How do I get traffic to my adult blog?
Without some visitor traffic coming to your adult blog, you won’t have any eyeballs for your galleries, and thus you won’t make any money. Obviously, one of the major keys to making money with an adult blog is, to put it simply, pure traffic! The more visitors you get, the greater the chance that one of your visitors will be interested in buying some porn. In this article I’ll outline a handful of ways that anyone can start driving traffic to an adult blog including submitting, search engines, hard linking, plug trading, bookmarking, and purchasing traffic.
Search Engine Traffic
Sengine traffic is the cheapest, easiest, and possibly the best traffic that you could ever get for an adult blog. Search engine traffic is targeted – people are looking for very specific things usually, i.e. galleries for a specific girl or videos, images, etc. within a specific niche. If you can cater to what the surfer is looking for, and that surfer turns out to be a buyer, then you’re in luck. Search engine traffic negates the need for a large amount of traffic, because of the good quality of the traffic. For example, I know people who get 100 visitors a day that make more money than people getting 10,000 visitors a day. How? They’ve managed to start a site based around an exotic niche or babe where the people searching for the content in question are hungry for more content, and are willing to pay to get it.
But how can you get search engine traffic? There are a couple of ways.
Get Indexed
One of the first things I do whenever I start a new adult site, is a simple search engine submission. Do a search for ‘Search Engine Submitter’ and you’ll find about a million sites offering the service for free. The services usually just submit your site to Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, Ask and then about 100 search engines that no one has ever heard of. Google will easily send you the most traffic of these sites, so I highly recommend signing up for their Google Webmaster Tools program. With the Google Webmaster Tools you can get some detailed reports about the search visibility of the pages within your site, and ensure that your entire site is being indexed properly.
If you’re running a blog, Pinging is another tactic you can use to ensure that your new blog posts are quickly indexed by a wide variety of search engines and blog indexes. This feature is fortunately built into
Wordpress (probably the most popular adult blogging platform next to
Babelogger). To ensure that it is set up correctly, go to your Wordpress Settings, and then go to the Writing section. Ensure that there is an entry for rpc.pingomatic.com in the Update Services box. Pingomatic is a service that will replicate your ping to many other update services, so you can just ping one service instead of a hundred different services.
Proper Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the practice of ensuring that the content on your site is properly formatted to make it easier to find on the largest search engines. The higher your content is ranked on a search engine, the more traffic you’ll get for a specific keyword. Keep SEO in mind from the beginning of creating your site, and you won’t have any problems with implementing all of this later. There are a large variety of SEO tips and tricks, so I won’t lay them all out here.
Hardlinks and Backlinks
Backlinks are another key to building traffic to your adult site. A backlink (or hardlink) is a simple HTML anchor linking to another website. The text used in the link is indexed by Google, and is one of the main ways that they determine the keywords used to find your site. The more backlinks you can get for a specific keyword, the more traffic you can get from search engines for that specific keyword. Backlinks will also affect your Google PageRank, which can be thought of as a measure of how ‘authoratative’ your site is on a specific subject matter or keyword. Ask around on any adult webmaster IRC channel or an adult webmaster forum, and you’ll easily find some people that are willing to trade links. Hardlinks can send a little bit of traffic as visitors click on them, but are usually most beneficial in receiving higher amounts of search engine traffic. You’ll often find people buying and selling links, but there has been some recent buzz around Google possibly penalizing people selling links, so beware.
