FabulousEntertainment

I saw this quote on some swingers site. I like it a lot. It reminds me somewhat of Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where he talks about there being two types of womaniser; first there is the man who is looking for the perfect woman but of course never finds her and secondly the man who just enjoys the infinite variety.

It is also something that is very true about marketing. Providing you have a basic proposition that people like then the key to successful promotion is just quantity; the more you do the more it works.

Fab Swingers has succeeded because of quantity. It’s not just quantity in marketing of course, but there is also a strong network effect because the more members the site has, the more valuable it is to the members. And the more likely they are to recommend it.

The only thing I’m feeling a bit negative about right now is that I’m mainly having to focus on just keeping the site going as the servers struggle to cope with the rocketing traffic. I’d be much happier if I could concentrate on marketing which is my skill.

However I’m sure that most social networking sites would be happy to have the problem of struggling to cope with traffic growth!

I’ve just finished my last day at work and returned from my leaving night out (so excuse any typos!). My plan from now on is to make a living from Fab Swingers and the other website I run.

It is quite a big step but it’s something that I really needed to do. Both websites need more time spent on them if they are to realise their potential and I was just being over stretched by trying to do too many things at once.

It’s also a bit more pressure though, as my hobby turns into my job. One of my friends has a great expression for this type of situation: COB which is Cock On Block!

I am delighted to say that I am now an editor of DMOZ!

I’ve already made a good start of sorting out the Swinging section however it will take some time before the edits become public.

It’s quite a strange role because normally I have very strong views which I sound off about but as a DMOZ editor I have to be impartial. I am enjoying it though and I would like to take over some other categories in due course.

I applied last night to become an editor of the DMOZ Open Directory. I really want to try to sort out the Swinging -> Personals and Ads section. At the moment it’s a bit of a mess with broken sites, inaccurate descriptions and fairly ridiculous omissions - including top 100 Alexa sites which haven’t made it in.

The parent category is also a bit of a mess so hopefully I’ll be able to look at that too.

I do hope I get accepted but I’m not holding my breath.

A few months ago I bought a MacBook Core 2 Duo with 512MB memory. I think that the Intel switch is beginning to settle down and it looks the initial teething problems have been resolved more or less (although Microsoft Office and Photoshop are still not available as native Intel binaries).

However I was seeing the spinning disc of death just a bit too much so I decided to upgrade the memory to 1 GB. The MacBook has two memory slots but unfortunately for performance the Duo processor likes evenly matched banks so my MacBook shipped with 2 x 256MB so to upgrade I needed to buy 2 x 512 MB chips.

Installing the memory seemed straight forward however in the process of upgrading the memory I somehow messed up the power so the battery wasn’t charging. However I reset the system management controller and that seemed to fixed it.

The new memory has absolutely transformed the computer and certainly as far as I’m concerned 1 GB is really the minimum memory required for a MacBook.

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!

Last week I was made redundant, which was completely unexpected. Unfortunately I am not going to get very much money so I’m going to have to move pretty quickly to find something else.

I’ve spent the last 11 years working in the internet industry, mainly helping people with web businesses. But I’ve never actually ran my own website which is something I’ve wanted to do for sometime. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to start a community website for people in the swingers lifestyle and build it up to 1 million members within a year.

Why swingers? Well a mix of reasons. First, it’s something I know something about; secondly, I think it’s a community that’s pretty badly served by the websites that are out there just now; and finally there is a lot of demand with about 5 million searches a month for “swinging” on the search engines.

I’ve got roughy £300 / $500 in total to spend on this project so it is going to be tough competing with the much larger companies out there but I’m pretty sure I’ll do it.

This blog is going to be the story of how I build a home-based business up to the stage where I can make a living out of it. Or it might be a porn version of Grapes of Wrath documenting a downward spiral of failure and disaster. But let’s look on the bright side!