GO KILL YOURSELF - 10 Reasons Your Business Is Dying
 

:2 cents:If I may be so bold...
(full article here)

----excerpt----

1) You are Boring ? Penalties of being Mediocre

Mainstream marketing guru Seth Godin's book Purple Cow deals with the importance of being remarkable.
Particularly online, getting noticed and invoking curiosity in potential consumers immediately is important.

Are you remarkable? Is your site worthy of being noticed?

Don't answer that one too fast.

Even if you shoot exclusive content, you are not necessarily remarkable. Are you trying to be the next Vivid or Penthouse? Then you are not remarkable. (1)

If you are an affiliate and don't create your own content your job is even more difficult because you have to work with other people's content. How can you present that and be different?

What once was remarkable and noteworthy usually becomes average and mundane. Remember when Bang Brothers released BangBus.com to a market that hadn't seen reality sex sites at that point?
THAT was a remarkable concept.

Fast forward a few years and reality sites are now among the most saturated kind on the web.

Did you start your site in hopes of competing with a similar site?

If there is a similar site you are already not remarkable.


2) Overextended Payouts and Promotions

Something awful has been happening lately.

The industry has been cannibalizing itself over the past years with an attitude of one-oneupmanship in regards to affiliate payouts and prom...(continued)

Where are you other 8 reasons?

Great read Kroy!

Do I have to read ALL of that to be successful?

Can't we get some cliffnotes.. Geeez... What's he writing a novel?

Commmonnn help a brotha out!

:)

I didn't want to post the whole thing here, it's quite long. There's a link to the full article.
And here it is again

Good read..

That post was remarkably boring... He is not remarkable

nice article

bump

pretty good article there :thumbsup

The Purple Cow - and the other books mentioned in this article's footer - are widely regarded as being based on assumptions, rather than proven theories.

I can tell you one time when it is not good to be a purple cow -- and that is when the farmer is deciding which of his cows he wants to slaughter!

im not gonna read it..

This is a great article that everyone should read.

Good article.

:)

Thanks for sharing Kroy!

There should be one for guys like you:


Don't Be Lazy

good article dont agree with it all but very good article. A question I like reading Seth's books but has he ever had success marketing anything besides Seth?

Nice reading.. I score 7/10 :)

True, however, must people aren't successful at marketing anything

Good Read

Great article and well written!

Lots actually. Google can help ya find out more. :)

Thanks for all the kudos, I really appreciate that.
To naysayer mike-al - I posted this thinking of you after seeing your whining and finger pointing in other threads lately - so it's sad you didn't get it.
Looks like you're one of the few though so I guess there is still hope for the rest of us.
:2 cents:

Let's try something more meaningful than "good article" (By the way, I do think all previous good article posters are either idiots or otherwise having an off day. On second thought, strike that last alternative.)

This is a very solid point, and in no way speciffic to adult ; tech companies of all sorts have shown great exposure to it, and to a certain extent even non-tech ones.

There's a lot of herd activity going on in adult, and I think moreso than anywhere outside of grade school.

Maybe a good side exercise, to complement that article, would be this :

1. Pick up a piece of paper and write down 10 important statements about your business. Anything from "PR is meaningless" to "Blue is the true sell color".

2. Next to each, write G if you guessed this yourself, but can show no proof ; I if you've come up with it yourself, and have proof ; R if you've read it somewhere and have actually proven it to yourself, and I'm a lemming if you've read it somewhere and you just believed it.

Then count your lemmings.

What's that you say, nobody has the time to test everything they do ? O, really ?

very good Kroy.

this is the smartest and most true advice I found on the article:

when it comes to fetish - no matter how much you think you know about it, you will always make only 1/5 of the money a webmaster with the actual fetish can.
it is better to stay with things that turn YOU on.

Nice article!
thanks for sharing.