Gallery Submitting
Submitting is the process of submitting your galleries to a variety of link dumps, TGP sites, babe dumps, etc. in order to receive traffic. Usually you have to provide some benefit to the person running the site, i.e. linking their site, or sending them a certain ratio of traffic back before you can submit your galleries to their site. Most non-TGP dump sites only accept galleries that are hosted on your own domain, rather than free hosted galleries (FHGs). The traffic isn’t as easy to get as search engine traffic, but it is usually a more stable source than search engine traffic. You can usually find a list of link dumps or gallery submission sites on most adult webmaster forums. To start with, it helps to do your submissions every single day in order to build up a lot of back links. The traffic will really build up over time as more and more of your submissions are archived and indexed by search engines
You can either submit to the sites by hand, or submit using an autosubmitter program like
Submit Machine. When I was submitting by hand, I would bookmark all of the submit sites in Firefox, and then open them all in separate tabs, submitting a gallery to each site one by one. A pretty boring and arduous process that makes it difficult to keep track of what galleries you have submitted and haven’t submitted yet. Thus, I created Submit Machine to make it easier to submit more galleries to more sites and to be able to keep track of what I had submitted. When submitting by hand, I’d often find that I had forgotten to submit a gallery that I had created. Some sites only allow you to submit a specific URL one time, so keeping track of what you’ve submitted can definitely save some time. Furthermore, when submitting by hand you tend to ignore the sites that send a lower amount of traffic and focus on the high traffic sites only, because the 30 seconds you’ll spend copying and pasting your URL, writing a description, etc. is not worth the handful of hits you might get. Instead, when using Submit Machine it takes less than a few seconds to submit to any site so there is a better return on investment when submitting to lower traffic sites. Submit Machine also comes preloaded with around 100 different link dumps, babe dumps, babeblogs, etc. – so you don’t need to waste time trolling webmaster forums to build up a list of reliable sites to submit to.
Plug Trades
Plug trades are one way to retain a regular amount of traffic to an adult blog, but it requires networking a bit within the business and knowing some other webmasters at or near your level of traffic. Plug trading is the practice of linking to other webmaster’s galleries on your front page, going beyond linking to only your own galleries, sending traffic to another webmaster’s site in return for traffic from their site. As you’ll be trading with other webmasters at or near your level of traffic, you would expect to get back at least 100% of what you’re capable of sending. You can usually work these trades out with a simple “I’ll plug your galleries X times this month on my site in return for Y plugs from your site” type of deal. If you’re trading with a webmaster that has more traffic than you do, you can usually work out a deal where you plug them more times than they’ll plug you, so that the traffic is even at the end of the month. I recommend setting up trades with other webmasters that are in your site niche usually. For example, if you’re trading plugs with a Babe blog but you have Teen content, their visitors won’t be too interested in your content and vice-versa - the trade won’t work out well for either party.
Bookmarking / Repeat Traffic
One obvious way to get traffic is to just have good, oft-updated content that people will want to come back and see over and over again. Check your gallery stats and see what people like the most, what type of galleries they’re spending the most time on, etc. and tailor your content to suit your visitor demographics. Make sure you provide a javascript ‘Bookmark’ button that will add a bookmark for your user – yes, people do still use those on adult sites.
Buying Traffic / Advertising
Some webmasters will buy traffic from other webmasters or purchase advertising on an Ad Network (that accepts adult ads) such as Black Label Ads, AVN Ads, Ero-Advertising, or AdEngage. Unless you’ve got a very lucrative revenue per visitor on your site, I would recommend against going with an Ad Network – as the cost per click will usually be higher than the return you’ll get from each visitor.
Some webmasters offer good rates on gallery plugs and front page traffic, usually depending on the Google PageRank of the site or the amount of traffic you’ll be receiving. Be sure you’re looking for traffic from dependable webmasters, do some research to see if they’re selling quality traffic to other webmasters; look around on some adult webmaster boards. Always check their per-country visitor statistics if possible, as foreign / non-English traffic is statistically less likely to make a sale.
While buying traffic is a good way to get some traffic flowing, I wouldn’t depend on it long term. Purchasing traffic is a trap that I’ve seen too many new webmasters fall into – they’ll go buy $1000 worth of traffic and fly high for a week, just to see none of it ever come back to visit their site again. You’ll see people spend $1000 on traffic to make $1001, when they could have spent $0 and made $100 instead. In order to succeed long-term you’ll need organic growth - repeat traffic, search engine traffic, and traffic gained by networking with other adult webmasters.
Hopefully this article has given you a good idea of where to get started in bringing more traffic to your adult blog. Your overall amount traffic will start out small at first, but you'll be able to watch it climb very quickly once your site has been indexed by Google, after you've got more content, after your site has been around for a while and built up backlinks, and after you've got more friends in the adult blogging business that are willing to trade traffic with you.