Words Work..

In addition to building our sites and placing banners, buttons and a whle other range of ads on them, the one type of marketing tool that is so often neglected is text. We either dont have the time to write something about the sites we're promoting or, we dont know how to use it effectively. Hopefully after reading through the rest of this post both of those reasons will no longer be an issue for you. So, what are some of the advantages of using more text on our sites? Lets take a look:

1. Costs.

Text doesnt cost you as much in bandwidth as buttons, banners and picture do. This is especially true if you post to TGP's make your text stand out on your galleries and, as long as it does, it will pull clicks.

2. Loads Quickly.

Surfers (and some webmasters) are lazy, they dont like to wait for your sites to load up, text gives you the opportunity to have your marketing material for your sponsors paysites in front of the surfer within seconds, dont make the surfer wait for those banners at the top of your pages to load, by the time they have done, the surfer will have already scrolled down the page.

3. Creativity rules.

With text, you can say anything you want to the surfer, there are really no limits, there is only so much that you can possibly fit on a 468x80 banner that is going to sell the surfer to your sponsors site, use text instead, you have much more control over what sells the surfer.

4. Interaction.

No matter what type of marketing you are doing, interacting with the customer is a must. Online, there really isnt any other way of immediately drawing interest from your surfers, make sure you grab their attention, make the keywords in your text BOLD and uppercase, italicize some of the wording to make it stand out more. Tell a joke, tell a story, just get the surfer interested in the site you are selling.

Now you know some of the reasins to use text, lets take a look at some of the ways you can make your text have a real impact on the surfer:

1) Use bright or bold colors.

Make them stand out, use deep shades, bright shades, bold typefaces, make your hyperlinks stand out from the rest of the text by giving it a different color.

2. Choose 'easy' fonts.

Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, use fonts that are easy on the eyes and, more importantly, fonts that come as standard with most makes of computer. Using a font that looks like it was written with a quill might look 'nice' but, if the surfer cant read it, its not going to do anything for you.

3. Size is important.

Size matters, you want your text to stand out yet, at the same time, you dont want it to distract from the rest of the page. A size of around 10-18 point is probably going to be the 'optimal' text size for regular page text, go bigger and bolder than that on headings and hyperlinks if you must.

4. No pain, lots of gain.

Whatever you do, make sure that your chosen colors complement each other, dont use bright lime green text on a baby blue background, this should be common sense to many but still, on a weekly basis i see sites that do use some of the most god-awfull color schemes known to man, yellow text on a white background for another example :eek:

5. Make good use of ALT tags.

In addition to putting text on the page, use your image alt tags, thats what they are there for, if you have a pic of a hot guy blowing some other hot guy, use your alt tags and tell the surfer about it and, tell them where they can find more pics like the one they are looking at! Using your alt tags also gives the surfer something to 'read' while they are waiting for the images to load, especially if they are on a slow connection, remember, not everyone has broadband.

6. Compare.

So your sponsors site has over 50,000 high resolution images, so does the next 100+ sites the surfer is going to see in the course of the next 12 hours, what is going to make your sales pitch 'special'? Compare the site to other things that the porn surfer may be interested in or, know about, a simple, 'Get Instant Access For $2.95 - Way Cheaper Than A Big Mac Meal' or 'What can you by for $2.95? Hmm, how about a McMuffin, A Starbucks Espresso or, 3 whole days of NON STOP hardcore XXX ACTION!' text link might be all it takes to make the surfer click through to your sponsors site, likewise, if selling a VOD site, tell the surfer that joining the site is going to be 'cheaper than buying the latest Falcon DVD' because, you know what, it will be!

7. Get emotional.

If you cant get the surfer interested in the site or product you are seling, you are wasting your time. Think about what is going to get and keep the surfers attention, why do new channels always show doom and destruction at the top of the hour? Simple, it grabs peoples attention, you need to do the same when using text to sell your sponsors paysites.

8. Sell the sites features and benefits.

I really cant say this enough, you are a surfer on a free site with a max of say 50 pics, some galleries, small 10-20 second movie clips and, perhaps, if you are lucky, a story or two. Would you rather stay on the site you are currently on or, go to a site where you can 'watch live streaming feeds with audio where you actually get to hear the guys cumming in real time'? Let the surfer know, if they are looking for cheap, blurry content, to keep freeloading but, if they want the good stuff, they have to join paysite.com right now.

Hopefully, this will have given a few of you some ideas about how you can implement more text in to your existing sites.

But, remember, text is just a part of the marketing plan, you need to have a good product to sell to the surfer first otherwise, its going to be like selling ice to an eskimo, this is also one of the reasons why 'free' sites really shouldnt use the 'quality' content because, lets face it, if you are giving the good stuff away for free, why would the surfer NEED to buy a membership?

Regards,

Lee