I’m writing this in response to Top 7 Reasons Why Optimizing Porn Sites Is Hard, which is a nice post, but there are a few points I want to disagree with or expand on.
Build Non Nude / Softcore / Celeb Sites to Channel Traffic & Links
If you stick to explicit / hardcore/ XXX, you’re going to have a really hard time marketing your site outside of the adult vertical. An easy way around this is to build sites that sit on the fence. Websites that feature almost nude, bikini girls, models, and celebrities often push the limits but are socially acceptable. These types of sites can link build in way you can’t with a traditional porn site and then be used to link out to your more explicit sites. There are many ways to work in porn and they do not all require work on explicit sites.
Check out, Egotastic. It’s not a “porn” site, but features nudity and is adult themed. It had been very successful in a niche that sits on the fence. Because the women are celebrities and not porn stars, people are much more forgiving.
Social Marketing Is Possible
May people think social marketing is out of the question for porn sites, but this isn’t true. I’ve had a ton of success with StumbleUpon and del.icio.us. I’ll cover this more in depth later, but both can be used to market adult content. SU allows adult content and even has stumblers who use it primarily for porn. And del.icio.us is used by a more “technical” / “tech” crowd, and trust me, they like porn too. I’m not saying they’ll bookmark extremely explicit content, but softer content can find success on del.icio.us. Softer (non nude, almost nude, celeb, bikini) content can also find success on Digg. Usually it’s an article featuring images and not a wall of pics.
Get Creative For Text
Text is one of the hardest things about porn. You can generate a fair bit of text though if you’re creative enough. I suggest having a blurb and description after the pictures in each post. Your visitors won’t mind the paragraph of useless text at the bottom of the page, but the search engines will love it. Offer your reaction to the set and maybe a description of the image content.
I also make effort to make a text-only post periodically. Yeah, you’re visitors might hate it, but it helps a lot. Make a top list or review. Talk about something related to your market. You can talk about women, relationships, sex, movies, pornos, etc. I suggest making a text post and quickly following up with an image post to push the text down on the first page. People coming in will bounce if they instantly see wall of text.
Trick Those Guy Who Force You To Two Way
The Adult industry is plagued by blogs and sites that force you to reciprocal link. A few of these are fine, but it gets shady if you do it with 50 sites. So what is a porn SEO to do?
Well… most of these guys know some SEO but pay absolutely no attention to NOFOLLOW! Seriously, they never check to see if you added a nofollow to the link. Out of a 100 trades, one guy might mention it.
Some might think this is shady, but unless they explicitly ask for a dofollow link, I won’t dofollow. Those 50+ crappy link trades just turned into 1 way links. The adult industry is also very lazy. Give it a month and just take the link down. A lot of them won’t notice, if they do, just apologize and say you didn’t even notice you took it down. Put it back.
(This is different if they’re using a toplist or counter script, in which case, the reciprocal link helps bring in more traffic. More on this later)
Image SEO
I’ll make an entire post about this, but learning effective image SEO is KEY! I get tons of traffic from Google Image Search. This is about not spamming but effectively describing the image with keywords. Alt and title attributes are great, but I’ve seen the most success when I name my images with keywords (not pic1, image002, etc). I will write a whole post on this, but image SEO can help make up for the lack of text.
So?
Yeah, Porn SEO presents a new set of challenges, but many of these challenges can be overcome with a little thought and creativity. The most important thing about porn promotion is to not expect the same things to work that you use to promote your other sites. Many things are the same, but some just require minor adjustments. All of you “content is king” / “write good content” guys are going to laugh your ass off when your post of 50 pictures and 1 sentence is pulling you in 300 visitors a day, while all your Make Money Online buddies are working their ass off writing about how awesome twitter is.
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