Advertising is in a bit of a crisis. By that I don’t just mean online advertising. In the past ten years, technologies have surfaced that have changed all the rules for how businesses reach their target audiences. Widespread use of DVRs has made television advertising more challenging. Widespread use of the Internet has dropkicked circulation for newspapers and magazines. Apple has introduced new hardware and software that has dominated the distribution of digital audio content. And online, advertisers are stuck trying to find ways to be noticed without annoying the very people they need to thrive.Add to this the explosion of content. There are more television channels than ever before, more magazines despite the challenges faced by print, more movies and video games released each week, and more websites than any one person could ever consume. What this means is the average website operator is faced with the daunting task of being noticed in a sea of digital data, and at a time when viewers are growing ever resistant to traditional means of getting their attention.

In this challenging environment, you will somehow have to make your mark if you want to build an online business that survives until next year. And even if you do figure out 2009, get ready for the rules to change again in 2010. Adapt or die. Evolve or quit. Online marketers cannot afford to get comfortable; instead, always be ready to respond to the changes brought by new technologies, new trends, and new actions from your competitors. When you build your website, you had better be sure that the people you do attract find something that catches their interest quickly, or it’s back to the virtual sea they’ll go and you’ll be left with nothing but zeros on your income statements.

When you develop landing pages for your website, put yourself into the mind of your target audience. No easy task, since not every visitor will be exactly alike. But there are some commonsense things we can learn simply by paying attention to our own surfing habits, and through keeping a constant watch on the stats we generate through our websites’ log files. Here are a few tips:

Make Your Point Quickly

If there’s one lesson I have learned in my twelve years of website operation it’s that adult surfers have an extremely short attention span. When you design your adult website’s index page, tour pages and various landing pages, make your best sales point quickly, and with a reasonable word count. Your viewers are unlikely to read every word on your page, so make your most important points first and save any supporting text for later on down the page. Too many words can actually drive away surfers.

Don’t Stuff Keywords

When we build pages for our website we of course need to think about how surfers will get to that page in the first place, and for many of us that means search engines. Even if search engines play an important role in your approach to traffic generation, be careful not to simply stuff your website with keywords and keyphrases. First, if you don’t know what you’re doing then you probably won’t increase your search engine traffic anyway. Search engines are pretty sophisticated these days, and can often spot (and penalize) clumsy SEO efforts. But more importantly, you’ll decrease the effectiveness of your pages with surfers. A page stuffed with keywords tells the surfer that the site is more concerned with farming traffic than with providing useful content. Many surfers will click “Back” before they spend any significant time on your site. You should of course use keywords and keyphrases in your text, but do it in a way that communicates effectively and naturally to your audience.

Pictures Outsell Text

For adult websites, the pictures you use on your pages will probably sell significantly better than the text you write. If a page you created is performing poorly, try changing some on the images you are using in the design. For general adult websites, pick some of the more unique and attractive images from your collection. A really good picture will increase the time a surfer will spend on your page, which gives you additional opportunities to make your case and hopefully either convert a sale or at least direct the surfer to the next page.

Don’t Be Les Nessman

Surfers hate an overt sales pitch. If you come across like a sleazy salesman, you’ll lose most of your audience quicker than you can say, “there’s never been a better time to buy.” Most people naturally resist when they know someone is trying to convince them of something – especially when they don’t know that person well. When you design your index, tour and landing pages, you need to quickly communicate what your site offers without sounding like you’re trying to push the surfer into buying something.

If your landing and tour pages follow these simple but important tips, you will have a better chance of reeling in the surfers that you do attract to your website. With the right approach, you’ll keep them around long enough to make a click deeper into your site – and the deeper they click, the closer they get to converting.