before just had the blog title.  Again, there were links to be added or removed and again I added the CashTraffic banners in prominent spots.

For the newbie or even the experienced webmaster or blogger I whole-heartedly encourage using Thumblogger.  It’s an excellent platform with loads of features built in and great support by the platform team.  But I also take to heart the old adage about putting all of one’s eggs in one basket.  I think it’s a good idea to spread your blogs around to other adult blog free hosts such as Blogtur.

One feature Blogtur offers is a feed aggregator where you plug in RSS addresses, pick which of your blogs you want them to post to, and then whenever you log on you just click a single button and all the new feed items are added to their specified blogs.  Pretty handy to make a lot of posts on multiple blogs with a single click of the mouse.  However, there are drawbacks:

1. ALL items are added, you can’t specify just one blog or one feed without disabling the others first.
2. The categories sometimes have a mind of their own, so even after the items are added you may want to re-specify what category they should be under.
3. These items are verbatim from the RSS feeds - so either you want to edit them afterwards, or use morphing feeds if available.

Another drawback to this platform is that there aren’t widget tools for creating or editing entries, it’s all raw html.  This isn’t a big deal for the experienced blogger/webmaster, but if you’re new to the game you may want to stick with other platforms until you become more adept at reading and writing code.  Also Blogtur doesn’t work well with javascript, but it handles objects just fine - I’m not sure about embedded videos, I’ll check that out and post it as a comment on this entry once I try it.  And finally, there are no widgets or boxes to easily add or remove elements.  If you want to add or subtract something from the layout, you’ve got to do it in the template html - again, not terribly inconvenient for the experienced blogger, but daunting to the newbie.

While Blogtur is best suited for creating doorway pages (splogs, or spam blogs, that offer little to no original content and are used to funnel traffic to one particular site), I found it ideal to use for Adult Site Review Network in order to promote a hosted review site that contained a nofollow, noindex tag.  I’m using their RSS feeds, so I mostly leave the feed content alone and have created a blog whose content IS indexed and IS followed, directing most of the traffic back to them while also providing links to some other sponsor sites.

Allright, enough about all of that, now it’s time to get back to what I said I would do today.

Alright, this is my first post.  So let me start by talking a bit about why I chose to create this blog.  This blog is to serve two primary purposes:

1. As a journal for myself so I can look back at what I did and when (I’m thinking this will prove useful as it generally takes a couple of weeks for any changes to impact the search engines), and
2. As a place for other adult webmasters to learn from my successes and mistakes.   And to a lesser degree
3. A place to find tips, tricks, and advice to the newbie looking to get started.

Alright, so on to what I did today to warrant the name for the post.  Recently thumblogger got hacked and everything from the past six months disappeared.  Bummer because it was all changes that had been made to the blogs and not just the posts and I had invested some serious hours in all the blogs I have there in that time.  So I went in got to work and made them even better than before.  Well, wouldn’t you know when everything gor straightened out, my OLD changes were back and my NEW changes were undone.  So, I’m at it again.

Yesterday I started by removing some old links that seem to me to be kinda scammy by the sponsors.  By this I mean that your affiliate code is in the link, fine, but not in the links from that page.  Meaning so long as someone follows the link from your page, you’ll get credit for the sale, but your affiliate code will NOT be attached to any of the other pages for the spiders to find and index.  I just don’t have the traffic to justify that type of linking scheme.  For me, these sites were mostly VOD sites anyway, and of those I prefer AEBN and Yappo, as your affiliate code is included on every single link!

Well, thumblogger has a great feature that I like to take advantage of, and that’s the random box.  You can place a box anywere on your blog to rotate through up to 20 different bits of html - great for rotating banners, pics of the day, video walls from VideosZ, that sort of thing, and that’s where I spent a lot of those hours I was talking about.  So I found myself overhauling these boxes - and it occurred to me that instead of using this potentially valuable web space to promote sites that would be just as served by a single text link, I would be better served by placing banners to under-optimized for SEO sites that pay $25-$40 for every signup to their ‘free to join’ sites.  Namely being CashTraffic, CECash and WEGCash.  Ordinarily, I think banners have little effect but to add some visual interest to a page that might possibly one day get clicked.  But when placing a niche flash banner on a niche site with words like ‘Free to Join’ or ‘Free Lifetime Access’ while also using title fields to hover that ‘Free’ emphasis, I think I should see a lot of conversions.  An example of these banners in action on a thumblogger page can be seen at my Free Porn Passes blog.

Tomorrow, I plan to finish filling out those random boxes, adding deep links to my niche Vixeo and AdultBouncer sites wherever I have remaining slots, followed by working on the layout of my custom Adultbouncer site, Daily Porn Movies.