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Mark Tiarra discusses How to Win at the Paysite Game

In the beginning, the cyber-deities created – STATS! Before you follow any of my advice here make sure you have superior server stats. MKStats is one program from the old days a strongly recommend or something like Urchin. Another one that I've found more recently is Saw Mill (http://www.sawmill.net). Essentially what is important is you need to have stats reporting on your server that shows you all the pages and files that get viewed, where people are coming from, how much is being downloaded, etc… Running a paysite without a good stats program for the server would be like running a sports book with no idea who played for each team. So once you get that taken care of, it's time to get started.

The first and most important thing to understand about building your tour, and for that matter, all the rest of your paysite is that you cannot allow yourself to become married to any concept. The power of the Internet is that you can try things out and know the results almost immediately. With your web page, you get to experiment with a variety of ideas and find out what works best. Conversions are bad? No problem, try a different model on the tour It's not like you spent $2 million producing a commercial that is now going to run for 60 days on every major network. You can change things any time you don't like the results you are getting and then watch for different results pretty much immediately.

So this is the overall concept I want you to understand before digging into my specific advice. It's all about trying things and testing the results then tweaking or changing them. No one thing works every time in every circumstance or we'd have a simple formula to work off of. What I will give you here are the best starting points and the methods and specific elements for implementing the process to your success which is the "try and measure" method. First you try a tour, then you measure the results. Once the results are close to your target then you reduce the testing to more minute details of the tour and continue to test until you have optimized completely. With that said, let's begin with a discussion on the types of tours that work and when to use them.

When building a tour for your paysite there are many things that need to be considered. Page weight (or total size in KB of the files), color combinations, model selections, pixel size of the entire presentation, text, positioning of key links, etc… Every piece has an effect on the conversion and they each interrelate with one another. There are also general schemes to consider. By that I mean the style of the tour, whether it's the highly graphical, rectangular tour, the long page filled mostly with text and samples, or anything in between. Choosing what style of tour to put up used to be a simple matter of matching it with the content of your site. Amateur personality and certain niche sites did best with a text laden tour and mega sites did best with the rectangular, graphic heavy tours. Any hybrid of the design types usually applied to sites that catered to a niche with a very broad market such as lesbians or teens. In today's market, however the tour style you choose is more a function of the source of traffic being sent to that tour. This paradigm shift occurred about the same time TGP traffic became the primary driving force from free sites to sponsors. The match up is generally as follows: TGP traffic, newsgroup traffic and/or chat room traffic almost always works best with a long page, text laden tour. Banner traffic from "old school" free sites, exits from other paysites and most SE traffic will usually work best with the highly graphical tours. Of course there are always exceptions to any rule but these are the starting points to work from so you will be much more likely to get it close the first time and have less adjusting to do as you go. Let's see some examples… two that I did and one from another talented firm.

Type "A" Tour – http://www.karasxxx.com
Type "B" Tour – http://www.facialabuse.com
Type "C" – Hybrid Tour –http://www.lumyr.com/liveclientzone/pickyourmovie/html/

The other point to consider when building your tour is the reaction you will get from webmasters. If you are planning on running any kind of webmaster program to get traffic, you not only have to impress surfers into joining, you have to convince webmasters that your tour will make money for them and that you are a professional enough company for them to count on. Unfortunately, most webmasters signing up to your program will have a very narrow view of what works that is based on their specific experiences. A lot of the webmasters tend to feel the need to be impressed by eye candy before they will sign up as an affiliate or partner. While this is fine if your site gets the kind of traffic that responds well to highly graphical tours, it can crate quite a quandary for you when your site is doing better with a very plain looking tour. The solution is quite simply to do more than one tour… one for webmasters and that certain pool of traffic and one for the rest of the. In truth having a few tours for your webmasters to choose from will eventually be your best bet because this allows them to try different things with you instead of just leaving for another sponsor if they don't like the initial results. It also opens you up to attracting a wider range of webmasters right who will be willing to give your program a try.

It's time now to discuss what things your different tour types will need to succeed. Before I speak of each type specifically I want to list the common points that all tours need to share:

· Prominent "join" link: Always make sure your link or button that asks people to join the site is the most prominently displayed object in the tour. Always have at least on of the "join" links somewhere within the first window of each page, which is to say that a user would not have to scroll down below what is immediately visible initially to get to the join link. In the current market, 1024x768 is the most commonly used screen resolution which means that you have to have that join link appear somewhere no more than about 500 pixels down the page (remember you have to figure in space for the browser interface too). It's also always a good idea to have a join link at the very bottom of the page either centered or to the right.

· Simple sales text: You're not selling a book here. People respond best when you list your main selling points in very bold, simply listed, non-verbose text. Something like: Over 40 Gigs of Downloadable video, 24/7 LIVE Girls, etc… Even with amateur sites where it is important to get a cross personality and the story of the model(s), your main selling points should figure prominently as a simple bulleted type list in the tour. People love sound bytes… the text version of sound bytes work just as well. · High contrast text: Besides just being simple, your text should jump off the page and be easy to read (especially that join link). Use an outline on your text or a good solid drop shadow… whatever works. Just make sure no one is squinting to read it.

· Your favorite isn't everyone else's favorite: People join paysites because something they see arouses them. That something is almost always the assets of a particular model in your tour that they want to see more of. All the talk about how much great content you have helps for sure, but ultimately one face or body is the most likely thing to get out the credit card. So how do you choose which face to put in the tour to induce the greatest arousal? Well at first you pretty much have to guess on your own (or the designer's) tastes. If you have content of models that includes their name, then you might want to do a search engine query on them and get an idea by the number of matches, which of your girls is the most popular. Once your site has been up and running though, you simply need to look at your web stats and see which girls in your members area are getting the most attention (i.e. clicks). Eventually you will find what is the favorite of the masses rather than just yours and when you put those models in your tour, conversion will improve accordingly.

· Quick loading: As a rule of thumb I always say to keep any single page of the tour at 100kb or below in total download size. Even though broadband is more common now, there are still plenty of modem users out there and no one with a broadband connection is going to mind a REALLY fast loading page for them. Of course this also ties in with making sure you put your site on a good web host because no matter well you follow these instructions and no matter how awesome your tour is, if you host the site someplace that serves the pages up very slowly, you won't see much in the way of conversions. So make sure you pick a host that can deliver reliable, FAST connectivity or you will be left scratching your head at a 1:2000 conversion ratio even though you did everything I said.

· Video samples: As more time passes, it becomes more and more important to have a video heavy site. Offering small 10 to 20 second samples of a handful of the videos on your site is a great way to tease a customer so much that he is just dying to see the rest of it. Obviously videos are going to be more than 100kb but these so long as the user clicks off of the page to see a sample it's not going to create a problem with the rule above.

· Customer support link: We're going to talk about this much more later but for now just know that it's important for you to have a customer support link leading to a good and comprehensive help page on your tour. Potential clients will be a lot less fearful of handing you a credit card number when you openly demonstrate how good your customer support is going to be for them.

· The join page matters: What you say on the join page will make a difference to your conversion. Keep the page relatively short (I often see join pages that are far too loaded with text) and offer a simple list of key points to remember. Your number one and maybe number two sales points (such as "over 40 gigs of DOWNLOADABLE Video"), some text about how the billing will be done discreetly (guys don't want some porn name appearing on their credit card statement) and lastly something about how you are an honest company and take customer support very seriously. A lot of people are still wary to use a credit card online or have been screwed in the past so you have to make sure they know you are not going to be dishonest.