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Some things work and some things don't ... yet
Web 2.0 has brought us a whole new world of communication tools that even we can use here in adult but are they really as good as they're cracked up to be?

I can't talk about sites like Myspace or Youtube because I haven't used them but there are several other channels that we perhaps we should be using.

Blogging
I'm certainly a huge fan of blogging ... and I mean genuine blogging ... real entries that you have written and not scraped from someone else. And I mean genuine blogging - not just a load of auto-generated crap that does nothing to get the average surfer interested.

I'm a big fan of blogging because it is an easy way to make money and to get your message out there to the world. In another place I wrote about just how easy it is for to get good search engine placement for important keywords with a blog. Not only can you get that placement but you can get it a whole lot faster than you might with a regular site.

Last storm season a major tropical cyclone ripped through a town to the north of us and created an incredible amount of devastation. Like all tropical cyclones everyone knew this one was coming and people wanted to know all they could about it so lots of them were hitting Google but at first there wasn't much there for them to see.

Almost by chance Steve mentioned it on one of his mainstream blogs when it was still a couple of days off the coast. Google picked that up within 24 hours and started sending traffic. When Steve spotted that in his stats he began following the cyclone with two and three posts a day and Google was picking those up within 12 hours of him posting them.

The traffic surge to his blog was interesting to say the least. Needless to say this storm season he's following the tropical cyclones again and once more Google is sending traffic.

That's how easy it was to get traffic from Google with a blog about 12 months ago but since then it has become even easier. Google now allows you to ping them directly so as soon as you make a post in your blog Google gets notified. For those who haven't seen it this is Google's ping URL:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

Another reason why blogging is important to search engine traffic is the fact that Google is now including a lot more blog entries in their search engine results pages for more general items than just topical searches like tropical cyclones.

So if you want to get a grip on some high quality traffic then start working the search engines with a genuine blog. A couple of minutes a day is all it takes to write a blog entry and it's not hard to fit that into a busy schedule.

Podcasts
Podcasts were seen by many to be the next big thing after blogging and they've been around long enough to be able to judge if they really are going to be a worthwhile marketing tool.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a report on the podcast research they are doing and their findings are interesting. It seems that over the last two years the amount content available via podcast has, in their terms 'exploded' but the number of people who actually look at that content has not kept pace with the explosion.

Pew found that 12 percent of Internet users have downloaded a podcast but only 1 percent do it on a daily basis. So perhaps those figures might indicate that podcasting is not necessarily something we in adult should be all that interested in just yet.

When there are so many other marketing channels open to us taking the time to produce a podcast could be seen as a little wasteful considering the limited audience that might see it.

But that doesn't mean that I'm particularly anti podcasting. In fact I can see several areas where producing a podcast could bring in some valuable signups.

Solo girl sites where the person running the site is the girl herself could benefit from podcasting. A regular podcast featuring something like a little teasing talk from the girl along with a very short video clip that promises a lot without actually showing much certainly could be a useful sales tool.

Perhaps the major sponsors - with their increased level of resources that small webmasters don't have - might find podcasting a great way of promoting their sites. Dating sites that allow girls and guys to submit video clips might also do well with podcasts that feature those clips.

Blogging can and will give you some immediate traffic boosts and if you're not blogging - even with adult content - then you really are leaving money on the table. On the other hand podcasting definitely still has some way to go but it could work very well in the right circumstances.