Adult Website Development: Goals for Commercial Websites
A while back I wrote about the need to have a purpose when you first set out to develop a plan for building an adult website. In that discussion, I touched on some of the variables that are in play for adult webmasters – variables like type of content, niche, etc. The purpose of that discussion was to point out that before you start to build a website, you need to think about the variables you have under your control that you’ll need to tweak just right to make a unique website that serves a purpose for its audience.I want to go back again to a general discussion of the things that ought to be going through your mind while you’re developing a blueprint for your adult Internet business, but this time let’s take a slightly different approach. This time, let’s talk about the goals you hope to achieve rather than the ways you can make your site unique and useful to visitors.
There’s a pretty good chance that before you finish reading this sentence, you’ve already thought to yourself something like, “Goals? My goal is to make money, duh!” For most adult websites, but not all, making money is a given. But that’s too broad of a goal, and simply knowing that your website is a commercial endeavor isn’t going to be very helpful.
So instead, let’s look at some goals that are useful, starting with the obvious.
Initial Monthly Revenue Target. Start with a realistic number here of how much money you want to be making each month in order for your website to be considered minimally successful. I’ll stress again, this starting number should be realistic! It’s not what you want to eventually make when you’re rubbing elbows with Larry Flynt, but the very minimum you need to be making every month at some point down the road in order for your website business to be worth continuing. It should include revenue from all sources, whether that be affiliate program commissions, direct sales of paysite memberships, sales of hard goods, whatever.
If time isn’t a factor (for instance if you are retired or sit around the house all day no matter what), then your initial monthly revenue target will probably be just enough to pay the expenses of running your website – plus some beer money. If time is important to you, then you’ll need to cover your expenses, plus a reasonable amount of compensation for your time before you can call your site a minimal success. How much is an hour of your time worth if you were to spend it in some other pursuit that brings known financial returns? Now consider how much it will cost you to host your website, license or create content for your website, purchase or create software to design and run your website, domain name registration fees, legal consultation fees, etc. Do you plan to attend industry trade shows? If so, factor in the cost.
Time to Reach Initial Monthly Revenue Target. With any new business, you’ll probably want to set a time limit of how long it’s worth it to operate in the red while trying to reach your initial monthly revenue target. If you make this number too small, you will be drastically reducing your chances for success – especially when you consider that website promotion and traffic generation is a game that’s played out gradually over time. If you make the number too large, however, then you might be spinning your wheels in a futile effort to make something work that simply isn’t going to happen.
Again, the number you determine here will probably be affected by how important time is to your individual situation. If time isn’t important then you might be able to set this number a little higher. Don’t set it too high, even if time doesn’t matter, because at some point you might want to consider scrapping a plan and trying something new if you simply can’t meet your lowest goals.
But with the question of how much time to give it, money is also going to be a factor here. You should know how much it’s going to cost to run your website each month. How long can you afford to run your operation at that level of expense?
This may seem like an especially long period of time, but I generally advise new webmasters to shoot for 12 months. Veteran webmasters might be able to reduce this by half for new projects, and webmasters with both experience and access to lots of traffic might push that number down even smaller. 12 months might seem like forever, but if at the end of the year you have a successful website that produces month after month because it’s built on sound principles, it will be worth the effort big time.
Building a website business takes time because you’ll need to adjust to the feedback you receive from users and the from the information you get through your website’s logs or stats; you’ll need to make changes, wait for more feedback, make more changes, etc. As your website builds up more and more traffic, the feedback and stats you receive will be increasingly valuable. So you also have to allow time for branding to take effect, if applicable, search engines to trust your website, page rankings to increase, and link trades to build up.
Sales Conversions Per Month. For each item that you are selling on your website, you should ask yourself how many sales you’ll need to make of that particular item each month for it to be considered successful. Your target monthly revenue discussed above looks at total revenue from all sources, but you’re likely to have a number of different methods for making money with your website.
For example, in a traditional adult paysite you’ll make money from the new monthly memberships you sell, from existing members whose accounts recur for another month, and probably from traffic that you send to other companies’ paysites in exchange for a sales commission. You might also make some money from sources like members who buy time with a private webcam service that you offer.
Each item should have its own monthly sales goal. If any of these things are failing to meet the goal you are then in position to evaluate that specific aspect of your business in more detail.
For example, let’s say I build a new website called ynotbuymyporn.com, and on this site I offer monthly memberships for $30 that recur at $25 for subsequent months. Let’s also assume that I send some traffic to PussyCash’s ImLive.com cam site, for my members who want to buy some private webcam time, and I also send some traffic to my friend’s paysite, and he has agreed to pay me $30 for every sale that I generate for him.
