The Day After Christmas
Posted On: 2006-12-26
So while you guys are still celebrating Christmas, over here in Australia we're already into Boxing Day and that's a great day to kick back and enjoy a summer's day in Queensland.
We had a great day yesterday, family and friends came over and enjoyed some great food and a lot of laughs. Today is a little different though; it's a day to unwind, watch some cricket - there's 85,000 people at the ground and at least another million around Australia watching it on television too - and think about the coming months.
While winter in the northern hemisphere is usually a good time for sales for adult webmasters there are parts of every season where sales do slow down. Right now we're just a few weeks off one of those slow periods. Towards the end of January sales usually slow down as many consumers find that they really did overspend on their credit cards in the lead up to Christmas.
Then we have a few months where sales pick up before we finally hit the dreaded summer slowdown. I still have to laugh when I think about the summer slowdown. There was a time when many 'experts' laughed at the idea that sales dropped off in summer but these days even they acknowledge that sales do drop in summer.
While there's little we can do to prevent people overspending on their credit cards or heading away from their computers during summer we certainly can be doing more to maintain a steady level of income for us during these periods. Of course we could try and work harder and produce more galleries and more free sites and submit them to even more TGPs and link lists so that we get more advertising in of the same eyes that are always looking for free porn ... or we could work smarter.
Personally I love working smarter rather than harder and that's why more and more of my marketing sites are aimed at pulling in traffic from the search engines. Traffic that comes from the search engines has always been gold but these days ... and especially during the dry times of the year ... it's even more valuable and if you're not working hard at getting that search engine traffic then you really are making a serious error of judgment.
While it's quite easy for me to sit here and suggest that you should be working to develop your search engine traffic you may find it a little hard if you've haven't tried it before. And one thing you really do need to realize is that it will take time to see a return on your search engine work so the time to start is right now.
Another thing that you need to realize is that reaching the point where you do begin attracting search engine traffic takes work and study. It's not like building a gallery and submitting it every TGP on the planet, instead you have to build a site that's attractive to the search engines and attractive to surfers, develop a linking strategy for the site so that the search engines do see it ... and then wait for the site to move up through the search engine results pages.
Of course, while you're in the waiting stage you don't actually stop working. Instead you go on building more and more sites and each site you build, and each page of each site you build, needs to target slightly different search terms so that your sites and pages appear on more and more search engine results pages. When you think about that you may begin to change the way you build your sites.
If you've been building free sites you will be right into the groove of building sites start at the index page because that's where the link lists send surfers but search engines can send traffic to any page of your site. That means that every page has to be designed to make sales, every page has to be strong on selling because that page could be your only chance to make a sale to the surfers who come from the search engines.
But wait, there's still more. If you've been building for TGPs and link lists and now you're making sales you simply be repeating yourself with every site or gallery you build and that's quite acceptable. But that approach is not going to work if you are looking to work the search engines.
Instead, you need to keep in touch with the search engine world and you may never reach the point where you think you have nothing left to learn. I spend time every day reading and learning all I can and while that may sound like hard work I have to admit that I've come to find it fascinating.
Even more fascinating is watching your bank balance grow as all that study and hard work pays off.