Just wondering: do your sites offer erotic stories? We used to sell a bundle of stories (still can do) to loads of sites, but that demand dropped off about five years ago. I’d come across them when reviewing certain sites, and saw some again the other day, but I hardly see any new sites with erotica included.
Is that a ‘thing’ now? Everyone’s only into videos and not words?
Does it make a difference having stories or not? I mean, does a members’ only story section go down well with members?
I don’t have a membership site so I don’t know and would be interested in your thoughts.
Is they concept of members’ only erotic stories dead?
I still write fiction for a few clients, but nothing like I used to.
They’re missing a trick when it comes to promotion of a site (rather than offering fiction to existing members).
Sharing a photo and a snippet of the text on social media can bring in a big number of new visitors, and if you’re encouraging them to join a newsletter when they arrive, rather than just trying to sell them a membership, you can grow a good list of leads and keep them coming back.
We write fiction for a couple of our own blogs and in our experience it’s a hell of a lot easier to get newsletter sign-up from it. As long as you keep delivering that content in future mail you can keep them interested and sell other relevant content.
So, I would say if you’re doing it to get attention and visits through marketing it’s a valuable tool (for affiliate bloggers etc), but as a part of something you’re selling (a pay site, for example) I’m not sure it has the same impact.
I wrote and posted some erotic gay fiction on one of my blogs to see if it would help SEO. The stories also included some photos. I thought with all the rich gay content keywords, plus the length and overall value, Google would notice it. Nope, didn’t seem to have any effect.
I dont think anyone buys stories any more, also problem with that is duplication on other sites so it’s value for SEO is minimal. But yes, people certainly still read and enjoy them.
Shout out to Conran, I had him write a story for us and it was great. As soon as we have the budget for it we’re going to have him write a lot more.
I do think there’s more traction in having an open forum where users post stories?everyone is so used to sharing everything now. But I would still seed that open forum with some quality stories by a professional writer, so there’s at least some really good content in there.
I agree with using snippets of stories in your blog posts. I’ve used this style in the past for my women’s straight and lesbian blogs. I found that they do indeed help SEO, and signups were noticeably higher following that style of post. For The Girls especially offers nice story snippets for their affiliates along with a photo/drawing if available. Within the site it’s considered a Women’s Magazine section with hundreds of exclusive stories for the members.
I don’t see why a male magazine section of erotica couldn’t do as well for both marketing and additional site content for current membership.
Another idea for members is a forum or blog where they can submit their own stories.
For one of our blogs the fiction gets the most organic traffic. For the other, we can post ten new fiction posts a week and little changes.
But, on the second blog we’re promoting it through social media and we pay no attention to Google.
In my view, you can get lucky with fiction and guys still want to read it, you just need to find the audience for it. It shouldn’t be used with the hope that it’s going to bring in organic traffic, it should be used to improve time on site, increase engagement, encourage sharing, and to promote other content in-post.
Use your fiction to promote on social media, use it to get visitors coming back for more (Part 1, Part 2 coming next week etc).
I know I’ve said it a lot, but affiliate bloggers really need to get back to making their site a destination that guys would bookmark and come back to. Every day we should be writing with the single goal of “how can I get this visitor to remember me and come back tomorrow?”
The sales will take care of themselves if you focus on this singular goal. This is just my opinion, but this is what’s working for us.
It probably goes without saying that we never use duplicate content on our blogs and when I write fiction for a client it’s 100% unique and solely written just for them. Years ago I thought about writing a batch of fiction for sale to a maximum of 5 or 10 customers when a client asked if I do that, but it defeats the purpose of publishing it on a blog. This kind of content should be unique to a site.
Thanks!
I’m glad you liked it and it’s working for you. I look forward to writing a lot more for you.
It helps that I love your content
[QUOTE=Porno Joe;176362]
I do think there’s more traction in having an open forum where users post stories?everyone is so used to sharing everything now. But I would still seed that open forum with some quality stories by a professional writer, so there’s at least some really good content in there.[/QUOTE]
We’ve tried the forum thing for several years and we’re about to close ours after this summer.
It’s never really taken off for us and the monitoring and upkeep is a drain on our resources for too little pay off. So, we’re dropping the forum and focusing on the blog and newsletter.
The thing we’ve noticed about our forum is that for every one member who posts something, there’s another hundred who just sit there doing nothing, then they pop up once a month to bitch about the forum being dead.
Maybe we just haven’t managed it properly, but it just seems as though it’s too much work for little in return.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say you’ve used story snippets in your posts.
Is this to promote other content or do you mean adding an element of fiction to the affiliate post so it’s not just a description of a sex scene?
We do the latter in a lot of ours. We try to make it all a little more personal and real and less about the scene. So, while some might just describe the scene being promoted, we’re more likely to use the subject of the scene as a platform to add fiction… “When I saw this video the guy reminded me of someone I used to fool around with…”, that kind of thing.
I agree it does work, but this is something I’ve long believed about affiliate blogging; we should be making it more personable wherever possible and less about the hard sell.
I’m referring to using actual text from a story. Grabbing parts of it that are erotic, use a photo or drawing that goes with the story line… and leave off just where your reader goes, OH SHIT, I gotta see, hear, read… what happens next!
Another item that did rather well on the Erotica for Women’s blog was Audio Erotica. There was one guy selling it that had an affiliate program, and I did OK with it. He’d of done a lot better if he’d been producing new stories on a regular basis. He had like 6, maybe 8, and when you’d purchased those, there wasn’t anything else to promote to an already buying client.
Then he stopped making them, and took down his site (without notice). Later, he did try to get me to try his stuff again, but his site got weird and the name of the program was just off key. I can’t recall specifics, but I knew if it didn’t get a positive response from me, it sure wasn’t going to get one from my readers either.
