2. Do It Their Way
Payment Options:
For years you have been hearing that not every customer wants to pay by credit card. Some merchants have resisted offering alternative payment options. Speaking strictly from the perspective of consumer confidence, having powerfully branded payment services from a variety of processors available can increase the level of trust that a potential customer has in your site overall. If you walked up to a store that had a big cardboard sign on the door written in magic marker saying 'CASH ONLY' your point of view about the store would be affected. If your potential customer sees that your join page offers payment by Credit Card, Check, SMS, Phone and other methods... the implication is that your site has been approved by many billing entities and that they have each done some due diligence research into your website already. Anonymous payment options like
www.TrustCash.com and
www.netcash.com also give consumers the perception that their identity information is entirely safe because not even the merchant has access to it during a transaction.
Translation:
Many of your potential customers speak English as a secondary language. That means the text on your site should either be written in a way that is easy for someone to understand without a formal English education, or translated into a variety of languages to suit your traffic, or both. Obviously you won't have 100 languages available, but if you look at your traffic stats and notice you are getting a fair amount of visibility in a country that speaks Spanish... providing a Spanish version of the tour is a simple way to make each of those potential customers feel more confident that the owner of the site they are viewing has their interests in mind.
www.translationsxxx.com handles more than 30 languages and they are well versed in all of the industry specific language necessary to create a coherent sales pitch in a variety of languages.
3. Certifications:
For decades consumers have relied on trusted sources of information to do their research and testing for them. Newspaper reviews of new movies, Zagats reviews of restaurants and Consumer Reports ratings of products have earned the trust of the mass consumer market and are able to boost consumer confidence for merchants, products and services in their listings. The same is true, and even more powerful, online because on the internet people are routinely buying products from merchants they have never heard of before, or merchants that are not local to their area.
Trust Seals:
Certification seals are also something you have surely seen offline for decades. Government stamps of approval on food products, hotel chain certification awards, and even things like the Oscars or Grammy awards are essentially designed to generate consumer confidence in a product or service based on an inspection of it by experts in advance.
For websites there are seals designed to demonstrate that a site is free of viruses and malware, properly encrypted and safe from third party hackers. Versign, McAfeeSecure and others offer those kinds of services. They come with monitoring and scanning as well as a simple seal that shows the site is safe from third party scammers.
WebsiteSecure.org approaches the consumer in a different way. Checking to see if the site itself and the people managing it are doing so ethically from the consumer point of view. Doing test joins and cancels, reading the terms and privacy pages, checking join forms and taking other steps to make sure that the consumer will in fact get what they are promised and be charged no more than they have been told to expect.
A decade of wild west days and the recent rash of aggressive billing tactics used by some have severely damaged the reputation of all online businesses. Now, rather than being trusted and given the benefit of the doubt by consumers, in many cases a potential customer requires that the merchant prove they are ethical at the point of sale before they will even consider signing up. Having a
www.WebsiteSecure.org seal, or a VeriSign seal... or both on your paysite can go a long way toward doing that.
As the owner of WebsiteSecure.org I obviously think that there are many reasons it is the best certification for site owners based on its low cost, strong branding and unique visibility among adult consumers. For more information on that, contact me via ICQ# 266942896 and I will gladly walk you through a full demo.
Review Sites:
To be clear, not all review sites are the same. Some people throw up a glorified blog with little credibility and nearly zero attempt to provide honest unbiased reviews. Those are not review sites. On the other hand, the adult industry has some very well known high traffic real review sites that have been around for years developing loyal bookmarkers who rely on the trusted reviews they publish. Even an 'average' score from a review site like
www.TheBestPorn.com,
www.RabbitsReviews.com,
www.TheTongue.net or
www.AdultReviews.net can do a lot to improve the credibility of your site.
If a review reader sees that a real review site gave your site a score of 79 and took points off because your site does not offer a picture slide-show option - the subtle fact is that he knows the site has been reviewed by a credible source and while it doesn't have a slideshow... it can't be complete garbage or they would have said that it was in their review. Sites that are listed on a dozen major review sites and have consistent scores and factual data stated about them benefit from the fact that credible reviewers did not find any serious flaws in their product.
www.WebmasterScore.com offers a free Review Site Submitter that allows paysite owners to send out a detailed review request to more than 50+ quality review sites in a matter of minutes. The list is prescreened and can save you many hours of your time. It's also entirely free thanks to generous sponsors.