Affiliate Myth #1 - I sell porn.
 

Nope, as an affiliate you do not sell porn, you sell traffic, surfers are not your customers, they are your ?product? your business is not based on creating surfer experience, giving the surfer what he wants, or any other happy horseshit revolving around keeping surfers happy.


Your business should be 100% focused on moving as much traffic as you can to where it will make you the most money, anything else is a waste of time and effort.

:2 cents:

ya....keep going....

My stats show something quite different to this :2 cents:

If I make an effort to get into the surfer's mind, I can roll the conversion ratios right back to 2004

Who gives a fuck. I sell porn.

When your stats cover a couple billion unique, and the 17 million sales I have analyzed I will believe yours over mine.

Only is you have your own paysites

Traffic Myth #1

Your business is not "traffic" and "volume" is not better. Your business is marketing. You are trying to put in front of each visitor, exactly what he/she is looking for, using very clean, well laid out, very clear and very consistent marketing effort that provide perfect clarity, consistency and continuity in the message/marketing/graphics/copy/layout/design from the surfers origin all the way through to the join page or landing page of the sponsor.

More traffic is not better.

More traffic is not necessarily more money. A lot of traffic can be zero money.

Continually learning to understand and convert traffic better is the understanding of good marketing and is ALWAYS more money and you will start to learn over time that the lessons learned apply to anything you sell either online or offline.

1 years worth of my stats show clear differences, they are statistically significant results i.e. unlikely to have occurred by chance

This has absolutely nothing to do with what I said, in fact most of it sits hand in hand. No where did I say more traffic equals more money. I said

"As an affiliate your job is to push traffic, as much as possible, to where it makes you the MOST MONEY"

"traffic" can make zero money.
"traffic" can make a lot of money.

More is not better.

Again, you bring up "as much as possible", not "understanding marketing, conversions etc as much as possible and maximizing conversions".

Typically more is worse and in cases of PPC or paid traffic as an example of "more traffic"... it will make someone bankrupt before they can even begin to figure out how to convert it.

Again, I never said more was better. I said send as much AS YOU CAN to where it makes you the most money.

This is true; we have to be smart and creative in finding ways of increasing the conversion ratio

Shit, this thread needs Paul Markham

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh :1orglaugh

What is the point of getting as much traffic as you can if you have no clue how to make money from it?

How many tgps are getting 100K a day right now and converting at 1:50,000

How many ppc campaigns are running right now getting 1000 hits a day and converting at 1:10?


Saying "as much traffic as you can" is like saying "to catch a fish, you need the biggest body of water possible" without understanding how to catch a fish in the first place.

We are saying the exact same thing. As much is you can WHERE IT MAKES THE MOST MONEY. they are not 2 different things in context of what I said. lots of people that send 500 unique a day make a LOT, lots of people that send 50,000 unique a day make beer money if they are lucky.

Probably a bit over-simplified in the first sentence, and you'll get pulled up on your exact wording (as you have done), but yeah, pretty much what your second sentence says.

Anyway, i'm just playing around. It's nothing against you.

I am just always astounded at how little people in this biz understand about marketing (not you) and how little emphasis there is on great marketing.. when afterall, thats what webmasters are supposed to understand first and foremost. It's not JUST a numbers game, its selling a product... no different than selling a DVD player or fishing poles or anything else.

Intentionally over-simplified to provoke thought and discussion, something too often lost in todays message boards.

"Your business should be 100% focused on moving as much traffic as you can to where it will make you the most money"

Whether it's the 50 super targeted clicks a day from source A, or the less targeted 20k clicks from source D, or the 100k popunder traffic from source F, it doesn't matter.

#1 priority is to move it to where it's going to get you the most $

As an affiliate you have to sell your traffic to the highest bidder - Its the same as most businesses with a product to sell....

That involves sorting your product and selling to the retailer (prog) that best matches what you have to offer.

OldJeff is correct - We do sell traffic, but its not as simple as sending out a random truckload of our product and hoping that the retailer can use it.

We often have to prepare the product for sale......

sweet, good info almost too good to post here. lol

There is only one golden rule in traffic...

"Who sends me the most money"

:)

Hence why we are known as traffic whores. :)

Oh... and Jeff , you KNOW yr right , stop shaking the cages.

Surfers are not my friend , nor are they my customers. They are my customers when and only when they actually buy.

Until then , they are merely my prey ;-))

Yes I've read every post here already. Of all the rage inducing parts of that post this one bugged me the most. I despise sending a surfer off without some happy horseshit revolving around keeping them happy or giving them what they want. Sometimes this means up to the point of coaching them on what to do once there to enjoy the experience.

