Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Come and peek into my brain as I let it wander around the edges of an interesting possibility.

It's Sunday morning here as I write this and Steve is currently engaged in some dialogue with a Venture Capitalist. If that made you raise your eyebrows then just calm down, Steve is not talking with him about raising money for anything we want to do. Instead they're talking about the language used for the Internet and the advantages of not relying on just one language.

That may sound rather dry and uninteresting but it has a great deal of relevance for adult webmasters.

Over the years that the Internet has been becoming popular English has become the default language of the Net. Now whether that is a good or bad thing depends on a number of factors and these days if you want to guarantee the widest appeal for your site then English is the only language worth worrying about or is it?

I'm not sure that I would go so far as to suggest that a site in poor English is better than no English at all though. In fact a poor English translation of a site is quite likely to have the completely opposite effect to what the site owners might hope for. The reverse could be quite true too and an English site translated into poor German or poor any other language might not sell well either.

Hiring a translator may not work for every site either. For many of us it would be difficult to know whether or not the translator had really been able to get our message across clearly. If the site had a very personal aspect - and appeal - to it the translation, no matter how technically good it might be, may lose that personal aspect and appeal entirely.

That was/is particularly important in the discussion Steve has been having because the ability of blogs to have a cross-language appeal had much to do with what the discussion was about. However, what if the blog was part of a network?

Obviously the translation aspect of it would still be there but what if the network 'employed' bloggers from other countries to write their own blogs in their own languages? There would immediately be a benefit to both the network and the foreign language bloggers.

Now if you're still with me you're probably wondering what all this has to do with adult webmasters but if you stop and think about it for a moment you will begin to see a point where our marketing methods are lacking and blog networks have a huge advantage.

We here in adult are all individuals, we work alone, we market individually and we each have a very small market-share and all those things are restricted further by the language we use on our sites. On the other hand the bloggers in a blog network feed off each other.

There is an immediate traffic benefit from being part of a network. Your message can go out to far more people and if you have someone in the blog network who writes in a different language then your reach is extended even further.

Of course that all sounds wonderful but your average blog network would never work here in adult or would it?

When you look at some of the big blog networks out there you will see that the people who put them together are not as isolated as we adult webmasters are. But don't use that as an excuse to write the idea off because there is one blog network where the principals have never even met.

Not only have those guys not met but they're also the first blog network to attract venture capital. So distance and isolation is not a reason to discount the idea of forming a network with webmasters in other parts of the world.

Of course there are other problems to overcome and maybe the typical blog network business model would not work for adult webmasters. The more I think about it the more I am sure that you just could not directly transplant that business model into adult. But there is no reason why that business model could not be the basis of something that would work in adult.

Yes, I know I've been thinking out loud again and there are probably 50 good reasons why my idea would not work for adult webmasters. But just think what might happen if just five small to medium sized webmasters got together and formed a network.

Think of the reach in terms of traffic those guys would have. Think of the reach in terms of search engine appeal those guys would have. And think of the dollars that network could earn.

Putting it together would not be easy, making it work would not be easy either but it could make some serious money and that's what should interest all of us.