The end of the year is a great time to reflect on your life and your adult business…. The good, the bad and the ugly of it all. Focusing on the good parts of it. Or at least the potential of the good stuff.
For me, its going thru my various sites and seeing what needs to be updated, changed or just plain dumped. Today, I start to say good bye to an old friend. An affiliate that used to keep me in beer and pretzels. The kind of money that bought the good beer and the tasty pretzels. The affiliate is Medley Inc. or now known as Friend Finders Network.
I realized it was time to start fading them out of my business life as I was reading over one of their year end emails. They are trying to sell me on promoting their new dating site nostringsattached.com . This is their lame attempt to copy Ashley Madison and the growing infidelity/affairs market.
These are the same people that own and operate Penthouse.com . Follow that link to see more of the very beautiful Penthouse Pet you see above. They also own dating sites like Alt.com plus Bondage.com and AdultFriendfinders.com
They, like so many of the other big boys in the Adult market, have lost their way. They lost connection with what made them famous and rich in the first place. Their business model is quickly becoming obsolete and they no longer offer anything useful to me as an affiliate, or to their potential customers who I would recruit for them.
They don’t understand that the market changed. The customer wants a little more interaction than a snapshot and pricing plan to see anything of value. A little more tease to please before they open up their wallets and give out their hard earned money. The customer is also getting used to one, maybe two click purchases. Not wading through pages of options and terms and up-sells.
Affiliate marketing is important to the survival of the Adult Internet market. That will not change except to become more important going forward. But if you want me to sell you, you need to give me (and the potential customer) something more.
As I dump one, I am heavily pushing another that “gets it”. Kink.com understands the market has changed and so they have changed how they interact with the customers as well as with the affiliates. Lower prices, more pricing options, more purchasing options. They also have open forums for the customers and fans to interact.
For the Affiliate, Kink offers a lot of variety. Plenty of ways to keep the potential customer engaged and interested. I just get them to the chosen landing page and they can sit there for hours happily getting teased and tormented. This keeps them from wandering to another site and keeps them wanting more. Their conversion from viewer to customer is not always immediate, but it is better than most of my other affiliates.
Webmaster referral for Kink.com
What’s on your dump list for 2010??
