After being in this industry for like 16 years you can quite honestly say you’ve seen a lot. Some things however you tend to see time and again. One of those “things” you see time and again is the trust a porn star will put in her boyfriend. They seem to really think they know everything and employ them as their driver, bodyguard, part time manager, publicist and webmaster. No this isn’t some suitcase pimp story about how when they break up he is going to move on to the next porno chick or land himself a job working for some agent like LA Direct Models with the connections he made when he was with you.
No this is actually a cautionary tale about porn stars who hire their boyfriends as webmasters. We can rant about how hiring your boyfriend as your PR guy can hurt your career later on. So moving forward ……..
I frequent a few industry professional boards and as such from time to time I get messages from different people asking for my advice or help. Today I got one of those messages. I won’t stay who it is. I’m not a total bitch and I’m not out to embarrass anybody. So the message to me today was that this person has a website that wasn’t doing so well. She hardly ever got anyone joining and her webmaster, who surprise surprise was also her fiance, said it was because they needed to hire an SEO expert. She wanted to know if I would take a look at her site and tell me what I thought.
Before I even clicked the link I knew what I would find … a amateur looking design, a lot of outgoing links to fake awards and review sites, and it would all be associated with her ccbill affiliate program. This site did not disappoint. It was a disaster.
The graphics were not even funny. They were so atrocious. I was going to stop right there and write his this long response about how when we ask a person to join our website, we are asking them to trust us with their credit card information and to gain that trust, to get them to join we have to have a website that is done far more professionally. But instead I decided to continue on and write my reply to her all at one time.
Next I made my way to her join page. She was charging $29.99 a month. Yet her site was offering less than 50 video clips, each less than 20 minutes, some as few as 7 minutes. All the videos but four were solo. Two of them were girl/girl and two were boy/girl but one of the boy/girl videos which was a short blow job scene was less than two minutes long! She did have a good selection of photos but damn, $30 a month worth? I think not!
The more I went through the site the more I realized how little of this girl was actually there. This is HER official website. So where is the connection to her? Fans want to communicate and interact with their favorite starlet, especially at a rate of $30 a month, that is why they join her official site. This site didn’t offer really anything in the way of a personal touch to the star in question.
In her original email to me the porn star in question made mention of her affiliate program and how everyone told her she had to start one for her website and she did but much to her surprise it’s not really going that well. She’s had no success with it at all.
This is not a fact that surprised me at all. There was a very good reason for her lack of success in the affiliate world and that was because she made an all to common newbie mistake and this is why hiring your boyfriend or fiance to run your website is always a bad idea. If he was a professional he would have known to not do this.
When they seen the site wasn’t really making much money they started to put up ads for other things like phone sex and text sex ads. She has 4 ads for alternative services on her front page alone. She’s so busy promoting her other services to make money, of which the affiliate gets none of, her website isn’t doing its job of promoting membership sales and that is where the affiliate makes money. So why in the world would an affiliate send that site money with all those traffic leaks in there?
An affiliate isn’t your friend, they are your business partner and they want to send you their traffic to make money by getting people to join your website. If you are so busy promoting other things like sex toys and text messages, then that affiliate is losing out on potential revenue.
That and well, when your fiance created the header graphic for the YOURNAME Affiliate Program, he spelled affiliate wrong. Just guessing here but that’s probably a major turn off to any of the more serious webmasters who might have considered doing business with you.
So my advice to her was of course don’t hire an SEO export. Spent that money on a professional design for your website. Ditch all the extra ads. If you must have them, limit them to your members area only. Next consider working with a more established network of real porn stars like Vicky Vette and Nina Mercedez. Both of these are actual porn stars who run their own networks and their vast experience can greatly help your website be a better success. There are a lot of companies out there who will make a lot of claims but in the end, these two are girls who have been there, done that. They are porn stars just like you. They know first hand what you go through as they go through it as well. But more than that, we’ve see more than our fair share of porn star networks rip girls off over the years and since these girls are porn stars themselves, I truly believe it’s the only way to go.
I don’t care how big or well known the company is, there is never -ever- a situation that I would refer one of the girls who come to me for advice to go with one of those kind of companies, ever. I know how things work behind the scenes. I know some of the bullshit they pull. I could rant on for hours about it but I think you get the point. 🙂
Of course this is the same advice I’ve given to 50 other girls over the years so today I thought I would post it so maybe some of the girls can benefit from this advice as well.