Affiliate Marketing Basics For Adult Webmasters - SpankBank.com

Adult Affiliate Marketing Basics

Making money online is not easy, but it can be very lucrative. By signing up for the right affiliate programs, you can make a residual income with very little cash outlay. This article is built around promoting WantedList and MaleBoxDVD, but you can use these tips to promote any product or service online. Bookmark this page now and refer to it whenever you’ve got a new website to promote.

Here are some basic steps for becoming a successful adult webmaster:

			Determine Limits on Time & Money to Invest

			Select Affiliate Programs to Promote

			Create a Marketing Plan

			Build a Website

			Promote the Products and Services

			Promote the Affiliate Programs to Other Webmasters

			Grow and Maintain


Determine Limits on Time & Money to Invest

	You can get started in affiliate marketing for less than $100 (the cost for registering a domain name and getting it hosted somewhere). However, the more money you invest, the less time you will need to put in. Cash will open the door to things like a professional website design and immediate traffic for your website. However if funds are tight, don’t panic! You can still make money but it will require a lot of sweat equity to build a successful website. First, determine a budget for building a website. If you decide to build it yourself, then you can get by for less than $10 on a domain name and about $5 per month for hosting. If you have the money for it, then you can spend anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars on a professionally designed website. My recommendation: spend as little as possible up front until you’ve mastered the art of getting traffic and online marketing. Start with a simple website that you design yourself, learn how to build traffic and then think about a more professional approach.

Back to Top


Select Affiliate Programs to Promote

	There are thousands of affiliate programs out there, and you’ll have to pick the ones that you want to promote. For starters, if you haven’t already done so, sign up to promote the world’s best adult DVD rental program at SpankBank.com. WantedList has some of the best conversions in the adult industry and we hope that you will choose us as the core program to promote on your first website. After you see how well our rental program converts, we’re convinced that you’ll continue to promote our program the most. Next, you’ll want to sign up for other programs to promote. As with anything else, you will do the best with subject matter that you yourself are interested in. For example, if you are into blondes with big boobs, then promote sites on that subject. Gay webmasters can promote our all male rental site, MaleBoxDVD.com. Interracial, Asian, Latina – whatever your particular fetish, put it at the top of your list. With our program, we have DVDs in every genre and you can target the specific pages to maximize conversions. The last thing to consider when choosing an affiliate program to promote, is where your traffic comes from. You’ll find that certain kinds of traffic convert better with certain programs – more on that later in this article. For now, pick a few programs to promote. We’ve got some great recommendations and registration is free.

Back to Top

Create a Marketing Plan

There are many ways to create traffic for a website. Luckily for you, most beginner webmasters don’t know where to begin. Thousands of websites go online daily and never see a single visitor. Here are the basics:


Type of Traffic	Examples	Volume	Effectiveness


Word of Mouth	Business cards, friends mentioning your website to others	Low	High – close friends and acquaintances will convert well – referrals are the basis for many business models.

Conventional Advertising	Newspapers, magazines, other print advertising, flyers	Medium	Low/Medium - This will have a lot to do with what audience the publication targets, ad size, placement and frequency.

Online Classified Ads	Websites similar to Craigslist, MySpace and auction sites like eBay - careful about abiding by their Terms of Service as many of these sites do not allow porn!	Low	Medium - depends on website traffic and target audience.

Online Banner Ads	TGP & gallery advertisements, eZine ads, forums	Medium	Varies – banner ads can be very effective in building a brand, but click thrus will only generate sales if extremely well targeted.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)	Natural search results on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista and other engines	Unlimited	High – natural search results convert better than any other form of marketing and it’s free

Word of Mouth

For this and many of the other advertising methods listed, you’ll first need to select a good domain name. You’ll want one that’s easy to remember and easy to spell. Try to avoid ambiguous words in the name. For example, if your website is rentalqueue.com,people may try to spell it rentalcue, rentalque or rentalq. Also, try for a short name that’s two to three words in length. Dot com domains are also easier to remember than .net, .info and other choices.

Conventional Advertising

If you have the budget, you can place ads in newspapers and magazines. If you really have the budget, you can place radio and tv ads, such as on local cable stations. The most important thing to remember here is, advertise your website not your sponsor’s. If you tell people to go to yourwebsite.com where you have a number of other websites listed, you’ll get repeat traffic and possibly many signups. If you tell people to go to sponsorwebsite.com/?id=yourname then you may lose a lot of potential visitors and signups. Keep in mind, conventional advertising can be very expensive and is not always effective. We don’t recommend this unless you have a professional design that you’ve already tested for conversions.

PPC Advertising

Pay-Per-Click advertising is a great way to get immediate results. You can sign up for accounts at Google and Overture (Yahoo) as a starting point as their traffic tends to convert very well. Once you understand the PPC game, you can branch off to other sources for traffic. Remember these key elements:

Budget, budget, budget – never spend more than what you would be comfortable losing if the campaign is a complete bust. Most PPC programs offer daily and monthly budget options.

Search vs. content listings – search listings (found alongside natural search listings on the search engine) will always convert better than content listings (found on affiliated websites).

Target your keywords well – never bid on one-word phrases like DVD. Instead, target your keywords specific to the traffic you want to pull, and aim it at pages on your site that are built around that kind of product. In the case of WantedList, you may opt to target keywords like adult DVD rental. People who want free stuff don’t generally spend money – don’t bid on words like free movies or free pictures because most of these people are looking for immediate and free gratification. You will be wasting your money.