I promote mostly cams, little difference but it applies to standard sites as well.

This is exactly what i am talking about. More traffic does not equate to more money. The "highest bidder" is pointless if you don't have any real understanding of the user, what they are looking for and how to get them to where they need to be as part of the process.

Both concepts go hand in hand.

The "highest bidder" does not mean "the highest return per click" or "most revenue". It simply means .0X/click. If you can't convert because you have a terrible understanding of your own visitors and terrible understanding of how to get them where they need to be, its irrelevant what anyone is paying per click.

An awesome big tits paysite that converts really well is irrelevant if you are sending the wrong traffic to it with an ad that says "click here to see a midget getting kicked by a donkey". All I am saying is that "traffic" is only 1/2 of the marketing equation.

:thumbsup:


The difference I'm hearing been what the OP suggested and what everyone else is saying is that everyone else thinks that by trying to sell the porn they can influence conversion ratios. Taking it to the extreme to illustrate why it's not the same thing, the "I sell traffic" thinking would be happy to have lots of popups and blind links that send traffic to places. The "I sell porn" way of thinking would build a transition between the source and the destination that presells the customer. Perhaps they'd have galleries of Emily18, LittleLupe, and a couple of other sites in that niche. They would be careful to show enough to hey the surgery interested, but not enough for the surfer to be satiated. "Customers" would arrive at the sponsor nearly ready to buy. On the other hand, "I sell traffic" thinking would be happy to have the "traffic" leave aggravated, so long as there was plenty of traffic being sold.

I suspect that both ways of thinking can be successful. I also suspect that if someone sells traffic to our Strongbox/Throttlebox/Affilate program they won't make a ton of money. On the other hand, if they get on a forum and sell Clonebox, taking about how it saved their ass when someone deleted their database, their conversion rate will be close to 100%.

I'm glad several have chimed in with this side of the argument. I act as if I own part of the program I'm promoting without the overhead. On revshare 35% on cams for instance is actually MORE than the program makes (directly) from your traffic.

How much someone will pay you per click is irrelevant without the other information needed to determine if it's good or not.

Let me bid and tell me if I'm the highest bidder. I'll buy webmaster traffic for a penny per click.
I'll pay $50 per customer for webmasters whom you're already sold on Clonebox.

Am I the highest bidder in either case? If you're selling me traffic, you get a penny. If you're selling them the product, you get $50.

Thank you for posting this OldJeff. While I've thought about this stuff long and hard previously it has been years since I really put some thought into it. I know what I do, and I know what most others do but I haven't been bothered to think past that lately. I feel like a brand new member of the forum again, I had completely forgotten how many have no clue how to sell porn and just do things that let them push traffic all over to see what sticks.

My name is stocktrader23 and I sell porn.

yea. I call my job 'internet marketing'.

There's even more to it than that. If you're selling an ad location per visitor sent one company might bid $0.05 per click and another $3.00 per click. The lowest bidder might be the one that makes you the most money. What if the $3.00 per click buyer wants you to put a link to something that nobody wants to click on.

Hi, can you explain how an affiliate could use the method of a forum into your explanation.
I always think a forum is about surfer experience, gaining traffic rather than direct selling. The selling comes from ads, certain threads etc

How could a forum be used in the marketing you are explaining please?

That gets even more interesting because while the people who don't click don't make you any money from that ad, you still have the user on your site and they can click on something else that makes you money. Interesting.

Here's what it comes down to, I think. Obviously if you're working PPC, you're selling traffic plain and simple. Good happy buying
traffic will keep your buyer happy of course, but you're basically selling traffic.

On the other hand, consider the affiliate approach. You get say 40%. If you bring in customers who buy $1,000, you get paid $400. If you bring in customers who buy $100,000, you get paid $40,000. It doesn't matter a bit how much traffic you send. What matters is how much they buy. If you can do anything that makes them more likely to buy, you should do it.

Yeah you can go really deep down the rabbit hole, I just doubt the guy taking the highest bid per click is thinking that far. :winkwink:

I wouldn't be surprised if he's already working on a 10,000+ word reply right now! :1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Summary: If you had $10,000 per scene content you wouldn't have to pre-sell it, just send traffic and let it convert 10 times better than a $1000 scene.

Paul has some good points but it's not like they haven't been tested before. Why does he assume the company with tens of millions in assets has done less work testing conversions than him with his spreadsheets and made up figures? Any smart program owner has tweaked their stuff to death and is constantly testing new ways to improve. Sure there were a lot of junk ones out there but they were junk from day 1 and were riding the wave of many joins, most are gone or dead at this point so who cares?

