Marketing 101 -- Advise Needed

[BoyNation]

Dear fellow webmasters,

Now that we have a well thought out web site with great content, I need to get advise on how to get it marketed.

I'm wondering if other webmasters can reply with what has been successful for them?

-- How does one submit and to which search engines/directories? Is there a centralized list of these?
-- Banner ad campaigns -- are these successful and what ones work better than others?
-- TGPs -- again, where does one submit these and advise on what works and doesn't

I know that these topics can fill a book, but if you have some thoughts you could share -- it would be very much appreciated by me as well as most of the other webmasters on this board (think of it as additional marketing of your site! ;-)

Thanks so much!

BoyNation
:juggle:

[robin]

I've been looking for this site for about an hour now... http://www.gay-empire.net/ It's got a great list of gay link lists, directories, se's and tgps.

I've got a small list of gay tgps: http://www.gaybumlinks.com/tgp/tgp_submission_list.html

Also a small list of gay link lists/directories/se's: http://www.gaybumlinks.com/bumbuddies.html

Link list and directory submission are a little more time consuming to submit to but well worth the effort especially if you get on a good one.

SE's are the easiest to submit to. Just enter your site's URL into the little form and press submit or enter. Having said that, if your site isn't search engine ready then there's no point in submitting to them.

Here's the 2 min. version on *very basic* search engine readyness. Here's a decent next place to go to: http://searchenginewatch.com/

For the most part; these days I don't really submit to the search engines as they find me just fine. I tend to concentrate on getting listed with link lists and directories.

TGP's : Gaystoryman has written an excellent article/tutorial/board post at another board. Ask him for the link or pm me -- I'll find the link again.

[Dzinerbear]

-- How does one submit and to which search engines/directories? Is there a centralized list of these?

Generally speaking, there's no need to submit to search engines, their spiders will find you on their own. Submitting services would have us believe otherwise, but it's not true. Search engines spiders will find you either through the sites that link to you, or by hitting the servers themselves and checking out what's new.

Now, I'm afraid that even though the search engines will find you, getting any kind of a ranking is quite hopeless in the case of asianboynation.com, at least as it's currently constructed.

First, a site's index.html page is the most important page for a search engine and yours contains a bunch of pictures and very little (if any) text. Search engine spiders can only read text, they can't see pictures and they can't read text that is in a jpg or gif. So essentially a spider comes to your homepage and says, "Nothing here," and moves on.

Second, your site's title is meaningless for a search engine. Your title is "asianboynation.com" which is not a word that a SE would recognize, nor is it likely a word that anyone would search for, at least not in the beginning. And a SE can't decifer that your title is actually asian boy nation . com, it just smushes the words all together like you have them and indexes them as one word. Your title should be something like this: Gay Asian Men - asianboynation.com.

Third, your buttons at the bottom of the index page are graphics and the links are incased in javascript. SE's will have problems with both and in all likelihood a SE spider will just leave your homepage thinking that's all there is. Do yourself a favour and put plain text links at the bottom of the page somewhere so the spiders can get into the rest of your site.

Four, your tour page is where you have a hope of getting somewhere with SEs because there is some text. But you have a number of problems you'll need to fix. I know AsianBoyNation is your branding, but do yourself a favour and display it as Asian Boy Nation, at least the SEs will pick up "Asian" and "boy." You have some other good text on there like "AsianBoyNation is different." But again, you've made it graphics and therefore unreadable by SE's.

Now, at this point you're probably tearing your hair out. Here's my advice. You've got a nice looking site, just buy some Google Adwords and get traffic to your site that way. Even if you did the things I suggested your site isn't likely to rank very well because "Asian men" is such a competitive word and you'd need to do way more than what I suggested to get anywhere. (It took me almost two years of slogging away to get good rankings for top keywords in my site's niche.) Search engine optimization is a whole field unto itself and most adult webmasters don't understand it and don't learn it, they're too busy putting up galleries. I've been studying SE's and SEO for four years now and I'm still constantly learning new stuff, but it's been worth it because I get shitloads of traffic from search engines and don't pay a dime for it. I'm only now looking at supplementing my organic traffic with pay-per-click traffic.

Finally, if you decide to go down this SEO path heed this warning: There is no quick way to a number one ranking, if anyone says there is they are a liar. If anyone offers to get you a number one ranking for a fee, run. There are a number of tricks that may work for a time and shoot your site to the top of SE's, but SE's are constantly adjusting their algorithms to compensate for the latest tricks. You'll be number one today and nowhere-to-be found the next, and you could even possibly get your site banned. If you want to learn good and solid SEO techniques, this is a great forum: High Rankings

Good luck
Dzinerbear

[basschick]

i'm not sure what you are asking here. are you asking for a list of tgps? do you have existing galleries ready to post?

[QUOTE=BoyNation]-- TGPs -- again, where does one submit these and advise on what works and doesn'tQUOTE]

[BoyNation]

First.....a very big thank you to Robin and Dzinerbear! The advise you have given is extremely helful (and I know that other webmasters will also benefit from this).

Basschick, to answer your question, I do not yet have a TGP gallery ready to go. I do have Dreamweaver (have never used it though) and have been told that it is not too dificult to create a TGP gallery using tables in Dreamweaver and then using automated software to submit to the various galleries.

A follow-up question:
Many sites that I have been to ask for reciprical links. I am wondering as a subscription web site where would I put those? I don't want to distract potential members from signing up....perhaps I can put them below the fold on the splash page? Or do I only do reciprical links on TGP galleries -- which will in turn drive traffic to my regular web site?

