Quote:
Originally Posted by Vjo
Fabien, all you say is true. Ratios are higher. Simple as that. At the end of the day, for you and me, the secret is finding sponsors that sell at a profit.
And yeah there are not very f'n many left.
But, there are some.
This biz for an affil is trying 10 things to find three that work. Not a cheap game anymore.
Traffic is priced right along the break even point for most affils so it is very tough.
Hold on tight to your winners and shake the loosers (with respect, they were once great payers) and keep on moving on.
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Im a sponsor, and Im wondering if what I offer is something that 'sells at a profit.' Since I am more focused on building a long-term brand for David's work, and in less than 15 months the site currently pays for itself plus a little production buffer, even in this shitty time, I dont see any real way we can ever go out of business. David will keep producing and coming up with new art-nude ideas for our soft-based site, and I will keep promoting it...pretty much resulting in nothing less than continuous growth.
What we have had to do in the last 4 months is move into brand new selling arenas. That is proving to be the answer for our soft-core. Web subscription sales are now only a part of the puzzle.
For example, David put together a few new print books here :
http://stores.lulu.com/davidnudes
And we have put out ultra soft-core dvds into the retail market in various mainstream stores. Those are now beating our web sales 10:1, but the profit margin on retail is not the same as a web subscription. But the dumber consumer that is buying our retail stuff is then pushed to go try the site, which has 300% more content for the same price. Thats our new model for soft-core. I dont think this model will help hard-core though, as you cant really cross over into mainstream with pee pee
What Im trying to figure out now is how to get the affiliate community involved on our retail side. That would entail getting proper affiliates to be willing to sign up to a new program that pays out on our eStore products under a central roof. CCBill is what we currently use and most affiliates trust, but their payment processing system is not suited for shopping cart and shipping experiences that the average customer is now used to from regular eCommerce sites.
If Google had an affiliate system to plug into their Google Checkout shopping system, then I bet a lot of affiliates would trust that system and try to use it.
But, to sum up this loooong post, our strategy is to squeeze every creative inch of our little brains ever day, trying to come up with more and more outlets for David's original content. That, I think, is the answer to next-gen soft-core. For every flavor out there though, I 100% believe all our problems would be solved if we ditched all the free content, retire all TGP sites (Those that refuse could be shut out by never getting good free content from sponsors anymore), and for marketers and affiliates to invent a few new ways to promote our products for sale.