March 2004: Use Content
A State of the Industry Opinion from Rick Latona, President and CEO of CJ Bucks, Dollars.com and Consumption Junction
Use content to acquire and retain traffic on your site. It has been said that "Content is King." I agree - content is king, but traffic is GOD, and even the king must serve a higher authority. As an operator of an adult paysite, you can utilize your content in many ways to acquire new traffic, and more importantly, keep the users coming back.
If you aren't using processing tricks to get people to join your site, it's important to actually sell them on what they'll get inside. For instance, paysite owners who rely on mailers, adware, and other aggressive techniques usually need to offer free trials to achieve great conversion ratios. Gallery makers rely on great pictures and video clips to get people to join your site.
Gallery makers also don't ask for traffic back. To prove the value of this point, we are going to have a math lesson. Let's first look at the facts.
- If your site converts at an average of 1 in 400, then 399 visitors don't convert for each sale you consummate. It's important you don't fool yourself by reading your own stats here. I'm not talking about second page uniques or first-page raws, but real first-page uniques. First page uniques are the amount of people who are actually coming to your site.
- Paysites like mine at www.cjbucks.com pay out $30 on $1 trials that, more often than we'd like to admit, don't even re-bill to the full monthly fee.
- You can usually pick up between one and three joins on your exit consoles for every 15 conversions you get yourself.
- Most pay-per-sign-up sponsors rely on revenue from outbound traffic to help finance the payouts to their own webmasters.
- You should be able to trade joins on your exit consoles. For instance, if you send cjbucks.com four joins a day, I'd be happy to send you four back each day.
What does all this mean? Traffic from webmasters who don't ask for reciprocal joins back to their program is more valuable than other traffic because you'll have a better trading position on your outbound traffic.
And (surprise!), to get this valuable traffic from gallery makers, you need to have new content added to your program weekly, even daily, with which gallery makers can download and build galleries. In addition, you should consistently make your hosted galleries available to your webmasters.
Leasing feeds is also a bad business model. If you spend $4,000.00 per month on leased feeds, you'll finish the year with $4,000.00 worth of content expenses in December. If you spend the same $4,000.00 per month on content, you'll finish the year with $48,000.00 worth of content assets! This is a no-brainer strategy that many people in the industry overlook. By shooting custom content, or even buying the rights to inexpensive content, you're building an asset base that can generate revenues long after the site has become stale.
Then, of course, you should consider the issue of presentation when leasing feeds. Would you personally, want to log into a members' area only to see a long list of links, which all open in different windows and none look the same? Many feeds even use different methods for playing the video! The whole thing is sloppy. The surfer experience is cumbersome and your site will lack cohesiveness.
If you own your own content, you can arrange it in a standardized form of navigation. Your members will be able to quickly navigate to the episode that gets them off, watch it and be on their merry ways...
These are all reasons why we've cancelled all of our leased feeds, and we've started to aggressively purchase content from nearly every company selling it. Our entire members' area has been revamped using the MAS content management software from Mansion Productions to arrange all pictures and videos in a way that makes sense to the user. We have constant updates, and each piece of content gets rated so new visitors can find what other visitors have enjoyed the most.
We've also taken screen captures, pictures and ten second video clips from every content episode that we've purchased, and made them available to gallery makers to download from the CJBUCKS.COM site and use to send traffic.
We are in the entertainment business - let's not forget it. Ultimately, yes, we should do everything we can to get traffic to the site, but good content, used effectively, will not only bring new visitors to your site, but also keep them returning and spending money. And, by owning the content, though it may be slightly more expensive, you'll make money using it for years to come.
It's good to be the King.
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