Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

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

If you don't recognize that heading as being one of the fundamentals of buying real estate then I guess it must be something that's distinctly Australian because out here it's the rule when buying any sort of property.

Out here when you're looking for property it's always the location that's important and buying the best house in the worst street in town is never going to be better than buying the worst house in the best street. I guess whatever it may be called in other parts of the world the same rule applies ... with real estate it's all about location.

So what has that got to do with adult online marketing? Well quite a lot actually because the location of various elements on the real estate that's your web page is vitally important if you want to make money and it's becoming even more important as screen resolutions become more and more variable.

As I've said here before, the number of different screen resolutions that people have their monitors set to is increasing and that makes it more difficult to design a site that looks good in all resolutions. You can't even set your page width to 100% anymore because if you do that some of the newer resolutions can really stretch your page across the screen and make your page elements look very ugly.

Not only do pages set to a width of 100% become rather ugly on wide-screen resolutions but important links and marketing messages disappear below the fold (that area below the first screen that surfers have to scroll down to see) on those wide-screens regardless of what your page width is set for and so may not be seen by the surfers. So now more than ever it's important for us to think about how we use the real estate on our web page and we have to be aware of location, location, location.

For some of us who have been chasing those elusive first page listings the way we use the real estate on our web pages has been quite important for some time. There are plenty of instances where well-known and very savvy search engine optimization specialists have made it clear that what appears at the top of a page has more impact than what appears towards the bottom of a page.

Keywords and keyword phrases when placed at the top of the page seem to have more impact than if they appear in the footer and the same goes for links. Links that are placed towards the top of a page seem to be viewed as more important than links that appear towards the bottom of a page.

Of course search engines do look below the fold so we don't have to be quite so careful in where we put important elements for search engines as we do for humans and that brings me to another point about the best use of web page real estate.

We live in tourist town and lately we've been doing some work for a couple of small businesses who are involved in a fairly competitive vertical. For them it's important to get potential customers to their sites and then get them to sign up fast ... sounds a bit like adult sites doesn't it?

The really savvy people in this vertical have more than just a link on every page to the signup page ... they actually have a panel that allows a visitor to the site to sign up no matter what page they're on. That's right; set off to one side of every page is a neat little sign up form that visitors can fill in regardless of which page they happen to be on ... they don't have to click through to another page to sign up they can do it without moving to another page.

The less savvy people in this vertical still rely on links to take site visitors to a dedicated signup page. Now some of you may be wondering why I'm suggesting that the guys with the panel on every page are perhaps a little smarter than those who don't?

The answer is quite simple ... every time you ask site visitors to go one more click before they sign up you lose around 25% of them. They get distracted ... they decide that they really don't want to sign up after all ... they decide that the back button is a much better option ... there are lots of reasons why they don't take that one extra click so you take that click away by having a signup panel on every page.

It's something that's probably long overdue here in adult where sponsors still expect surfers to click through to the join page. There may be some sponsors with sites out there that do put a signup panel on every page of their tour but I'm yet to see one.

Perhaps in adult the join form needs to be larger than what might fit in a simple side-bar panel but that still doesn't mean that it can't appear on every page. These days there's nothing stopping a sponsor using a signup panel in a side-bar that will expand when the surfer mousse over it to start the process of joining the site.

And that expanding option is something that might be useful for those of us who only send traffic to the sponsors. It's just one more way of getting important parts of the site in front of site visitors when the web page real estate is limited and location is so important.