What Is The Best Marketing Tool Your Sponsors Offer You?

[Lee]

So ive been checking a bunch of surfer orientated sites for the last 30 minutes and, i have to say, im really astounded at just how much pure crap is out there. The worst thing though, is that webmasters actually spent the time to build these sites, upload them and, thought they would be making money LOL

Ill give you an example, one site i went to was, i presume, trying to target surfers in to jocks, the content was all jocks, the marketing text on the site was telling the surfers that the site that was being advertised had the usual 'thousands of jock pics and movies' but, low and behold, the site they were being sent was a generic looking gay site from one of the larger affiliate programs.

Now, think about this, if the webmaster who had quite obviously spent a fair amount of time on building this site, resizing and compressing the content and, writing some pretty hot marketing text had actually bother to take the sponsors tour thy were promoting, they would have realized that all that work they did was wasted for that site because the paysite tour had nothing to do with jocks mentioned on it, no pics, no text, literally nothing, all generic crap.

IMHO, one of the BEST promo tools any sponsor gives affiliates are their paysite tour pages but, more often than not, as webmasters we totally overlook them as a research tool.

In essence, before you start building your sites, take a look at the paysite you are going to promoting, take the tour and READ what the tour says is inside the site, you are going to have a much better chance of selling a surfer a membership if you take the tour and match your sites marketing to the text and pics on the paysites tour.

As with yesterdays thread, it sounds like common sense to many of us yet, when it comes down to it, i bet more people DONT take their sponsors tours than do.

Oh incidently, when i say take the tour, i mean ALL the way through to the join page, if you are telling your surfers that a membership to site.com only costs $29.95 and the join page has a $69.95 membership selected automatically they aint going to be to happy, remember, you dont get a second chance to make a first impression

Just a bit of advice, do with it what you will

Regards,

Lee

[Bec]

You're right on the money here Lee. It's important to study a tour, what it sells and how it sells it. Ad medium should reflect that so there's a consistency from when a surfer hits a banner or text link on a promo to the actual paysite.

Along the same line of thinking about those tours being important, is for programs to offer more than one tour if the content they contain justifies having specific types of niche tours. At the very least, if the site has a decent amount of video and photo content, offer a general tour as well as a tour that pushes the video aspect. That way the webmasters listing the MPG galleries (either ones they host or an FHG) can link to a movie oriented tour, and vice versa.

[Jasun]

Maybe it's kinda smarmy of me to do, but I have taken to seeing sites and galleries like that that promote the TOTALLY wrong sites, and I email the designer and tell them they should be promoting us instead.

Funny thing is that amny of them switch over and tell us that they convert better not only when they have "Jock" or "Hunk" sites but even with non-realted things like "Twinks".

[Becky]

I agree. In the mainstream world of advertising, the ads (which are or at least should be what wms are building) are based on the product. How do you expect to sell the product if you don't know anything about it? It really is backwards when a wms builds a page and then goes looking for a sponsor to send the clicks to.

[Paco]

The best marketing tool, for our traffic, is a hardcore video tour (downloads preferred over streams)! The only other thing that came close in numbers was $0.00 or free subscriptions.

The worst is softcore banners - they do not perform, at all (again, for our traffic), followed by single page tours and phony demo offerings, which lead to the join page.