FabulousEntertainment

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.

I’m making pretty good progress with the UK market, we’re now approaching 1000 members and traffic (and ad revenue) is double what it was at the start of the month.

The question now is whether I just continue to focus on the UK or whether I try to seed some of the other markets. The USA market is at least 5 times the size of the UK and I also think that I lose quite a lot of sign-ups when users from outside the UK arrive at the site and find out there are no members in their own country.

On the other hand I have a seedling of a successful UK site (up from Alexa rank 2,386,556 on 19 Nov to 1,293,635 today) and if I give it care and attention it will grow into a huge success. But if I get distracted with other markets then it is likely to either fail or at least not grow as it should.

So I think that what I’ll do is continue to focus on the UK but when I have some spare moments I’ll look at the other markets. Once the UK work ups the site in the search engines I’ll probably penetrate the other markets naturally, if that’s an appropriate metaphor for an adult dating site.

Here’s the Adult/Casual Dating section of the Online Personals Watch blog.

There’s some interesting stats about Adult Friend Finder. According to one of the posts AFF is running at over one million registrations per month. I expect that this traffic is mainly driven by Pay Per Click advertising and their huge affiliate network, both options that are closed to Fab Swingers.

It is great to know that there are more than a million people a month who want to join a swingers community and I’m sure that once these people find out that there’s a free swingers community with pretty much the same functionality of AFF then they will come to us.

We are currently approaching 500 members and I think that things are getting easier. Getting the initial members to sign up was tricky because there weren’t very many people on the site - so they were unlikely to meet anyone.

However know that there’s a reasonable number of people on the site it’s become a bit more attractive. We’ve also been getting some really nice comments in our blog such as this and this.

I’m facing a bit of a conflict between doing development work on the site and marketing. At the moment I’m spending the bulk of my time on marketing; people seem to be fairly happy with the site and I think the main factor in success from here is attracting more members. In my opinion the site is already better than our main competitors.

Today the site was thoroughly crawled by MSN, this now means that we are finally getting proper coverage from all three major search engines (the other two being Google and Yahoo of course).

Ask has been round the site a little bit but is certainly not properly crawling it. However Ask has such a small market share that I’m not too bothered.

Of the big three, Yahoo is the only search engine which is actually sending us much traffic but I’m relatively relaxed about this: it’s still very early days and overall I’m very pleased with how quickly the site has been accepted by the search engines.

Google’s slogan is famously “don’t be evil” but I’m thinking that I want to make this my slogan too. The adult industry generally has a pretty bad reputation; someone said to me recently that the online adult business can be summed by by CREAM - Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

I would like Fab Swingers to be the opposite of this. I’ve made a lot of effort to make it a good website and a good citizen in the internet world. First, I’ve made it sure that it is all valid XML and passes the W3 Validator, I’ve also put in both PICS and ICRA rating tags to make sure that the parental controls on Internet Explorer, AOL, etc. work properly.

Most importantly though I’ve began the lengthy process of building trust with the users of the site and I really hope that over the years the swinging community will accept Fab Swingers into the family.

PS. I’ve had a few beers prior to writing this post!

Up to know my advertising has not been doing very well. I’ve now tested it for 3 weeks and I’ve made precisely zero from it.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about why this is and I’ve reached the conclusion that it’s because swingers probably don’t buy that much porn. If I was inclined to bash one off I would probably be more turned on by the pictures of the people on Fab Swingers rather than the adverts and there would also be that extra edge to it because I would know that there is always outside chance that I might get to play with them some time.

I’m going to ditch the porn adverts and instead use Clicksor. This will also have the advantage that I’ll be paid per click rather than having to wait out a two stage sales process.