Nick always making It sound so poetic :glugglug

Yep, looks like some people are purely focused on traffic as a strategy. I'm not too keen to share my selling methods as then they'll get watered down :2 cents:

Surely that is so elemental that every fucking one who isn't a complete retard will have got that on day one of building their first site? Or maybe I'm under-estimating the number of retards there are around.

It's really amazing when you think about it. So much information out there and people still doing the wrong stuff.

Well... at one point that was a standard banner ad in mainstream (i.e. flash "punch the monkey" banners as an example). The idea was always "send more clicks to the sponsor/advertiser" - of course, everyone eventually learned the hard way that "more" isn't better.

Again, my point was simple. It's not just "traffic" that makes money and "more traffic" certainly doesn't guarantee more money. Traffic is only part of the equation.

to bad that doesn't actually work as an explanation

Huh? Who are you replying to?

If they like to call it selling then let them. In the real world it's sending traffic and hoping for the best.

They can filter and hone it, yet ultimately it's a numbers game. Because they can't deal with them as individuals on a one to one basis and sell to their needs.

Also to sell you have to know about your product, what it does, what it's strong and weak points are. Few here know that about anything but a few niches. I've been in porn 3 decades and only know teens and big tits well. I love Penthouse Glamor, but couldn't sell it.

You only have to look into sites to see how little the owners know about the niche, few really nail their niche. Now is a pornsite owner selling porn or just getting so much traffic someone will buy?

Then how many people rely 100% on what the sponsor gives them? Good luck "selling" with only that. :Oh crap

If a person standing outside a disco giving free tickets for hot cute girls to come in and take a look at the disco is selling. Then so are webmasters.

No selling is a refined skill, that it's clear few here have.

If more traffic = more sales. This industry online would be full of billionaires. :1orglaugh

Before anyone comes in with some more BS let's see proof.

Forget my sites as proof I can sell a paysite membership. The content was shot for offline and know it's not what would sell best online. We couldn't afford to change our game. :thumbsup

I (everyone) knew it was coming but I still can't believe the words on the page. :1orglaugh

This is selling. F. A . B. style

F = Feature.This chocolate has taken years to develop

A = Advantage. To give an instant explosion of taste in the mouth.

B = Benefit. So you can feel the full sensation.

Which all counts for zero if you give them a stick of brown plastic. That's not selling, it's lying and conning.

In online porn adding mere words to a sample of the porn is just that, mere words.

Honing, filtering and refining the traffic. Isn't selling, it's targeting the best audience to sell to. Like trying to sell the greatest tasting filet steak to a bunch of vegans, OK that's extreme. You get what I'm saying.

So ultimately all affiliates can do is to hone, filter and refine. Because when the decision is made to go onto the site and get out a CC. It's not because of the convincing words. It rests on the shoulders of the product. And without closing a sale, you haven't got a sale.

Call it what you like, but it doesn't make a slab of brown plastic a bar of chocolate. :winkwink:

This for most is what they call selling.

http://www.downblouseloving.com/images/template_26.gif

to the original point of the thread?

try using this logic to explain what you do for work to some chick; it doesn't go far

so best buy doesnt sell TV's? they merely sell traffic to Sony, Samsung, etc? I dont think your logic is right :winkwink:

If you don't have the sign up page, you can't be selling. Promoting yes, selling no.

As very few affiliates have a sign up page or even a tour to close the sale, how can they "sell"?

Promote yes.

Main Entry: promote  [pruh-moht]
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: help, advance
Synonyms: advertise, advocate, aid, assist, avail, back, befriend, benefit, bolster, boost, build up*, call attention to, champion, contribute, cooperate, cry*, develop, encourage, endorse, espouse, forward, foster, further, get behind, hype*, improve, nourish, nurture, patronize, plug*, popularize, propagandize, publicize, puff, push, push for, recommend, sell, serve, speak for, speed, sponsor, stimulate, subsidize, succor, support, uphold, urge, work for

Anyone see the word sell in there?

However

Main Entry: sell  [sel]
Part of Speech: verb
Definition: exchange an object for money
Synonyms: advertise, auction, bargain, barter, be in business, boost, clinch the deal, close, close the deal, contract, deal in, dispose, drum, dump, exchange, handle, hawk, hustle, market, merchandise, move, peddle, persuade, pitch, plug, puff, push, put across, put up for sale, retail, retain, snow, soft sell, soft soap, spiel*, stock, sweet talk, trade, traffic, unload, vend, wholesale

Notes: a cell is a small compartment or the basic structural and functional unit of all organisms, while sell means to exchange or deliver for money or its equivalent

Sell as meaning. To sell the idea of taking the next step of the process. In that case affiliates do "sell". Is that what people here meant?