i generally do much better than 25% conversion on exclusive content sites.
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i generally do much better than 25% conversion on exclusive content sites.
Hello,
I'm the owner of the "Workin' Men Movies" site, and I am sick of giving away the goodies. Being new to this whole scene, I thought the trial was a given, something you always offered to the dear, deserving customer. I see now that it is a sign of uncertainty and a lack of confidence in one's product, and it is a way for vultures and scavengers to rape you of your work.
I've been producing this product of almost 20 years. It is not my main livelyhood - its gravy. But it has been, and continues to be, VERY good gravy, and I have a loyal and every-growing group of fans - and they are the ONLY people I care about. The sale of my videos and DVD's has greatly escalated since the introduction of the "Movies" site, and I will continue to push that site over the "Movies" site.
Your suggestions were eye-opening and well-founded, and I have decided to eliminate the Trial option. If they want my product, they can pay for it. If they don't - fine - but I won't kiss their asses any more.
Workin' Men Movies is in the House.
Woof! Woof!
Cheeks, I'm so glad that you're taking all of this in the spirit it was intended. xstr8guy, basschick, and I begged you to launch an affiliate program because we loved your product and we all knew we had hoards of visitors who would buy it.
I look forward to being able to sell lots of $30 memberships for you.
Cheers
Dzinerbear
Seent he workin men a few times thru submissions to Just Us Boys and Billy's Links. very nice. probably one of the few I'd spend money on if I was looking for porn
Just make sure you have your password protection
We'll be awaiting the removal of the trial from your join page and then we'll send some traffic your way. I think you have a site that is going to do really well with our users.
Thanks Cheeks! That is wonderful news!
yay! please post when the trial is removed :-)
The trial has left the building. :)
http://www.workinmenmovies.com/main.html
:thumbsup:
:juggle: :juggle: :juggle: :juggle: :juggle:
It seems like this thread already had its happy ending, but i want to throw in a few points from the sponsors side that are always missed by affiliates ... as with many areas, the lack of affiliate/sponsor understanding of each others business model is what causes so many problems in this industry.
while in this thread, everyone seems to be anti-trials, there are webmasters who can push 100 trials a day who would say exactly the opposite of everything mentioned in this thread ... a sponsor program has to balance a fine line between conversions and retention, webmasters earnings and sponsors earnings etc
when we launched the celeb sites, we did a lot of experimenting with trials and no trials, and in the end I gave up and left it at the place it converted best - because at the end of the day, MOST webmasters are more concerned with conversions than their bottom line. We had about 20% retention to start with, redid our members area and made it really 'full' looking and our retention went to 50% - no matter what we have done since we can't get it past 50%.
I know its stupid, its confused me for ages why this is the case, but how often do you hear someone saying 'wow man this site made me 5c per click' as opposed to 'wow man this site converts at 1/50' ?
The most joins I saw posted by an affiliate in this thread is less than 1 per day ... with industry average sites & pricing this equates to about $2 profit for the sponsor program per day, $14 per week, $56 per month, or $728 per year. As an affiliate, how much work would you do on *anything* that would make you $728 per year?
I'm not trying to devalue the work affiliates do, so please don't think this is mean as a 'fuck you if you dont make me any money' ... i'm trying to point out the realistic future of this business. How many brick and mortar companies allow 1000's of resellers to promote their product, with so few rules and no sales minimums etc? I'll tell you 1 ... amway ;-)
Something we all need to remember is that trials were invented not for the purpose of giving a surfer a trial of our website with the hope of them staying a member - they were designed back in the days when surfers forgot to cancel, and the 'oops i forgot' factor accounted for at least half of all rebills - maybe closer to 80% in the straight smut market.
Now that the element of 'oops i forgot' is no longer there, we are counting on our sites content being enough to keep someone a member when that person probably has joined several trials at once and cancelled before even starting to surf.
While the gay and womens markets have always been *better* for retention than the straight market, usually because the quality is higher and the sites have a personal touch, but how many gay programs are pulling 500 joins a day on a bad day?
There's 2 business models ... volume or quality ...
I can't think of anyone who is doing both well ...
1 more quick point ... we ask members for cancelation reasons when they cancel
i'll compile them into a format that i can post some day, but just to give you an indication of what surfers think $30 entitles them to
"Your site sucks, I couldn't save any of the pics"
"Its not my credit card"
"can you tell me _insert celeb name_ 's phone number?"
and here we are trying to figure out how to make these people stay members?! :wacko:
cj. - my paysite experiences are way different from yours.
we recently sent emails to all the cancelled members on a program i work with. the responses that we got from multiple people included:
i can't afford the monthly price
your site doesn't have enough updates
your site doesn't have enough content
i can't see the videos
i didn't like the site
those all seem like good reasons to cancel a membership. we didn't get one weird email back, actually. maybe there are more of the odd responses with celeb, i wouldn't know.
and i'll tell ya what - i've seen sites that don't update and at least 95% of the members quit.
i also promote several sites that have 50% or better conversion from trial to monthly. that makes trials very useful - especially if you buy search engine traffic and use a price in yout listing. you will get around three to four times the signups using a trial price in the ad as a full month price, so you definitely make more money that way.
A couple of things.Quote:
Originally posted by cj.
The most joins I saw posted by an affiliate in this thread is less than 1 per day ... with industry average sites & pricing this equates to about $2 profit for the sponsor program per day, $14 per week, $56 per month, or $728 per year. As an affiliate, how much work would you do on *anything* that would make you $728 per year?
(1) Workin Men Movies only started their affiliate program about the first week of December, so whatever stats you're reading about are new. And I can't speak for the others, but I've been busier than hell, so about all I've been able to do for the site is put up a few banners. I haven't really been able to do anything about pushing traffic.
(2) I think there's a big difference in volume between the programs you're talking about and the ones that we're discussing here. Workin Men Movies is a sub-niche of a niche within a market. It's redneck and working guys who fit within the hairy men/bear niche who fall within the gay market. That's already whittling down the interested surfer numbers.
(3) I think straight and gay traffic wants and buys different things. I cannot sell those mega-conglomerate program sites to save my life. My traffic isn't into that templated, Las Vegas crazy strip like design, "we'll give you millions of pics" kind of thing. But I can sell very targeted, nicely designed sites, within a particular niche. And if I have 20 of those that are all selling one membership a day, that changes your perspective, doesn't it?
(4) Clearly, in the case of Workin Men Movies, the trial wasn't working for anyone's benefit except the surfers. It had to go.
Cheers
Dzinerbear
D-bear, you beat me to it! But I wasn't going to be as diplomatic as you were, lol.
CJ, it would be impossible for a single webmaster to push 100 trials to Workin Men Movies in one day. In the big picture of the gay website market, WMM will never be a big time program. This is a labor of love for Cheeks and potentially for his affiliates.
As wonderful and unique as this content is, it will never appeal to anything but a minor percentage of the gay market. But for those of us (me, d-bear, basschick) that are HUNGRY for sponsors like this, WMM is a godsend!
We have tried to send our precious traffic to big-time sponsor programs. But have discovered that we were insulting those surfers with generic tours and templated members areas with inappropriate content. When we find a sponsor site we like, we love and protect it and do everything possible to make it a success.