How to increase traffic/sign ups on your paysite?

[Richard Eston]

Hi All,

I'm looking for your advices, recommendations, experiences, how a sponsor can convince webmaters/affiliates to promote a site or network.

What do you guys need? What kind of tools or promotions are you get crazy to have?

Where you can get affiliates and quality traffic in the most efficient way? (TGP, Review, Blog, Tube etc.)

It's our common interest to discuss and improve business! Let's start the brainstorm.

[Ramster]

You need to find a way to build your own traffic sources.

I suggest you buy gallery spots, blog posts and such. Maybe even hire a gallery submitter. In today's economy many affiliates have lost a large portion of traffic so adding some hosted galleries to a script that already has 10,000+ host galleries is not going to do a whole lot of sales. It will help, it all does but there are less and less "big affiliates" around these days than there use to be.

[Richard Eston]

Bad news Ramster, but I'm afraid it's true. Independently from that, I'm open for more possibilities and ideas for sources.

[LB]

Originally Posted by Ramster

You need to find a way to build your own traffic sources.

I suggest you buy gallery spots, blog posts and such. Maybe even hire a gallery submitter. In today's economy many affiliates have lost a large portion of traffic so adding some hosted galleries to a script that already has 10,000+ host galleries is not going to do a whole lot of sales. It will help, it all does but there are less and less "big affiliates" around these days than there use to be.

Its been a couple of years since I looked at buying gallery spots and unfortunately they were still so overpriced it was an utter joke.. unless you had the most amazing product you were unlikely to turn a profit. Have they come down a bit?

[Richard Eston]

I don't think so. It looks like - for example banner - it not worth, it's a graveyard waste of money and time, however you could have a strong presence and image on the field. I think it's true for gallery spots too.

[Ramster]

Originally Posted by LB

Its been a couple of years since I looked at buying gallery spots and unfortunately they were still so overpriced it was an utter joke.. unless you had the most amazing product you were unlikely to turn a profit. Have they come down a bit?

Not really no. There's a few places worth buying but many are still over priced.

There is juicyads if you want to buy banner spots. That too are mostly over priced but when a site/program is trying to get traffic your options are limited I'm afraid.

Of course you can buy traffic from google too.

Overall in today's market there is not a whole you can buy where you will turn a profit. But a new program or a site trying to get traffic could buy spots, hope to not lose too much and with the spots also hope for some exposure with webmasters to gain them as affiliates.

A lot hoping there though

[terry]

Originally Posted by Richard Eston

What do you guys need? What kind of tools or promotions are you get crazy to have?

For me its...

1. Quality RSS feeds
2. Downloadable picture content, at least 15 pics per set. Not just a few sets. If you want to keep an affiliate, namely me, to continue promoting your sites, you have to keep updating the content area.

[tickler]

Pretty much generic cookie cutter sites, which means that I wouldn't be promoting them with paid traffic.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by terry

For me its...

1. Quality RSS feeds
2. Downloadable picture content, at least 15 pics per set. Not just a few sets. If you want to keep an affiliate, namely me, to continue promoting your sites, you have to keep updating the content area.

I second what Terry mentions, with these comments...

1. The current RSS feeds you offer are only good for importing to TGP scripts. There needs to be several hundred well-written words in the description of each entry in order for blog marketers to make use of your RSS feeds. Right now they're pretty useless to bloggers (which I've been saying to 21SexturyCash in emails beginning in October 2008)

2. Content for promotion: 15 pics in a set are only enough for those who primarily build galleries for TGP submission. For builders who make free sites for submission to Link Lists (the basis of this board) you need to offer at least 30 pics in a set and they *all* need to be your best pics from that shoot or they won't get used.

3. Member area access to choose our own content. Many webmasters won't bother promoting any sponsors who won't provide them with access to the members areas of the paysites they're interested in promoting. One reason is so that webmasters can choose content that won't be the same as every other webmaster is using (very important). But it's also a way to know what the customer will be getting when they buy a membership. Knowing that and studying the tours allows webmasters to pre-sell the paysite in ways that result in both sigups and rebills.

4. Tours that convert as well or better than the competition on the same traffic. Many affiliates will run tests to see how your tours convert and make a decision on continuing promotions based on how your tours convert compared to similar paysites/sponsors they're promoting with the same traffic. If your tours don't perform they'll drop your links or remove them from the best positions (most traffic) on their sites.

One basic rule to think about is that if you're not paying out at least 5 cents per unique visitor sent to each paysite by an affiliate, then you need to find out why not. If you're not paying out that or more per unique they send you, you won't be able to get a lot of promotion out of affiliates with traffic.

All that said, I don't promote your sites a lot right now, and it's mainly because of things I mentioned above. I've written to your people about the RSS feed problem since 2008, with no improvements made. I told them about traffic leaks on your hosted blogs too (not sure if you still have the blogs). I've also asked about hosted FLV files several times since 2009 with no good news coming yet.

It's a shame because I was getting almost 10 cents per unique sent, but without the needed tools it's too much work to promote the sites so I don't do it.

HTH

[Toby]

OK... I'm going to play a little Devil's Advocate here re: RSS feeds. The lengthy blog type descriptions make those descriptions pretty much unusable for TGP import. A TGP only has use for a single descriptive sentence. The solution is either two feeds, or customizable feeds where the affiliate can select a short TGP style description or a long blog style description.

Personally, I don't use RSS feeds for importing galleries to my TGPs. I'm a fussy sumbitch, so I want to check the gallery content to make sure it's a match for the niches I promote on each site. In most cases I usually end up only using about half of the galleries available, or less.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Toby

OK... I'm going to play a little Devil's Advocate here re: RSS feeds. The lengthy blog type descriptions make those descriptions pretty much unusable for TGP import. A TGP only has use for a single descriptive sentence. The solution is either two feeds, or customizable feeds where the affiliate can select a short TGP style description or a long blog style description.

Yes, I should have been more clear. I didn't mean they should kill the existing TGP-only RSS feeds they have, but they need to add feeds useful to bloggers in addition to those.

Seriously...I mean, it is 2010 now, and affiliates have been using blogs to promote paysites for some years now. Sponsors who still don't offer good RSS feeds for bloggers are signaling that they can't keep up with needed tools.

And please, if you do get RSS feeds for bloggers created, don't ruin them by using any of the crappy morping tools out there. Just need well-written posts that make total sense to a horny surfer and help him decide to spend money, not posts morphed into uselessness in some idiotic attempt to fool search engines into thinking they're not duplicate content.

Okay... that was clearer.

[Richard Eston]

Thank you for the precious advices. Helpes a lot, especially now when I've watned to make a post to help me out with ideas and suggestions, what to focus on during the development of our upcoming RSS tool. So, it's very good that you started to discuss this...