Of This and That

Posted On: 2007-12-20

Oh boy will I ever be happy when Christmas is over. Yesterday we got all our gifts for our many kids and grandkids off in the post because none of them are making the trek north to spend Christmas with us this year and that was a big relief.

Once the gifts were in the mail we thought that we could take a deep breath and relax instead of running around like headless chickens trying to find the right gift for everyone. The thought of a quiet Christmas was not unappealing but with 10 kids and almost as many grandkids drama is never too far away and one phone call last night was enough to change our plans. Now we could be doing a quick two-day round trip of around 1400 miles sometime in the next few days.

Is it any wonder that I'm finding it hard to get my head around any serious work today?

The Long Tail
Hitwise have an interesting review of their data on the long tail of search on their blog at the moment that's definitely worth reading. It seems that the long tail is getting longer and what Hitwise describes as the 'head' is getting bigger as more people are becoming more sophisticated with their searches.

We've seen an interesting example of the long tail of search in the last few days ... but I doubt that it's quite what the experts describe as the long tail. About 18 months ago Steve wrote about something on one of our mainstream blogs and included an image. Within a couple of weeks Google Image Search was sending hundreds and hundreds of hits every day to that blog for that image.

That traffic continued for well over 12 months and only dried up about three months ago. It was nice while it lasted and we know that we did make money from it but we weren't surprised to see the traffic end because the overall theme of the blog had very little to do with the image that Google loved so much.

Now, three months later, the traffic to that image has started to come in once more but it's not from Google. It seems that now, some 18 months after Steve made that post MSN has found it and likes it so much that it's sending a heap of traffic our way. I guess the moral of that story is that nothing's over till the fat lady sings and I'm sure we haven't heard her sing about this image yet.

Selling Lingerie
Are you selling lingerie on any of your sites? If not then you might think about doing it in the future because the online sales figures for lingerie this Christmas are interesting. It seems that, even though most people are seeing tough times ahead and are reducing their spending, sales of sexy lingerie is up compared to this time last year.

That's interesting because other online clothing sales seem to be down but not for lingerie. You might have to hunt around for lingerie sites that will accept sales from adult sites but there are a few out there and even if you can't find them it's not too hard to filter some traffic from your adult sites down through a mainstream site that would be acceptable to lingerie merchants.

Those Interesting Trends
If you read my column yesterday you will have seen that I talked about Google Trends and I suggested that you should type 'porn' and 'free porn' into the search box on the Trends page because if you did that you would see something interesting.

It was so interesting that I tried it again last night and got a similar result. It seems that, while there has been a gradual increase in the number of people who search for 'porn', the number of people who are searching for 'free porn' is decreasing at quite a noticeable rate.

Now I can remember the time when many adult webmasters would go all out to get a good search engine placement for that term while other adult webmasters wouldn't touch the term because they didn't think they could convert that traffic into sales. Perhaps soon it won't really matter whether you can or can't convert that traffic because the number of surfers searching for 'free porn' is beginning to diminish.

Other combinations of words that include 'porn' don't seem to be getting many searches either but have a play with Google Trends and you might find a search term you can target that is really popular.

And now I'm off to work some more and think about that long road trip that could be in our near future. Oh the joy of kids.