Pics from AEE 2012 and Internext
Long Term Networking
January 16, 2012 By 1 Comment
This didn't happen overnight. Give your contacts time to grow and develop.
For many people conferences are an important part of our business networking. They are a way we can keep up with the industry changes, technology, and new people. It is the best way to make real life relationships with people and take your conversation off the computer.
This week 2 big conferences are back to back. Internext is the 15th-17th and AEE is the 18th-21st. There will be many important people from the adult entertainment community at one, if not both, of these conferences.
A lot of people go to these shows with unrealistic expectations. They think they will meet people and as soon as they get home they will have a treasure chest of opportunity. Well, in some ways they are right. The networking is incredible. If you make the right connections you might have a treasure chest of opportunity. To mix my metaphors, that doesn’t mean that they will fruit over night.
When you go to a show be prepared to nurse those relationships. The show is just the first step, though a very important first step. Now you need to follow up. You need to keep in touch. Over time you will be surprised at what can come from these contact. Sometimes direct businesses, sometimes referrals…sometimes both!
Occasionally an opportunity will convert immediately after a show, but often time they have a several month gestation. So go to the shows but give it time to develop.
Mainstream Thinks Dot XXX is a Bust
December 12, 2011 By 1 Comment
An op-ed piece was written on Mashable about the new dot XXX domain. It was a criticism piece about dot XXX being an irrelevant domain and that main stream people will only be buying it to prevent pornographers from using their trademark.
The author was ignoring the first non-adult trademark to purchase a .XXX with their own uses in mind..PETA. PETA was one of the first companies to buy a .XXX and they have every intention of using the site for their own marketing purposes. Since many people think that their ads are verging on pornographic anyway, it will be interesting to see what they do with their new domain.
The writer continued to criticize the adult industry and their history of domain names, saying that most of our traffic is based off of accidental web stumbles instead of specific searches, SEO and all the other traditional means of driving traffic to a site. He used the example of Whitehouse.com being an adult site and not a site for the White House. In that case, yes accidental traffic was the primary source. Of course the domain also gained a big reputation because it is not the White House and people liked the humor of it. In this case the criticism was more that someone was quick enough to buy that hot domain real estate and figure out a way to monetize it in a big way.
He also used Whitehouse.com as an example of a site not being what is appears to be. According to this logic, your business URL and name needs to be reflective of exactly what you do. So if you make wool scarves, you better call your business Wool Scarves Inc and have the domain be woolscarves.com. Because branding like “Warm Sheep” is misleading. I think the marketing world on a whole would have a huge issue with this logic.
Is he right that most mainstream businesses will buy a .XXX domain to prevent someone else from using it? Yes. Of course that is why they also bought .net, .me, .com, .co, .info, .cc ….you get my point. If your business is trademarked and branded you want to make sure that you are capturing every possible source of traffic. You don’t want someone else benefiting from your brands hard work. Is .XXX any different? No.
So will there be some mainstream .XXX that is actually used? Yes. Will some be parked? Yes. Does it mean that .XXX is a failure? ….no.
Buying Twitter followers is like a bad boob job
October 28, 2011 By 2 Comments
You created a Twitter account. You learned to tweet. You started following people, and some started to follow you back. But you see other tweeps who have thousands of followers, compared to your hundred. The green-eyed monster rears its big green head and you want that many too. So what do you do? Believe it or not, many people go out and actually buy their followers.
Buying followers is not the answer.
There are many services out there that will let you buy followers. I say to people, a little tongue-in-cheek, that for $100 I could have 10,000 followers tomorrow. Ok, it would be a bit more than $100 and it might take a week, but I could still get them. The problem with buying Twitter followers is that it is like a bad boob job. It looks good on the outside, but when you take your shirt off it looks awful. What I mean with my awful metaphor is this: looking like you have 10,000 fans overnight is great, on the surface. Instant popularity. The reality is that it is hollow (warning, here comes another bad metaphor); it is a one night stand with no orgasm. Not only is it meaningless, there is no satisfaction.
- Bought followers do not read your tweets.
- They do not retweet you.
- Bought followers do not know who you are.
- They are not necessarily even people!
- Bought followers will never be clients or customers.
- And they will not click your links.
Bought followers may make your numbers look good but in all probability they will not benefit your long-term goals. If you want real engagement, click-throughs, retweets, people who help grow your network, read your tweets and do business with you, you have to do it organically. It is slower, but the payoff is much bigger.
