Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

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

There was a time ... long ago ... when adult online marketers were the ones who were really ahead of the game and it was the mainstream guys who were struggling to understand how to make a sale online but those days have long gone.

Right now it's the mainstream guys who are well ahead of the game and every year they seem to move even further ahead of us here in adult online marketing. While there's no doubt that we still do make sales with our old methods of giving away heaps of content we seem to be happy with the sales we get and we don't seem to be out there exploring new ways of doing things.

On the other hand that's where the guys in mainstream are right now and it might be possible to take some of the things they're doing and make them work here in adult. But if you don't get out there into mainstream you're never going to know what they're up to so I would encourage you to go looking for places where the mainstream guys discuss their techniques because they have so much to teach you.

Recently I read some notes from the 6th Annual B2B Marketing Summit and there is certainly plenty of food for thought in them. Here are just a few of takeaways that are relevant to us here in adult. I'm going to try and avoid adding too much of my thoughts to them in the hope that they will get you thinking along new pathways ... pathways that will work for you and put more money in your pocket.

Focus
Optimize your entire marketing process ... look at everything you do and avoid having a focus on just one part of your process because if you focus on just one thing something else in the process will fail.

Look at how you present your products ... making a sale in a B2B environment isn't about providing a feature rich product, it's about providing answers. And that's the way it should be for us too if you think about it.

'Focus on the cumulative effect of your marketing activities' ... every dollar you spend should lift your bottom line to a new level and not just give a short-term boost to your earnings.

Page design
What do you use to guide a visitor to your site to what you want them to see? A speaker at the Summit suggested that you should be using size, color, shape, position and motion to lead your site visitors to where you want them to go. So what do they see when they hit your web sites?

Always remember that what you see on your web pages and what other people might see can be two entirely different things. If you're serious about designing web pages and sites that are effective sales tools then you just might have to get a couple of friends to sit down and work their way through one of your sites while you watch where they go.

Optimize
Here's a suggestion from the Summit that can be very hard for us to understand and accept. 'Don't optimize based on how you think/search, optimize for the way your customers think/search.'

Most of the people that visit our sites are not as tech or Internet savvy as we are so we might have to dispense with the fancy designs and 'touchy-feelie' alternatives to 'click here'. We might have to start thinking like a newcomer to the Web and remember how hard it was to find our way around back then and we might make more sales if we make our site designs and navigation very basic ... it all depends on just who is visiting your websites.

Selling to individuals
Everyone who comes to your website is an individual and every individual filters information in ways that are unique to them. In mainstream the suggestion is that B2B marketers need to quickly move from generic information to more specific information and finally to personalized information if they want to make a sale.

So how are you going to do that? Does it sound like an impossible task? Maybe it depends on just how granular you want your personalized information to be and with that thought in mind it might be possible to bring adult marketing down to a personal level.

It's just one more thing to think about and test and you do have to consider your marketing and do some serious testing if you want to make real money here. As you can probably see from the concepts they're talking about over in mainstream, this is a very serious business and if you want to succeed in adult then you have to be just as serious about it as the mainstream guys are.