Now, I previously set my initial target revenue goal at $500 per month, and here’s how I expect to make that money: 7 new paysite subscriptions per month ($210), 5 recurring memberships per month ($125), another $100 in commissions from PussyCash (at least 2 conversions), and $75 in commissions from my friend’s website (at least 3 conversions). That puts me slightly over my target revenue, and gives me monthly conversion targets of 7, 5, 2 and 3. Now if I am failing to meet my initial target revenue, I can look at these individual conversion targets to determine whether it’s a site-wide problem (likely if I have no traffic) or some other problem, like failure to retain enough members, or poor conversions at my friend’s website.
So while we discussed sales conversions in this article as if it were one category, we’re really setting a number of goals here, depending on how many different ways we plan to make money.
Desired User Behavior Goals. In a way, when you build a website you should be constructing your design and content with a mind for training your users to behave in desirable ways. Sounds pretty BDSM, but it’s really not that kinky. You built your website for a reason, and you want to make sure it serves that purpose. We’ve discussed some of the financial goals you might set for your website, but sometimes there are other goals that don’t directly produce direct revenue, but which serve the big sales picture nonetheless.
For example, email newsletters can be an effective method for keeping in contact with customers and potential customers. But even if you have a great newsletter packed with fantastic content that any adult should be happy to receive, you still have to convince each person to sign up for your mailings. A long time ago, that wasn’t so hard; but users are wary of email spam these days, and with good reason. So one of your goals might simply be to “get X amount of users to sign up for the email newsletter every day.”
With this example, every person who signs up can be thought of as a conversion. Your goal should be realistic, taking into account how much traffic your website receives every day. So if your website gets 1000 unique visitors per day, you might set a newsletter signup goal of 10 per day. Be prepared to adjust your goal if you’re way off base, or as your traffic numbers change. Now when you make tweaks to your site’s newsletter signup process, or how you notify visitors of the newsletter’s availability, you can track how these changes impact your goal.
This isn’t limited to newsletters, of course. You might want users to read an “about us” page, click to your blog, click a link to follow you on Twitter, etc. Set goals that make sense for the type of website you’re running.
Traffic Related Goals. I know, you want one meeellliiooon visitors every day, right? Get it out of your system, write that goal down on a piece of paper as if it might happen someday, frame it on your office wall if you want, and then get a new sheet of paper and get serious.
It’s really important to set realistic and informed traffic goals for your website, because traffic is probably going to determine how successful you are at your other goals. I wish I could give you some simple numbers of some foolproof formula to follow, but traffic just isn’t that simple. The source of your traffic will have something to say about the rate at which you can convert that traffic into sales and revenue. So if your visitors are of the “not likely to buy porn” variety, you need higher traffic goals than if your traffic is more agreeable to the possibility of making a purchase.
I don’t want to get sidetracked in a discussion about traffic here, but I’ll offer this simple example for the sake of clarification. Suppose all your traffic came from Google. One group of arrivals found your website after searching for “free porn” while the other found your website after searching for “porn membership sites.” The first group is likely to be a lot larger than the second, but they’re specifically searching for sites that don’t require a purchase; the second group is probably willing to make a purchase if they like what they see.
So we know not all visitors are he same. That means when you set your traffic goals, you’ll need to find a realistic number that represents the average visitor to your site. That means you’ll need to think about how you expect visitors to find your website (think about the marketing approaches you plan to take) and then do a little research about what reasonable conversion ratios would be for visitors coming from those sources. You’ll be assuming your website is well built and can keep up with average conversions in the industry, of course. Your best bet for getting a feel for conversions is to ask other webmasters about the results they’re getting – and then increase whatever conversion ratio they tell you by at least 35%, because they’re probably lying! So if I generally hear that people are converting their Google traffic at an average rate of 1 in 250 for paysites similar to mine, I’d set my own goal at around 1 in 400 just to be realistic.
That can give me a general idea if the numbers that I need coming into my website, but most sites consist of more than one page. So when you’re setting traffic goals, think about goals for each page of your website. Once you have a unique visitor at your site, where do you expect that visitor to click? What pages will he or she visit? By setting traffic goals all over your site, you can track how different aspects of your website are performing compared to your internal expectations. Keeping tabs in this will be invaluable for your later SEO efforts, and for knowing when and where to make tweaks to your website’s presentation.
So now you have an idea of the types of goals you should be defining for your website. By no means was this article an exhaustive list, but you should have a good idea of where your mind should be at, and what kinds of goals you need to set. Now you just need to get to work setting the goals that make the most sense for your unique adult website.