It's a bit overwelming how much there is to do when you have a new site!
:-o

BoyNation

[Dzinerbear]

Most TGPs will require a recip button link on your TGP gallery, not your main website.

Other entities like Hunk Hunter want a link on your site. Some are picky about the placement, others aren't. If any of these demand a link on your index page at the top, I'd tell them to shove it up their hoo-haw and move on.

Don't worry too much about distracting joiners, surfers are so used to seeing a million buttons at the bottom of the page that they rarely catch their eyes.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

[gaystoryman]

Lot of good answers here.

Just to add a few things.

Keywords are important and to check which keywords are being searched I use the OVERTURE KEYWORD TOOL which is really helpful. Also consider taking out a one or 7 day subscription to Keyword Tracker (sorry don't have the URL for it)

That being said, I agree with DZinbear 110% on the index page. Most webmasters ignore its importance totally. They load it with graphics which is nice looking but does nothing to get you ranked.

I look at an index/warning page this way.

1. It is the front door to your business establishment. How many stores on main street do you see that have nothing but WHAT ISN"T ALLOWED? Think about it.. when you go to the latest restuarant they generally have a menu posts, they have their hours of operation and sure they have the 'no shirt, no shoes, no service' stuff but its secondary.. they want you inside, so what they offer is prominently displayed. That is what your index page needs to do, to let them & the SE know you are there.

2. If all you have is a warning, and graphics to other sites, aren't you defeating your whole purpose of being a site? You are telling the surfer, hey we don't want you if, and if you want something these guys, not us, are better cuz gee, that's why we have their banner here. Advertising other sites on the index page (unless it brings shit loads of traffic) are useless.

Also add navigation in text links. Buttons look nice but SE follow text.

Add a 'site map' and 'links' page link in text to your index page. The 'site map' link is for the SE and should be rich in text and list all your pages in the free area.

Use the title tag on each page with a different KEYWORD phrase so that you optimize for different areas, but make sure your page also supports that keyword phrasing and is relevent.

Use an h1 tag in the body to support the title tag. This adds to your keyword relevency

Use a paragraph tag to support the H1 tag further, but don't go overboard either.. one or two sentances can be just as effective.

Name your pages to the keyword they support. Tour1 isn't gonna help you with anchor links but if you have a page called Naked Asian Boys then link to it using the anchor text.. 'see more naked asian boys' it will help. Each page a different name based on a different keyword phrase...

Also don't go overboard.. if a keyword is say asian boy sex... don't have it thrown in all over the page.. make it relevent and fit in with your title tag, h1 tag, sentance/paragraph, and even an h2 tag if you want but don't throw it in a hundred times... that will get you an opposite effect.

Geez, I am long winded today, anyhow hope that helps.

Robin thanks for the comment on the TGP tutorial, if Lee wants I can send it to him for inclusion on GWW.

Good Luck boynation
Ian

[basschick]

boynation, i have never seen one person who made a good gallery that will sell their first few atttempts at gallery-making. why not pay a qualified designer to make one for you? it doesn't cost much - then all you have to do is mirror the gallery, add receips, and go post it.

re link lists - there are very few worth giving a link on a paysite. persiankitty is one, however. why not make free sites that use your paysite as a sponsor and post those to places like link a rama? you can put receips on the free sites on the warning page without worrying about it.

if you want search engine hits, have several good fpa's made - and unlike most fpa's, make them a FULL page. make sure there are places for text. that way, you can have multiple pages pulling in search engine hits for you.

good luck!

[Xstr8guy]

What amazing advice! And you guys/gals are giving this stuff away for free? Thanks!

[zewkin]

Wow, this is some good juicy info.... I'm going to save this page and hide it away just in case it gets taken down for giving away such good information. Thanks Boynation for asking the questions and everyone else who has given great responses.

:groovy: :groovy: :groovy:

Not sure how much it would help, but I would suggest in the warning text on the bottom of the page to include some of the key word phrases. Instead of "Warning, this site contains adult images" change it to "This site contains images of sexy asian guys".

Speaking of warning text, does a search engine spider pick up anything that's in a form's textarea box?

[robin]

I was hoping that Dzinerbear & Gaystoryman would post to this thread. :thumbsup:

[krusher]

boynation, i have never seen one person who made a good gallery that will sell their first few atttempts at gallery-making. why not pay a qualified designer to make one for you? it doesn't cost much - then all you have to do is mirror the gallery, add receips, and go post it.

I always thought a good template would make Tgp submissions easy, but I was under the impression that a template could only be submitted so often to the same tgp. I mean that is what you mean by mirroring the gallery right?

[desslock]

Gaystoryman and Dzinerbear have run through a lot of good points.

In case you missed it: always use text links. Even if you have people clicking on images to navigate, you can have a secondary set of links somewhere else on the page. Adult site designers often lose sight of this, because we tend to present our product from a 100% visual point of view.

Also good rules to keep in mind: The more pages on your website the better. The older your website is the better. The more relevent links from other sites to yours the better.

And additionally, you can get lots of traffic optimizing for the images servers for google and yahoo. In many cases, you can have a tough time getting placed high on www.google.com, but images.google.com is a snap. And when people search for porn, they know to search on Google under "Images" and to deactivate Safe Search.

I have always had a tough time staying on page one of Google for the term Matthew Rush, but I seem to keep a number one placement for the now-versatile Falcon Exclusive on images.google.com - and the man delivers.

Steve