Preferring to spend their time on tour design and site promotion, many adult pay site owners neglect basic design principles when building the “inside” of their sites. You won’t find any revolutionary or extraordinary advice here, just a simple reminder of the most basic philosophies that all adult Webmasters should consider when building a members’ area for a pay site.Preferring to spend their time on tour design and site promotion, many adult pay site owners neglect basic design principles when building the “inside” of their sites. You won’t find any revolutionary or extraordinary advice here, just a simple reminder of the most basic philosophies that all adult Webmasters should consider when building a members’ area for a pay site.
When you build a membership site, do you spend eighty percent of your design time on the tour and twenty percent on the actual members’ area? It’s of course important to spend some time on your tour; an adult Web site’s tour has everything to do with how successful that site is in converting new membership sales. With that in mind, it’s easy for a Webmaster to downplay the importance of the members’ area, or as I like to call it, the “inside” of the site. It’s absolutely possible to make a lot of money off a site with a great tour and a horrible inside. After all, the surfer won’t see the inside until he or she has paid for a membership. But there’s little advantage to neglecting the inside of your pay site. The hard part with running a successful adult Web site is getting surfers to sign up in the first place. If you’ve managed to get someone interested in your site, you might as well keep him or her around. You might be able to sell that member something else in the future, if only a renewal membership next month. So the question to ask yourself is this: what can you offer your members that will keep them coming back day after day, month after month?
GET ORGANIZED
The first (and most often neglected) is organization. If you walked into a video store and the movies were simply thrown onto various shelves in no particular order, would you shift through the mess for hours trying to find something that was of interest, or would you take your ass to Blockbuster Video? Imagine a library or bookstore that simply stacked books in random piles, leaving visitors to push through thousands of books just to find that one book for which they were looking. To organize your members’ area, first decide the types of content that you are going to offer. Images, video clips, full-length movies, erotic fiction and live video shows are just a few examples for what’s common. Separate each into its own featured area of the site; this may sound basic, but you’d be surprised how many pay sites neglect this fundamental design principle. If you offer general erotica and a member wants to find pictures of cum shots, it shouldn’t take that member more than two or three clicks to be knee deep in jiz, so to speak.
SHOW ME THE HOTTIES!
Second, don’t bury the cute models. Too many members’ areas are so into quantity that they bury the cute models that surfers really want to see in too many sweepers. What’s a sweeper? A sweeper is a model so unattractive that she or he sweeps your members right off your site and into the hands of the competition.
THE SPICE OF LIFE
Third is variety. Unless you’re an amateur with his or her own site, make sure to feature more than just a couple different models. Variety applies to types of content as well. Don’t just offer pictures alone when you can also offer live strip shows, video clips and stories. If you look hard enough, you can find all kinds of affiliate programs that can provide your pay site with free content.
COMMUNITY STANDARDS
Fourth is community. If you build a nice community for your members then they will be more likely to stay longer. Offer live chat rooms, message boards, daily jokes, games and news headlines.
BACK YOUR PRODUCT
Fifth is customer support. Make it easy for your members to contact you if they need help. Don’t make it difficult for members to cancel – you’ll just piss off the government, and most of your members will simply charge back their subscription anyhow. Plus, staying in touch with your members will provide you with valuable feedback that you can use to improve your site.
“If you can shoot your own content or hire a photographer and models to do it for you, then you have a leg up on everyone else. But there’s more to originality than just the content itself. How do you present that content?”
GO ORIGINAL
Sixth, and perhaps most important, is originality. With hundreds of thousands of adult sites on the Internet today, it’s not easy to do something that’s original. If you can shoot your own content or hire a photographer and models to do it for you, then you have a leg up on everyone else. But there’s more to originality than just the content itself. How do you present that content? Do you offer your members some sort of complete fantasy, or do you just throw pictures in a gallery and leave it up to them to fill in the blanks?
So once your tour is converting reasonably well and you start to get a regular flow of new sign-ups, turn some much-needed attention to the inside of your pay site. Remember that an adult Web site, unlike a print publication or video, is a continual work in progress. No Web site is ever complete because there’s always something more that can be done to improve it. Don’t neglect your members’ area, and in time you’ll have a valuable Web property that will serve as a steady source of income for years to come.
Connor Young is Editor-in-Chief of The ADULTWEBMASTER Magazine. He lives in California where he has worked as an adult Webmaster since 1\’\’7.