Experiment with your bids – It may cost several dollars (and sometimes several hundred dollars) per click to get the top position for a keyword. But you may find that a lower position will yield a better cost per acquisition (CPA). If your sponsor is paying you $25 per signup and your CPA is $10, then you’ve made $15. If on the other hand your CPA is $40 then you’ve actually lost money.

Bid on obscure terms – try for phrases that don’t have a lot of bids on them. You won’t get much traffic, but if there’s no competition then it virtually guarantees a good return on your investment.

Online Classified Ads

Be very, very careful about where you post ads. For example, it is against the CraigsList terms of service to spam their pages with ads, so please don’t do it. However you may find some websites that are ok with adult classified ads and they may be free or cheap to advertise on.

Online Banner Ads

When you promote goods and services on your own website, chances are you’ll include a number of banners on your pages. If they’re targeted well, you’ll make money. However, when advertising your site, you may find that paying for a banner spot on another website may yield either very little traffic, or traffic that converts poorly. I wouldn’t recommend buying banner space unless you’ve got a professional banner design that yields a good click-thru-ratio (CTR) and points to a professional website that converts unique visitors to signups well. Even then, you will need to be careful about where you buy ads. Banner ads on sites with a large amount of traffic are great for building a brand, but if the traffic comes from surfers looking for freebees, then you’re wasting your money unless it’s your goal to make a name for your website because it has something unique to offer visitors.

Here's a hot tip: putting our banner in your signature on some adult webmaster forums with your link code is a great way to get some subaffiliates under you and earn residual income for doing practically nothing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is both an art and a science, and it’s ever-changing due to algorithm upgrades on engines like Google and Yahoo. You can do a search on SEO to get the details, but essentially it boils down to 3 key elements:

Content – Lots and lots of pages full of lots and lots of machine-readable text. This means actual text in your HTML – graphic depictions of text and Flash artwork are very pretty but cannot be read by most web crawling robots. For example, Googlebot will crawl the pages of your site and pull any text it finds. It indexes this content and looks for keywords. If you’re lucky, it will consider your page relevant for a particular key word, and you’ll get a listing whenever someone searches for it.

External Links – Basically, as more websites link to yours, you will get ranked higher in the engines. Try for keyword links if you can – get other webmasters to point to your website with text links rather than banners. It will be difficult at first, but you can start by applying for a listing on one of the many online directory websites. Make sure you have a links or resources page on your site where you can place a reciprocal link back to them. If your site is brand new, you may have to place some links directly on your homepage, but try to limit this. Also, download the Google Toolbar. It will give you a relative idea of how much weight a link from a given page carries. Some webmasters may elect to buy links but be warned, it is against Google’s terms of service to buy pagerank.

Internal Links – Have a well organized structure for your website and have text links that use keywords relevant to the pages they point to. Having a dedicated site map is a great way to make sure that your pages are all linked up.


Build a Website

	Now that you understand the fundamentals of online marketing, you can build your website. If you haven’t already done so, buy a You're now set up to figure out your site structure. You can start simple with a homepage, four sub-pages, a links page and a site map. For your sub-pages, make the categories broad. You can then build more pages under each of these as you add content to your website. After you have your site structure, think about a design. You will want a design that allows for text content, links, images, banners and other advertisements for the programs you are promoting. If you have the budget, you can hire a professional designer, but I would not recommend this until you understand how to build traffic – don’t throw money away. Instead, if you have artistic ability then make a design yourself. Or to save time, you can get a very nice template website for as little as $50.

Back to Top


Promote the Products and Services

	You now understand a number of ways to promote a website. If you want, try a mixture of methods and see which ones convert the best for you. SEO is a given because it requires only sweat equity. However, it can take a long time – months – before you see a single click. Therefore, put a few bucks into a PPC campaign if you can afford it, and if you’re ok with losing some money while you experiment. Have a few friends critique your website before you spend money advertising it. This is also a great way to generate word-of-mouth advertising at no cost.

Back to Top


Promote the Affiliate Programs to Other Webmasters

	Once you’ve tried out a few programs and have seen results, promote the program to others! Many affiliate programs like SpankBank offer commissions on sign-ups generated by webmasters you refer. We pay 5% gross on all referral signups. Let’s say you refer a webmaster who generates $1000 in sales monthly. You’ll earn $50 per month for doing nothing, for as long as their website continues to receive traffic. We have affiliates sending us upwards of 5 figures in revenue – imagine getting a few of these to sign up under you and you could be making thousands monthly with practically no effort at all. Plus, SpankBank has four-day cookies attached to referral ID’s. This means that if Sam clicks through your link today, but doesn’t sign up for our program until 3 days from now, you still get credit for referring him to the site.

Back to Top


Grow and Maintain

	Think of your website as an organism that continually needs to grow and develop in order to stay alive. You need to set aside time every day, or at least every week to write content for your pages, upgrade your design and hunt for links. The more you put in, the more you’ll get out! This primer should serve to get you started as a beginner webmaster. From here you can read up on other ideas for promoting your site and expand even further on these ideas. Don’t forget to sign up for SpankBank and I look forward to sending you your first paycheck!

Back to Top