Great article Kroy, ICQ added:winkwink:

Although party sponsorship maybe easy to lampoon, dispositional branding, or what company would would think of first if someone asked you to say, "Name a solo girl company"

My bet is on you naming a party sponsor. Recency has a TON to do with branding, and with so many sponsors, letting your name into my head at my desk is a battle worth fighting.

But yes, less big parties, and more private ones that only I'm invited to :-)


http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...I5KqrwKkoZzEAg - Hit Minute 18, or watch the whole thing

Maybe should always be a concept to include in your business plan. How else to purple cows occur.

Look, risk is only risky when it's unchecked. Set aside 5% or 10% of your marketing budget to try out new "MAYBE"s and slowly test assumptions about the industry around you.

If you aren't unsure about "Something" you are doing, you certainly aren't innovating.

I think more to the point, if MAYBE is all over your plan, or takes up more than 10% of a given division's budget, then apply some metrics to turn maybe into certainly, then look for some new maybes.


c'mon kroy - No, seriously good read, but I'm gunna put some points up for debate.

True enough, but this advice is very old news (just applied to adult for this article) - it's long been said that you should do what you love. If you know the product, you will better know the market.

Define too much, in terms of economics please. C'mon even in a perfect competition market, businesses see operating profits.

Economic profits, above what the market should hold, are fleeting by definition.


But too much competition is a fucking cop-out. There's no such thing in any industry. There is just competition. You could argue that any competition beyond a monopoly is "Too Much". I would like to see some metric or definition for market saturation.


Are you saying 97% of surfers are familiar with their porn sources, and have all the memberships that they intend to buy? Shit not even nasty dollars has a 35% brand penetration. There's plenty of room for growth.


Strike #4 it's fucking weak.

I guess there's no reason to open a restaurant then either huh?

People already know how to go out and eat.

Listen, there are plenty of TGPs that would rock if created today, but what has occured, is that there is a substantial barrier to entry in the mainstream TGP market because established sites like mine have spent years building brand loyalty within the market.

So if you're going to penetrate, it costs more money than it used to, as is the case with established markets.

It's still a pretty low barrier to entry for many niches.


Again, #5 is weak, and speaks only of TGPs, and of owners doing stupid stuff with their time while building them.

or more accurately, You never do one, and then the other. You should always be improving your product, and you should always be marketing it to your customers.

The mentality that you should get customers, THEN build, or Build THEN get customers, implies that you should stop building or stop getting customers at some point.

Businesses have a few essential departments that should always be working. Marketing, Production, Accounting, Legal. You can't afford to do any of these things part time, in any business, in any industry.

There's nothing new about theft. A flash player doesn't change shit about that. Poor point.

Nothing like establishing that your brand is full of pussies that won't defend their rights.

It's like advertising that it's ok to steal shit from you. Oh and then there's the reality that you are sponsoring the theft of other content, and engaging in business with people that didn't respect you or your rights from the onset.

Always a healty way to start a relationship of being someone's bitch...


"You can't use my full movies from my member's area"

"Fuck you bitch"

"Oh, um, ok, can you um, sell me a banner spot then?"

"Haha, sure, put on this gimp suit."

There's turning lemons into lemonade, and then there's just being an undying optimist.

Not every event is positive to your business, and thinking this way is that me-too mentality he just argued against here.

So which is an illegal tube doing, brand building or giving away their member's area and product? methinks the latter.

Fluffygrrl alluded to this earlier, and kroy seems to be around it as well.

a Great method of evaluating business opportunities is

I would recommend the long tail too.

But, here's my step 10.


READ A FUCKING BOOK. Can't find customers, THERE'S A FUCKING BOOK ON IT. MANY BOOKS, WHOLE SECTIONS OF BOOKS. Have you google'd the problem?

If you had to do a high school research paper on your company, could you cite anything? Could you make 20 pages about what the fuck it is that you are doing? If not, you are probably in real trouble.

