FabulousEntertainment

I am extremely pleased with the performance of my Adult Friend Finder affiliate advertising, I’m making roughly 300% more than I was just with Clicksor.

The funny thing is that despite reducing the impressions of the Clicksor adverts by 50% (to make room for the AFF and some Vidshop adverts) the revenue from Clicksor is almost exactly the same. I think that it’s because I’ve made the advert area more dynamic with lots of different ads so it’s become more eye catching.

It would be so much easier if adult sites were allowed to use AdSense.

I’m just in the process of switching from PyBlosxom to WordPress.

The three reasons I chose PyBlosxom originally were:

• I love Python, the language it’s written in.
• It needs absolutely minimal system requirements and puts virtually no load on the server.
• It’s very secure.

Unfortunately I need slightly more advanced features than PyBlosxom offers. The main one was that I really wanted a robust comments/trackback system running because a blog that you can’t comment on is more like a rant than a conversation.

This Christmas I asked for the gift of traffic, and I’m quite pleased with what I got! Here’s my update of the Alexa traffic rankings. The Google Toolbar hasn’t been updated with the latest PageRanks so they are unchanged from my last post.

The Alexa Ranks quoted are the 3 month averages. Fab Swingers’ 1 week average is 165,318 so I’d certainly hope that we’ll overtake Swing2us early in 2007.

I’ve written a criticism of Swinging Heaven. I find it really annoying the way that they imply that the site is free when it isn’t. For example the opening sentence on their homepage is “It is completely free to register as a member of this site” which is true in the sense although it is extremely misleading as free members can’t do anything at all!

I really wish that Swinging Heaven would just take the honest approach and
say that it is a subscription site - why not be honest when people are going to
find out very quickly what’s going on?

I’ve decided to give the Adult Friend Finder affiliate programe a go. There’s three optionss available:

• Pay Per Click: between $0.05 and $1 depending on what percentage sign up for the free membership. $1 is paid for 50% signing up.
• Percentage Program: between 35% and 75% of initial orders and 35% to 55% of recurring orders depending on the traffic per day.
• Per Order Payout: $30 flat fee per order.

So let’s say I refer 20 visitors a day and 25% signup for a free membership. That would be $8 per day under PPC. If 5% of free memberships convert and they opt for the most popular order of $19.95 that would be $5 initially plus a chunk of their lifetime subscriptions under the Percentage Program. Finally, the same order rate would be worth an average of $7.50 per day under option 3.

So under these assumptions I’m probably best with option 1 or possibly option 2 depending on what their renewal rates are. My conversion rates are fairly wild gueses though, but I’ll be able to report back properly once I have some proper data.

I’m rather pleased today. New signups in the past 7 days are 212. Also, according to Alexa we beat Swing2us for traffic this week - in other words we’ve moved up the traffic chart by more than 2 million places in less than a month.

This has also fed through to our bottom line and I’m pleased to say that we are now comfortably in profit, if we exclude the cost of my time. It looks like we can do about 10 times our present traffic without any server upgrades which is positive too.

My initial email campaign also went pretty well. I emailed just over 3,000 people and got about 33% signing up for the site. I got one complaint about the spam and seven people took the trouble to email me to congratulate me on the idea. The only negative is that I’ve now exhausted that source of email addresses so I’m going to have to think hard to find a replacement.

Well the Recommend Us link that I mentioned yesterday has worked incredibly well. This will be definitely be a regular feature of the site. I think it’s also a great lesson that I shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help from the Fab Swingers Community.

I’ve just been reading craigblog which is the blog of Craig from craigslist. It’s just really made me think that I should make a bigger deal of our ideals about not charging for the site.

In the Adult Dating section I say that “Charging for a swingers website is a bit like taking a prostitute to a couples party” and in the Swinging Heaven page I end with “because sex should be free”.

I really do want to make more of the ideals of the site; particularly in comparison with our very money grabbing competitors. Although I do want to make a good living from this site it will never be a $100m plus outfit like Adult Friend Finder and at the end of the day the site isn’t mainly about maximising revenues.

This is also our secret weapon. Today as an experiment I’ve added a Recommend Us page allowing our users to spread the word. I don’t think that the conventional sites could really pull this off (at least not without offering a bribe, but I don’t think most people in the lifestyle want to profit from their friends). Let’s see what happens.

I’ve been running a trial comparing AdBrite with Clicksor.

I do like the AdBrite directory which I think might be good for selling some CPM adverts but I’m afraid that I’m currently stuck with PPC and Clicksor is paying me a cent more per click.

I also really like Clicksor’s contextual adverts, it really does increase the click thru rates.