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!

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.