READ FUCKING READ. This is an ok article, but it's a hack-job synopsis of what those authors said. Nothing against Kroy, but the authors he cited are phenominal writers, with good editors, that backed all of these points up with case-study. Get the books if you want the milk straight from the cow.

Some of it is the same thing I've been saying for years. So why is he not being flamed?

Shooting exclusive and then shooting the same content that's on 1,000 other sites is pointless. you might of well bought non exclusive for the good it did you. Shooting badly or buying badly is even worse. But this business had the word EXCLUSIVE so far up it's rectum you could see it when it smiled. LOL That's called sarcasm.

The money has to found from somewhere to pay for the traffic. Usually the content. So you end up with an unremarkable site that needs more traffic. Solution is simple, cut the content budget and send more traffic. That's called sarcasm.

It's because many are marketing a product that sucks.

Porn is a consumable item, the people who buy it or even watch it for free do so on a regular basis. It's as consumable and disposable as the paper tissue we use to clean up afterwards. The consumer is educated and if not he learns very fast. He must be because you keep saying he is. That's called ironic.

Some base their marketing on throwing as much mud at a wall in the hope some will stick. That never was and never has been marketing, it filling the shelves and hoping. Marketing is about researching what your customer needs, looking at what you can produce to meet that need, producing the best product at the best price and then promoting it to your target audience of consumers. It's not about doing what ever you think will impress affiliates to send more traffic.

Which is the extent of many sponsors marketing.

Wow.. hitting the nail on the head here.

There are too many chasing too few. The cull is coming. Or already here,

So very true. How many Tube sites owners want the sponsor to host the scenes they need to get the traffic to sell a dating site? And how long before they start charging for "partnerships" or "Spots" to submit content they need to get surfers to sell other sites.

God knows where they got that business model from?

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Same principle applies to marketing.

Its easier to give your opinion on how something should be done than actually apply it. One thing you see over and over again in marketing books is A + B = C scenarios that don't even come close to matching the reality of marketing online. These books remind me a lot of grade 10 Economics class.

This is for most the real problem. Dogs that need to learn new tricks.

As for old dogs and new tricks. Well if all you're a dog and your target market is cats you're pretty well screwed. The person who decides in the end if a site makes it or not, or an industry, is the buyer. If you understand him you can sell to him. Cats selling to cats. If you understand affiliates then you could be a dog selling to dogs. Shame when the cat has the food bowl.

Get my drift? Know your audience and you can learn new tricks.

There are 100s here who understand everything about affiliates, driving traffic and getting more traffic. But little about what the traffic needs to make it stop, stay and come back. For the last 8 years that I have been here the solution to falling conversion ratios has always been, send more traffic.

Worked fine until the explosion in traffic senders and sites, coupled with the reluctance of surfers to buy came together. If you convert 1-100 that's 99 not buying, they don't get your message, you're selling them the wrong thing and they are moving on. The answer is not only to send another 100 to get 2 sales, it's also find out why the 99 are not buying and see if you can meet their needs.

Tough job if you think members are losers, models skanks and affiliates the dogs testicles. And after 8 years of doing it your way you will still tell me I'm wrong and tell me the problem is Tube sites. Yes we're charging $30 and we can't compete with a site giving it away for free. So it has to be the fault of the site giving it away for free. We could never be wrong. :1orglaugh

I'm off home, good night.

Did I stop the debate?

When an industry puts marketing above product it either has the product nailed down and can't be improved or what?

Imagine how you would feel as a buyer if you felt people were putting more into the marketing of a product than the product. Would you feel the industry was serving you or serving itself? Look around at the examples, MacDonalds, the Presidential election and perfumes. which one of these would you like them to spend more attention to the substance of what you're buying and less on the marketing?

Kroy you missed the main reason this part of the porn industry does so badly. It does not sell what the customer needs, it sells what the industry needs the customer to buy. Which is fine until some break the mold.

And yes I'm to blame as much as the others. And there are sites/sponsors who have broken the mold.

1 reason the business is dying, well a couple of them. LOL