This said, I will admit here that not all the follower buying sites out there are useless, some of the better ones offer to connect you with targeted followers and users, which is not the same as buying randomly in bulk. Ultimately Twitter is about engagement. Sure, you can purchase as many followers as you can afford, but if you are not participating in the discussion you will not receive any authentic benefits.
#TittyTuesday #FollowFriday and other sexy hashtags
July 22, 2011 By 7 Comments
Want to tap into the larger Twitter world and reach people beyond your followers? Hashtags are your key to the Twitterverse, and keywords are the spare keys you hide under the false rock in your garden.
Hashtags are words with a # in front of them. You will often see multiple words strung together into one, almost unintelligible, jumble of letters. For instance #deletemynumberif, which is trending as I write this. If you were to space this out it would read “delete my number if”. To make it easier to differentiate words, people will often capitalize the beginning of each word. The tag would then look like: #DeleteMyNumberIf. This makes it easier to read when stringing the words together.
What makes hashtags such a powerful tool is that they are easy to track and easy to follow. When someone uses one in a post, you can just click the tag and it will show you all the other tweets using that same tag. You can also search for specific hashtags. There is a website that shows you the popularity, and rate of posting, of hashtags. Go to Hashtag.org to see the influence of any hashtag.
Here is a list of popular hashtags and their rate for being tweeted. Now, .07% might seem low, but the average number of tweets sent per day is 140 million. So .07% is 98,000 tweets – and that’s a lot!
- #TittyTuesday .07%
- #Sexy #.25%
- #FollowFriday .09%
- #FF 1.73% (this is a more popular hashtag for #FollowFriday)
Keywords are searchable, but not clickable. This means you can use Twitter search to look for the keywords, but if you use them in a post they will not be clickable. One thing nice about keywords is that they do not have to be pushed together to form one nearly illegible word, they can be a series of words with spaces. This also means they are harder to spot as being keywords. However, if you use good keywords you can tap into some great trending topics.
Another way to tap into trending topics is to look at your Twitter feed. On the right side menu, there is a topic called “Trending” that will show you what is currently trending. You can also go to sites like WhatTheTrend.com to see this. The site will also tell you why something is trending. For instance, “Hard Nipples” is trending. Well, you might think, of course it is trending! Who doesn’t like hard nipples? Well this is not trending because of any Twitter After Dark action. It is trending because a judge from America’s Best Dance Crew said something about his nipples getting hard in response to a pole dance. Ok, so maybe it should be a part of Twitter After Dark.
But just because it does not originate in adult does not mean that you can’t capitalize on it. You have an audience that is specifically paying attention to this keyword. Tweet it out and use the keyword; you might reach an audience you don’t normally get to talk to.
Keywords and hashtags are significantly under used in adult tweets. If you want to reach your audience, and broaden your audience, be strategic – use hashtags and keywords!
Vivid Swayed by the Court of Public Opinion
July 13, 2011 By 1 Comment
On July 6th Vivid Entertainment offered Casey Anthony a XXX contract. To say the public was shocked and appalled was a sever understatement. There was a cry of outrage all across Twitter. The loudest cries came from the adult stars who were extremely vocal about their disgust with Vivid and were making calls for a boycott from their fans…and from the stars!
When people with 51,000 followers ask them to stop buying Vivid, and then ask their friends who also have tens of thousands of followers to stop buying Vivid, you will feel the power of their influence. The ability to reach literally hundred of thousands people within a matter of minutes is a flex of muscle that most people cannot match.
Well, being lambasted on Twitter and Facebook, in the blogs, in the news, and on the message boards had an effect because Vivid withdrew the offer before the end of business the same day they made the offer. Hersch stated, “It has become obvious to us that Vivid fans, and people in general, want nothing to do with her and that includes a XXX movie.”
The court of public opinion released its verdict hard and loud and in the process demonstrated the power of social media. Never before has public opinion had the swiftness and the strength that social media provides. Not only do people have a vehicle for their voice but the have access to huge networks on a massive scale. In moments like these you see the power of influence and how a few influential people asking for support can spread their issue across the internet, and therefore the world, like a wild fire in a tumbleweed field. What previously took huge media influence, possibly orchestrating incredible numbers of people to protest, and would take weeks if not months to express the depth of disapproval about an issue can now take less than a few hours.
