What is Your Online Business Model?
Posted On: 2011-03-03
Someone involved in online marketing that I have a great deal of respect for made an interesting statement on Twitter today. He said: "If your online business model is based on crap content, expect to lose with people and with Google."
And that got me wondering ... I know what my online business model is but just what is your online business model and how crap is your content?
Obviously many adult webmasters aren’t all that reliant on Google for their business. They source their traffic from other places such as TGPs and link lists and as long as they get their galleries and sites listed on those traffic sources they’re just about guaranteed to get at least some traffic to their websites so for them it’s Google shmoogle.
But what about the traffic that they do get from those sources ... what does their online business model expect them to do with that traffic? I can remember a time when people with a lot more experience than me were telling webmasters to show crappy content to surfers because it would encourage them to quickly leave your site and head over to your sponsors.
Back then it was believable and perhaps it really did work. There were certainly quite a few webmasters who were going to great lengths to make their content crappy. They would take perfectly good hardcore images and crop out as much of the hardcore as they could. They would take perfectly clear images and blur them as much as they could.
They went to great lengths to turn great content into stuff that was crappy enough to send surfers running but not crappy enough to get them banned from the link lists and TGPs that they were submitting to.
There’s no doubt that it was an interesting technique but I really doubt that it would work today. These days the surfers who visit our sites have become even more spoilt and if you’re not going to show clear images that hide nothing then people aren’t going to stick around long enough to see your marketing messages
So if you’re still looking back at those times and using a similar business model then perhaps it’s not working for you. Perhaps it’s time to come up with something new in the way of an online business model and that may be something could be a challenge.
What exactly is a business model that will work online?
Well I’m a great believer in the concept that there’s really no difference between conducting a successful business online and conducting a successful business out there in the real world. Of course there may be some superficial details that are different but the very fundamentals of conducting any sort of successful business are always going to be the same.
If your business model is built on a foundation of cheating people out of their cash then you’re not going to succeed. On the other hand if you are honest and upfront with people and deliver on your promises then they will always come back for more. If you deliver a quality experience and direct people to sponsors who deliver a quality experience then you will get the sales and the commissions that you deserve.
Of course that may mean that you may not make as much cash in the short term. Sometimes it’s more financially rewarding to sell memberships in crap sites because the sponsor will offer more in the way of commission ... if they every get round to actually paying you. However if you want repeat sales then you’ll only sell sponsors who give the surfer value for money ... even if they don’t pay as much commissions as the first lot do.
Repeat sales are another thing that businesses in the real world target. They want people to keep on coming back for more because it’s far easier to sell something to a repeat customer than it is to sell to a first-time customer.
Sadly the idea of getting repeat sales as a business model in this area of online marketing isn’t one that a lot of people consider to be all that sensible and yet there are a heck of a quite a few businesses here who have that as their business model and it works very well for them.
You only have to look at the better TGPs and link lists ... the ones that have very strict guidelines regarding the sites and galleries that they will list ... and you’ll find that you’re looking at businesses that are interested in repeat sales.
So if that business model works for them why won’t it work for you?
Oh ... and do you actually have a business model? If you haven’t then you better sit down and develop one because until you do have a business model you’ll just drift around like a rudderless ship ... switching from one sponsor to another and one niche to another and never spending enough time on any one thing to really make money.
So let me ask you again ... what is your online business model?