FabulousEntertainment

It may seem obvious that a sex dating site has passionate users but I’m thinking about the passion in the sense of passion for the site.

In How Not To Die Paul Graham says that “As long as you’ve made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you’re on the right track”.

We’ve got a great core of passionate users now, some people regularly log onto the site first thing in the morning and stay on all day. Other people are actively promoting the site to people they know which is getting us 50 new members a day at the moment. One member of the site has even designed and produced her own Fab Swingers promotional leaflets which she’s handing out at swingers clubs! Another member has told me that they’ve been banned from a pay site for promoting Fab Swingers.

I feel delighted and also a little humbled that people feel so strongly about the site that they’re willing to work so hard.

I think that this is secret weapon that will result in us eventually winning against the expensive pay sites, they may out spend us but they don’t understand how to put a community together.

Well it’s a year ago now since I started Fab Swingers, although it’s less than I year since the site launched. I thought it would be good to review progress.

Well, my initial target was 1,000,000 members in the first year — we’re actually finishing with 10,000 members. Now, I actually think that 10,000 members in a year is great and it makes us the largest free swingers site in the UK. Even better, half of the new members joined in the last few months so the sign-up rate has been accelerating.

The original target was of course based on getting some search engine coverage. So far we’ve only had decent search engine results for about 2 weeks; I’m confident that eventually Google will place us ahead of all the irrelevant/low traffic sites that are currently ahead of us (I believe in their algorithm!) so although it may take months I’m sure it will happen.

I also now understand that there is no way that we could have handled 1 million members in the first year anyway; our business processes and technical infrastructure would have failed. As I write this we’re still not quite there but at least we understand what needs to be done and are much closer to having the processes/infrastructure in place.

So what for the next year? If we simply maintained the present growth we would finish with 25,000 members. But I would like to see Fab Swingers finally get some search engine traffic and we’ve also got the affiliate program, increased word of mouth, newspaper advertising and leaflets at swingers clubs/fetish clubs/sex events. So on that basis I’m going to target 100,000 for the next 12 months.

The great thing about Fab Swingers though is that it is a profitable business with no external pressure so even if it takes much longer to meet these targets than planned then it really doesn’t matter.

I’m delighted to say that Anna has joined me today. She’s going to be helping me with marketing and community management mainly but it will also be great to have her help on sysadmin when I’m away.

She’s made a great start by writing some copy for the Swingers into Blindfolds section of the site. It’s sexy and funny which is exactly the style I’m trying to achieve with the site.

The other big thing is that she’s made me realise that the Swingers Forum we have at the moment just isn’t good enough. A forum is absolutely at the heart of a community site so it is very important to do it right. After much thought we’re going to switch to phpBB. It’s going to be quite a bit of work and no doubt the subject of a future blog post.

It really does make it so much easier having someone I can talk things over with. It’s also making me get some more formal systems in place, I’ve set up some Google Spreadsheets to handle our project planning and to-do lists.

I’ve just received the following mail:

Hi guys,

I have put our profile on your new site because at least I could get into it. I will explain.

We are now living in Dubai where every website with any nudity is blocked, the only reason your site was accesible to me was it is new and has not yet been found by the authorities.

Draconian? Yes, but thats what you get in a Muslim country.

name redacted

I am really keen to do something about this. Maybe we could keep a secret domain name/IP address for members and regularly change it - and make sure that the non-logged in view on that site was about Microsoft or something? But I’m not sure how as a free site we could keep that secret?

I think I’m gonna ask for some advice on this.

I’ve had loads of hassle today from spammers. I had a 419 in the morning who I stamped on immediately but they just re-registered!

So I quickly hacked up an IP address banning system and took out over 4000 African addresses in the same allocation that was being used. It seems to have taken them out.

Then a few hours later my new spam detection system went off and I found that someone was spamming our members. I took him out too. What is slightly annoying though is that I can’t just force one member to log off, I actually have to log everyone off which isn’t ideal.

But then at the end of the day I had a lovely surprise. A member posted to the blog that they’d pimped their profile and I was very impressed! I also didn’t realise this could be done!

It just reminded me of the start of My Space.

I’ve wanted to be in Jane’s Guide for absolutely ages. I really respect what they do and I think it would be a real stamp of approval for the site if we got listed.

I applied today and I really hope that they list us.

If they do I’ll plaster the Jane’s Quality logo all over the site!

It’s now 6 months since I launched the site so I thought it would be good to review where we are. So here’s some positives:

1. The software platform is doing pretty well and the features are popular. The move to the dedicated server has really sorted out the speed problems. The chatroom is still a bit broken I can see the way forward to scale that to any size now.

2. The business model has worked, I’m currently in profit and I’m sure that revenues will scale faster than costs as the site grows.

3. The site has attracted about 3,000 email-verified members in its first 6 months which is prety good for a new site with no marketing budget. The sign-ups have accelerated dramatically but it’s below target.

When I first had the idea for the project I set myself a target of 1 million members in the first year. The big issue is that we are still not getting any traffic from Google (other than for seaches for “fab swingers”) and the original target was entirely based on getting a good share of the massive search engine traffic around swinging.

Everything I’ve read has said that a new site will take 6-9 months before it ranks on Google for competitive terms so hopefully in the next 3 months we will see traffic take off. In the meantime I’ll continue with my guerilla marketing and SEO.

I think that I will also now spend a bit of money on PPC advertising. I am now very comfortable that I can monetise my traffic so I think that I will make a profit but even I don’t I don’t really mind spending my profits on PPC because it will keep the site fresh for the members and will generate lots of content which will feed back to the search rankings.

On the personal side I’ve commited to working on another web project for probably about the next two years. This project will cover my living expenses quite nicely. So I’m quite happy for all of the Fab Swingers profits to be reinvested for the next couple of years which I think will take it to quite an exciting place.

I guess if I’m honest I think that the 1 million member target is not going to happen this year but I think it is quite possible to happen within 18 months, assuming we get some search engine coverage on Google!

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’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.