This and That on a Thursday
Posted On: 2009-09-10
Well Thursday has rolled around again and that means that it’s time for another look inside my brain … also known as another column from me.
I don’t know what your week has been like but I have to say that it’s been a very interesting week for Steve and me. The work coming in from local clients has jumped incredibly and a couple of the new clients are presenting us with some real challenges.
One of them wants us to improve his search engine rankings in a vertical where the top 10 listings are almost all take up by big sites that have been around for years and have back-link profiles that most of us can only dream about. At the same time it’s in a local market where increased competition from other geographic areas means that traffic and income is diminishing.
That one is definitely going to be a challenge … but then making money online has been a challenge for years now so we wouldn’t be here if we weren’t prepared to take on challenges like this one is going to be.
Know the people you’re selling to
On Monday I mentioned a new tool that Google has available to help you see where the best places are to spend your advertising dollar. While many of us don’t have any of those type of advertising dollars to spend the tool is still quite valuable for people here in the adult industry because it can help to dispel a few myths and give you a clearer view of who is your target audience.
You’ll find the tool at google.com/adplanner and you can look back to Monday’s column to see how Steve and I use it. As we doodled around with it before I wrote about it in Monday’s column we checked out some mainstream sites that are important to us and our clients and we also used the tool to check out some adult sites as well.
If the site that you check with the tool is big enough it will even give you the age groups of the people who visit the site and that’s what turned up some interesting facts for us. What we found when we looked at the stats for some of the bigger Milf sites was that Google sees the major group that visits those sites as being in the 45-54 year age bracket with the next most popular group being the 35-44 year age group.
Ummm what happened to all those college guys that we thought were interested in Milfs? Maybe the idea that used to go around that it was guys in that college age group who were interested in Milfs was based on guesswork rather than hard data.
We also looked at the age groups that use link lists and TGPs and what we found there was a bit surprising too. The link lists that we looked at all seemed to have more visits from people in the 45-54 year age group and that applied to TGPs as well. College guys didn’t rate any higher than third for both link lists and TGPs.
I should say here that we didn’t do an in-depth survey of link lists and TGPs but if that’s where your traffic and income is coming from then it might pay to use Google’s Adplanner to look more closely at your traffic sources.
Two tips for affiliate marketers
Over the last few months we’ve become more involved in web analytics and now we’re writing regular reports and offering insights for several different customers so we often spend time looking at sites that deal with web analytics. It was on one of those sites that we picked up one of these tips and from our experience that I give you the other.
The first tip is that the people who are visiting your sites spend a lot of time visiting other sites and so should you. You can pick up some invaluable marketing tips simply by looking at other sites both in adult and in mainstream that want to sell you something.
The second tip is that big numbers for page views are nice but page views don’t always put money your pocket. Most analytics programs register a page view when someone opens the page … but that doesn’t mean that the person who hit your page actually stopped there long enough to see anything.
Your pages need to engage the people who come to your site and that’s far more important than big juicy page view numbers and if you know the people who are visiting your site … the people that you are selling to … you will be able to engage them.
And that’s it for me today. I’m off to some meetings and I might even get some time to write some HTML … sometimes I miss that.