For the most part, search engine marketing is not by any stretch of the imagination sexy. For example, I spend the majority of my time sitting in front of my 22” monitor that has at least 20 different windows open. Either I’m staring at PHP or HTML code or analytic tools with funky graphs, though there many curves they are far from the sexy kind. However, in order to be the best at what I do, I need to always keep an eye open to see what my competitors are doing. In the pursuit of maintaining my marketing edge, I often must venture into the steaming sexy underworld of web marketing. So prepare yourself for a wild journey because I plan to bring you along for the ride.
However, before I do I need to give you a quick history lesson. Back in 1999 the Internet was seen as the world’s largest newly discovered gold mine. Millionaires and billionaires were being created left right and center. Even I was offered a few million in investment for one of my online businesses. By 2000, this immense bubble burst and those eager investors disappeared. The near collapse of the online business world destroyed many large Internet businesses. The result was many of the top designers and web marketers were scrambling for work. One area of the web which was still raking in the cash was the sex industry. Porn was (actually still is) king. Now to further fuel their success porn sites had access to many top designers and marketers at rock bottom prices.
The online sex industry now set to work to dominate the web. The marketers were employing the latest marketing strategies to get visitors to their sites. Sex sites realized early on that dominating the search engines was key to their success. The search engines were being overrun by sex spam. To achieve this goal they would generated thousands of keyword rich sites in order to overwhelm search. They would create doorway sites that targeted every actor’s name plus nude or sex and every variety of adult-niche imaginable. If you were a smart marketer at the time you could use same tactics to domain non-adult terms. I remember helping a friend who was an affiliate marketer target all of Ford automotive terms by using a group of 30 sites in much the same manner. He made a few thousand per month just sending the traffic back to the real Ford site.
Speaking of affiliate marketing, sex sites were the first ones who brought the concept early on to a very sophisticated level. Adult sites used libraries of videos and content which they would give limited access to their affiliates. These affiliates would be able to promote a niche and have access to all they needed for an online business including: hosting, ecommerce, and weekly content. Some of the big players included Adultbouncer, Adultcheck, and Deluxepass. Amazon is now has one of the largest affiliate marketing programs, which mimicked only small percentage of the great ideas sex sites were implementing years earlier.
As Google become a more dominate player, sex sites built complex linking systems. These link systems when used today can still greatly boost rankings on Google. When Google launched image and video search sex sites dominated because their videos and images were already optimized. However, they went even further by embraced free tidbit content to entice users to sign up for full length or higher quality versions. Now with the popularity of social media, sex has gone social. Teaser videos are shown on Youtube. Twitter has thousands of profiles devoted to the promotion of adult videos.
The thing is by studying the way the sex industry markets itself on the web and applying the same tricks into the marketing of your site you can learn how to drive traffic. Sometimes a little investigation into the shady recesses of the web can give real insight to cutting edge marketing. Oh one word of warning, too much investigation can make you go blind ;P
Any questions about the web marketing, please feel free to contact me at 905-417-9470 or by email at allanp73@gmail.com
