In part two of this series, I talked about three issues surrounding the use of text on adult sites. First, I looked at how we can know if we’re using text to its greatest capacity to lure money from browsers.Words in an Image Industry – Why We Need Them and How to Use Them
[Part One, Part Two]
In part two of this series, I talked about three issues surrounding the use of text on adult sites. First, I looked at how we can know if we’re using text to its greatest capacity to lure money from browsers. Second, I talked about how text should be used to reflect the spirit and goals of your site. Finally, I discussed how important it was to use text to emit an image on your site that is neither stupid nor cheap nor deceptive. All three of these main principles are key to the issues of text use, but today I am going to outline some particular ways in which text can be used to enhance and enrich your adult site.
There are three different forms of text use that I will concentrate on. They are: 1) Outsider Enticement, 2) Insider Enhancement, and 3) Visitor Involvement. Each form of text use targets a different important group that comes to your site. And each form of text use must be carefully and thoroughly designed in order to guarantee that a particular group spends money (or more money) at your site.
Outsider Enticement
Some guy sitting around his apartment decides to cruise for porn. He goes to his computer. He’s in the mood for something new. Let’s say he follows a link he has bookmarked or a link he finds through a search engine to your site. His first glimpse, of course, is your homepage. What do you do to entice him?
Most Webmasters throw up a bunch of pictures and a few sleazy lines and hope that this guy will get turned on enough to stay. But we can do much better than that. We can entice this guy to stay not only through our pictures, but also through our words.
There’s a number of ways to do this, but the most important element to all these ways is that you want to get the guy to go to the second page, then the third page, then the fourth page, until finally you have shown him so much, gotten so inside his mind with your message, that he is throwing his credit card digits at your site. You can lead him through this odyssey of discovery by talking him through it.
Like how? Well, you can seduce him to take your tour. You can introduce him to a few of the models on your site. You can describe your content in ways that make him want to see it (and in ways that make it sound perhaps even better than it is). You can appeal to his current interests with sexual suggestions. You can tell him a story that he has to follow by clicking through your free pages. You can make him laugh. You can make him cringe. You can talk to him like a friend and make him never want to leave.
Your goal is simple – entice him with your words. Tell him what he wants to hear. Make him need to hear more from you. Convince him that what you have is what he wants and that he can only get it from you.
Insider Enhancement
Many sites have all their great text up front and then their back-end (their pay-to-get-in section) is devoid of language. That’s like meeting a great lady who’s sexy and talkative (in a good way!) and then, once you shag her, she stops talking. Sure, she might still shag you, but she refuses to utter a word. You’d find that a little weird, wouldn’t you? And you’d be inclined to shag for a while, but after the third or fourth time perhaps you’d get bored or annoyed with this psycho.
The issue here is enhancing the backside of your site with great text that makes guys want to keep paying to get in. This means getting them excited about the community inside your site. And words are the best way to create community. Better than images.
There are many ways to use text to enhance insider experience, thereby increasing the chance that insiders will want to remain insiders. You can have profiles on your models. You can have diary entries from your photographer or team. You can have valuable daily tips or site reviews. You can have articles of interest (anything from sex to investing, extreme sports to ancient history). You can have trivia contests. You can have member chat groups. You can have bullshit sessions for all it matters, as long as it makes your insiders feel like they’re part of a community.
Treat your members like your best friends. Give them lots to look at and lots to think about. Give them a diverse experience that is rich in images and words.
Visitor Involvement
Most of us get astronomically more hits than we get sales. This means that we have many, many more visitors than we have purchasers. Most people don’t purchase anything on their first glance at the goods. It takes five to ten glances for them to start pumping out the cash, which is the entire crux behind the advertising industry. Most adult Webmasters don’t get this. They think, “Hey! I’ll get a guy to come to my site and, bam! First time, he’ll sign up. And if he doesn’t, he’ll remember it so fondly he’ll come back again the next day and sign up.” The fact is most guys visit your site, don’t buy shit, and then away they go, never to visit you again, because there’s just too much great stuff to look at out there.
So, what to do? Visitor involvement is the answer. This is another word for a newsletter, but I don’t like to use that word because it sounds old and papery. Visitor involvement means getting something whereby you can trace your visitors (called an e-mail address) and then marketing to them in a way that keeps them involved with your site even though they never willfully decide to return. After so many acts of involvement, the chance that they will purchase something from you begins to increase dramatically.
Text is a great way to get visitors involved. You get their email, you send them your newsletter, and you re-involve them with your site. Now, of course, it’s far more complex than all this, which is why I am going to have to save the details on exactly how to make this work for my next several articles.
As some of you might have noticed, this essay is not so much about text as it is about marketing, and that’s because, in the world of adult Webmasters, text is marketing. Text is the way you get your message to the right market – your outsiders, your insiders, and your visitors. Speak to them in ways that make them want to listen, and you will have their ear, and their wallet.
Dustin Wood is the Textmaster / Marketing Director for The New Nude Network, a purveyor of excellent erotic sites, including hegre-archives.com, galitsin-archives.com, vulis-archives.com, and thenewnude.com.
The New Nude Network also operates New Nude Cash, a provider of top-quality content, affiliate programs, and ad slots for adult Webmasters. Email Dustin at dustin@hegre-archives.com or visit http://www.newnudecash.com.
