Trends in Adult Business - Experimental Learning
When I started this blog, I had in mind to make it educational and much more interactive that any other SEO website. Instead of writing tutorials no one was reading and quoting some outdated ones, I’d like to start a series of experiments to find out what’s working today and what’s not.
Since I’ve been in online business since the end of 1999, I feel qualified to call myself an old school webmaster. However, I was flat broke due to some bad circumstances (a death in the family, ending a long term relationship, quitting the university, getting fired from my job, etc.), and my personal online business was failing. I had to come up quick with an idea to make for living by doing something else.
I didn’t want to do anything I need to learn from the ground up, so I returned to online business. However, I had to make a small adjustment. Instead of mainstream I made the transition to adult business. That was back in 2005 and yes, I did celebrate 3 years of being an adult webmaster in June this year.
Let me tell you a short story about my previous life. Let’s go back to 2005 for a moment.
Due to my previous experience, it took me only six months to build a stable income. I had an idea in mind, a premise which was my guide: I had to take the first steps in adult biz with only $100 of investments, all the spare cash I had.
I bought a new domain, opened Moneybookers and Epassporte accounts, funded them with money from the first job I took (which was building a small 10 page free site, cropping thumbs and interlinking pages).
I was thinking about building a TGP on my new domain, but built a fake TGP instead. What was the difference? This fake TGP was a simple static website with a simple template; two 5×5 tables full of thumbnails surrounded with couple of banners.
This site earned me around $1,000 in less than six months. Getting partner accounts for TGP/MGPs was the best lession I learned. It was pointless to buy an account for $200/month, to submit up to two galleries per day and to hope to get listed and to make some sales. To be honest, for the two months of submitting, I only made 5 sales and $175 PPS out of this.
Anyway, I learned two very important things:
- How to crop thumbnails.
- TGP/MGP model was outdated.
Someone might have given up at this point, but for me, this was very positive feedback. In the first three months I learned that the model was not productive. Instead I decided to use my mainstream experience. I forgot the whole TGP model and started building a website that will get it’s traffic from the search engines only.
It was a revelation. A month or two later I started getting traffic from the search engines (especially from Yahoo) and sales began to flow. At that point I had enough money to start a new website. Let’s stop for a minute. I need to remind you of the Internet history at this point.
Did I mentioned the old school somewhere above? Where’s the border between the old and the new school? Which moment denotes the end of the old school? If you guessed anything related with tube sites and social networks you are completely correct. It was the rise of Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 mania started with blogging, where anyone could make a site grow and get readers. However, not everyone was successful. Why is that? They had no knowledge of marketing and promoting their own websites.
What was the point of my story? I was very lucky to enter the business at the moment of revolutionary change. This caused me to skip the process of building TGPs and submitting galleries. Instead, I focused on one thing: blogging! And you know what? It became my main source of income.
That’s why I’m going to share my experience of the previous 3 years with you. I’d like to start a little SEO experiment: a series of real life trial and error articles. With your help, I’m going to start an adult oriented blog that we are going to build together from the ground up. Then we are going to track it’s statistics, traffic and income, and find out what’s working and what not.
All I need is for you to answer to this simple question: what niche to choose and why? The deadline for your suggestions is August 25th.
If you are interested in Adult Blogging or SEO in general, I strongly encourage you to sign up to this blog and add your comments and suggestions.
Let the games begin!