The power of your influence is not just for selling or getting people to your website, but can be used for social good as well.
Dot XXX at Ynot
June 29, 2011 By 1 Comment
The Dot XXX panel at the Ynot Summit was definitely the highlight of the show. The panel featured Eric Bernstein from Embalaw, the Free Speech Coalition, Vaughn Liley from ICM Registry (aka Dot XXX), and Conner Young from Ynot. The talk quickly got tense, especially between Vaughn and Tom from Free Speech. Despite some tension a lot of information was put out, and misinformation was clarified. For instance, Vaughn said that India has not banned Dot XXX. Also to help combat some of the potential SEO challenges, Dot XXX will be launching their own search engine. Of course this does not solve the Google or Bing SEO issue, but it could create some interesting adult search and marketing options.
A new development is that you can now unblock a domain that you previously blocked. This had been a big concern for people. They were worried that if they blocked a domain it would be permanently inaccessible. The parking fee got everyone stirred up. Yes you can park your domain, but you will pay to do it. Meaning if you are getting Dot XXX simply because you don’t want someone else to use it you will have to pay a few hundred dollars more per year to not use it and keep it parked. Though dot XXX said why would you want to park a domain that is getting traffic. A good point if you are an adult site. But if you are not an adult site and you don’t want anyone attaching .xxx to your domain name, you are going to pay a hefty fee.
Here is a video of the panel if you would like to watch it in its entirety.
ICANN opens up TLD Registration- Are you ready for .Sexy?
June 24, 2011 By 1 Comment
Friday Feature Photo: Tara Lynn Foxx on her limited edition Adult Trading Card
So .XXX is not the only top level domain that is throwing their TLD into the ring. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organization that oversees TLD’s is opening up registration.
For most people we never think about our TLD, except maybe when you are registering a new web address (URL). In the adult industry, with all the hullaballoo about .XXX, I think it is safe to say that TLD’s have become a common topic of conversation. Whether you are for or against it, .XXX is making people think about the importance of their web address real estate.
.Com is the prime real estate on the internet. It is such prime real estate that most people assume you are a dot com. If you don’t have the prime domain then you might be sending web traffic to the site that does own your dot com.
Every once in a while a site like GoDaddy.com will try to convince us that a TLD like .CO will be the next .com. This is more a marketing push to get people to register .co instead of, or even in addition to, a .com. Of course there are other issues with .co, like people thinking it is a typo or mis-remembering it as .com. To date, dot XXX is the only alternative TLD to gain traction as a plausible dot com replacement.
Despite dot com continuing to dominate website naming conventions, a few have managed to worm their way in. The TLD .me is one that is gaining popularity as it gets incorporated into URLs and in certain ways become phrases, like tungle.me a calendar and meeting scheduling website. “Hey, just tungle.me” is becoming a phrase people are starting to hear. Show.me is a real estate social network.
Another TLD that has made a splash is .ly. You might be wondering what sites use that. Well, how about Bit.ly. This is the number one website used for shortening web urls for social sharing. Almost every adult star and adult website will be familiar, and have likely used, Bit.ly at some point in their social marketing ventures.
So despite the overwhelming cost ($184,000) to submit a new TLD to ICANN, do not be surprised if you start seeing some interesting ones out there like .you or .whatever or .sexy. They may not overtake .com but will any of them get traction? Or will dot XXX be the only top TLD to cause a stir?
Tara Lynn Foxx is this weeks Friday Feature Photo. Make sure you chat her up on Twitter @taralynnfoxx. She is a great gal to tweet with. Not only will she keep you up to date with her appearance and updates to her site, but she might get a little flirty in her tweets with you. I love a good flirty tweet!
Hit up the Adult Trading Card Company to learn how to get a card like hers! Follow them on Twitter @ATCCompany
Video from Exxxotica Miami
June 1, 2011 By 1 Comment
The Pretty Things Peep Show gave everyone a great show at Exxotica Miami with some Burlesque and Sword Swallowing. And please forgive the video quality, they were taken from my phone at the show.
The fire tassel dance by Go-Go Amy
Here is the video of the sword swallowing.
Some Classic Burlesque dancing by Go-Go Amy!
2 Live Crew gave a rare performance. Here is part of “Me So Horny”
