Quote:
Originally posted by Rick Latona
You can either get traffic to your Pay Site by link offers such as text or banners in which case someone is responding to the price or conceptual offer, or you can get them their using content. To keep members at your site you have to have good content. They won?t stay because you have a lovely style sheet.
If you aren?t using processing tricks to get people to join your site you have to actually sell them one what they?ll get inside. For instance, Pay Site owners who rely on mailers, Adware and other aggressive techniques usually need to offer free trials to achieve great conversion ratios. Thumb Nail Post Gallery Makers rely on great pictures and video clips to get people to join your site.
Gallery Makers also don?t ask for traffic back. To prove the value of this point we are going to have to take a math lesson. Let?s first look at a few facts.
? If your site converts at an average of 1 in 400 then there are 399 visitors who don?t convert for each sale that you get. It?s important that you don?t fool your self by reading your own stats on this one. I?m not talking about second page uniques or first page raws but instead, real first page uniques. First page uniques are the amount of people who are actually coming to your site.
? Paysites like mine at CJBUCKS.COM payout 30 dollars on 1 dollar trials that more often than we?d like don?t even rebill to the full monthly fee.
? You can usually get between 1 and 3 joins on your exit consoles for every 15 conversions that you get yourself.
? Most Pay Per Signup sponsors rely on revenue from their outbound traffic to help finance their payouts to their own webmasters.
? You should be able to trade joins on your exit consoles. For instance, if you send CJBUCKS.COM 4 joins a day, I?d be happy to send you 4 back each day.
What does all this mean?
It means that traffic coming from webmasters who don?t ask for reciprocal joins back to their program is more valuable than other traffic because you?ll have a better trading position on your outbound traffic.
To get this valuable traffic from Gallery Makers you need to have new content added to your program weekly for Gallery Makers to download and build galleries with. You also need to consistently add to your hosted galleries that you have available to your webmasters.
Leasing feeds is also a very bad business model. If you spend 4,000 dollars a month on lease feeds you?ll finish the year with 4,000 dollars worth of content expenses in December and no assets. If you spent the same 4,000 dollars on content you?d finish the year with 48,000 dollars worth of content assets!
Then of course, there is the all important issue of Member Retention. Would you want to login into a member?s area and only see a long list of links that all open up in different windows that don?t look the same? Most feeds use different methods for playing the video for crying out loud. The whole thing is sloppy. The surfer experience is cumbersome at best and your site will lack pizzazz.
If you own your own content you can arrange it all with a standardized form of navigation. Your member?s will be able to quickly navigate to the episode that gets them off, watch it and then go on their way.
These are all reasons why we?ve cancelled all of our leased feeds at CJBUCKS.COM and we?ve started to aggressively purchase content from nearly every company that has it for sale. Our entire member?s area has been revamped using the MAS content management software from Mansion Productions to arrange all pictures and videos in a way that makes sense to the user. We have constant updates and each piece of content gets rated so new visitors can find what other visitors have liked the most.
We?ve also taken screen captures, pictures and 10 second video clips from every content episode that we?ve purchased and made them available to Gallery Makers to download from CJBUCKS.COM and use for sending us traffic.
We are in the entertainment business so let?s not forget it. People come to our sites and spend money to see content. Thus, if you focus on content you?ll be a better entertainment company and more people will come to your site and spend more money while they are there.
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This is by far one of the most intelligent posts I have seen on GFY in a while. It's too bad this thread doesn't show that Rick was the one who posted it. And Rick nailed every point right on the mark.
And I tend to agree with the comment about the average gallery submitter (or other webmaster who isn't an affiliate program). Webmasters typically have a uni-directional relationship with affiliate programs in that they send joins to sponsors. Sponsors can then use the exit traffic and cross-sales as a bargaining chip with other sponsors to reciprocate traffic back. Something that is much more powerful than two sponsors trading joins if you ask me. Plus these types of joins are probably some of the most qualified traffic you can find. They came to the affiliate site first, looked at the tour liked it and joined. Most x-sales the surfer never even saw the site they're joining. Similiarly for exit consoles, the surfer came there as a second or third choice, not the primary choice. Those webmasters who can bring a surfer in voluntarily will convert the best and retain the best if the members area can provide their needs.
And as Rick mentioned above and in his article in last month's Klixxx, a lot of sponsors have forgotten that they're in the entertainment and membership business. Provide a service that is worth coming back to. A lot of companies have resorted to feed after feed and killed the surfer with the same content wherever they go. The member site of the future is exclusive content with targetted quality marketing. Rick knows it, ARS adapted their model to it and the survivors of this shake up will realize it too.
Congrats on 2000 posts and a great post Rick.
WG