Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Markham
Agreed 100%. in fact 200%. 
The problem is 2 fold. Having enough money to making sure the store has something they want to buy and they are treated well after you have paid to find and keep the 10 people that will hit the streets for you.
At no time will I say you do not have to market a product. What I'm saying is you need to market a bad product twice as much as a good product.
Second point is knowing what the customers want when they arrive. There are some very skilled people running very good affiliate programs. Problem is they don't know as much about the customers needs in todays market. Yes some do.
I was approached recently by a big sponsor to discuss shooting porn that will sell and I feel retain. After giving him the quotes he said he can't afford it. On joins he can, but once 50% of his turnover goes on marketing he can't. So his next site will be bog standard and the same as 100 other sites.
Which leads us back to the problem spunkmister raised. What's the point of policing content when it will not bring the surfer over to buy? If there is little difference between producers ABC blonde teen on a sofa porn and producer XYZ blonde teen on a sofa porn. Then why should the surfer rush over to spend money because ABC polices his content?
If you produce a product no different than 100 other people there's little point in protecting it. The free surfer will not rush over to you if he can get something else similar. |
True enough. If you have junk content that doesn't retain members all the marketing in the world isn't going to help you. But my original point was that competing over customers is not as important as competing over affiliates.
Here is an example. Which would you rather have:
1. An average site with average porn that has a good group of affiliates sending traffic. You make a profit of 20K per month. Your site converts pretty well and has average or slightly below average retention, but you make up for lower retention in volume. In a year you put 240K in your pocket. You continue to get affiliates and work on growing those numbers.
or
2. You focus on creating top notch, stunning content that blows people doors off. You don't worry about competing over affiliates, instead you market the site yourself. But you are just one person (or a small company of a couple of people) so after all the time you spend making the site amazing you don't have as much time to market it. You end up getting great signup ratios and above average retention and make 5K a month profit and put 60K in your pocket over a year. Your site is 10 times better than the other site, but you don't have the marketing team to get it out to the masses so you can't attract the traffic to really make it fly.
In a perfect world you would have both. Great content and great marketing, but that is not something easy to do. There are some programs that seem to pull that off, but it takes some big money and serious effort to put all that together. Porn isn't field of dreams. If you build it, they won't just come. You need get people out there and let them know it is there and that they need to see it. Two people can compete over customers and whoever has the better product will often win. But if one person is working alone and the other has a group working for him, the guy with the group will almost always win even if he doesn't have the best product.