One of my blogs is all about naked men with hairy chests. Today I went to google and typed in the search string “hairy chest naked men” to find other blogs that are similar to mine. The results? Other than a stray youtube link here and there, almost EVERY link for the first five pages of search results was for a tumblr blog. This made me depressed and sad, questioning why I even bother with my own blog.
To make matters worse I started to look at the tumblr blogs and did not see any that had links to a sponsor or even to another blog that might contain links to a sponsor, even though there were tons of images from membership sites. So in essence there are people out there creating dozens of blogs about hairy chested naked men and not making any money off of them. How in the hell am I supposed to compete against that?
I just wanted to vent here to see if anyone else ever feels like throwing in the towel because of Tumblr. Or is there some secret way people are making money with Tumblr sites I am not aware of? Someone cheer me up and give me a reason to continue…please.
Interesting that the same search on Yahoo yields fewer Tumblr blogs. The problem isn’t Tumblr per se, it’s that Google’s search as of today just happens to favor Tumblr’s network on these kinds of topics. This topic is so lost to Google, observe that the search engine is unable to find or create the kinds of meta descriptions and schemas we routinely see for practically everything else.
The description for Google’s first search result, Musings of a Homo/Mad Man, is like something out Black Hat SERP manual - “Tall men, hairy men, smart men, funny men, cuddly men, beefy men, older men, sweet men, affectionate men, aggressive men, passionate men, and⦔ Are we like back to 2000?
The larger issue is that because of advancement in CMS technology, it keeps getting easier to create a website on the internet, so numbers alone says that we face increasing competition. So when Google “fixes this” it’s more likely to mean that in the future, these searches will not be loaded with Tumblr, nor will they contain our websites.
All I’m gonna say is there are ways to make money from Tumblr so get on it fast. You can post links and affiliate codes on every image. We bring in a solid amount of traffic and hearty amount of sales from a couple of posts a day.
Yes Alan: that is because you post original content as a studio. If you are an affiliate, it happens often very fast that Tumblr deletes your blogs. Officially Tumblr does not allow affiliate marketing. While I used tumblr to drive some traffic it is always a bit risky as they can ban and delete you if you are reported or their own system determined you are doing affiliate marketing
If someone runs their own WordPress based blog you might want to look into using the smart Social Media Poster from nextscripts.com and you can connect your blog to Tumblr - this way you could repost to several tumblr blogs and keep some backup in case some of them are getting deleted.
Unflagged NSFW Blogs. Tumblr is home to millions of readers and bloggers from a variety of locations, cultures, and backgrounds with different points of view concerning adult-oriented content. If you regularly post sexual or adult-oriented content, respect the choices of people in our community who would rather not see such content by flagging your blog (which you can do from the Settings page of each blog) as Not Suitable for Work (“NSFW”). This action does not prevent you and your readers from using any of Tumblr’s social features, but rather allows Tumblr users who don’t want to see NSFW content to avoid seeing it.
Uploading Sexually Explicit Video. You can embed anything as long as it follows the other guidelines on this page. But please don't use Tumblr's Upload Video feature to host any sexually explicit videos. We're not in the business of profiting from adult-oriented videos and hosting this stuff is fucking expensive. You can use services like xHamster to host those instead.
To me this says adult is OK if you follow those rules. Anyone have someplace we can read that says no adult material? I did read through that page rather quickly but I also did not see anything about not being allowed to use affiliate links.
I believe they mention something about affiliate marketing here Bec. I couldn’t find the actual paragraph, but unless they changed their TOS somewhere along the line the term should be in there. I’m too tired to look right now. Sorry.
Tumblr is completely ok with adult material. LOL. There are SO many Tumblr porn blogs it’s incredible. If it wasn’t allowed they wouldn’t have a hard time finding blogs to shut down, that’s for sure.
That’s the page I went thru last night and didn’t see anything about not using affiliate links. BUT if you are the program owner, it wouldn’t be a problem …
Affiliate links aren’t allowed on Twitter? I’ve never heard that before. Is that so?
If so, what’s with the anti affiliate marketing ‘Fascism’ with the social media networks? You run a business online, you want to promote it and using social media is one of the best ways to build up traffic. Or so Google keeps telling us. But we can’t use affiliate links? LOL. Talk about hypocritical.
“Don’t use deceptive means to generate revenue or traffic, or create blogs with the primary purpose of affiliate marketing. Spam doesn’t belong on Tumblr.”
You’ll find this on a more useful TOS page called Community.
Interesting. It seems those who aren’t able to get their hands on part of the pie don’t want the rest of us succeeding at what we do. At least, that’s how I see it.
However, it is their site/company so we have to abide by it. I just have fun on Tumblr for the most part with links to my blogs here and there. So I’m pretty sure I’m ok.
I will agree that all the ‘free’ porn on Tumblr does have a bearing on our sales ratios though. There can be no doubt of that. There’s tons of it. I only use Tumblr because it’s social media. If I see a free download blog I immediately report it to Porn Guardian. That shit really pisses me off.
Most people are just having fun on Tumblr though and you can’t knock them for that. Even if it does affect our revenue as adult affiliates. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s reality in this day and age unfortunately.
I spent about an hour looking through adult tumblr blogs and all I saw were images that pointed to other tumblr blogs. So if people like us are using tumblr to point to their own blogs, I sure did not see it. Of course, just because I did not see it does not mean people are not doing it.
One idea I wondered about is creating a tumblr blog with the same name as your own blog, so if you have a site called “mygaypornblog.com” you would create “mygaypornblog.tumblr.com”. The logic here is that this might help with the branding of your blog name and pick up some traffic later. Thoughts?
I’m also wondering if it makes any sense to point your own domain name to your tumblr blog. This way your tumblr blog might get a ton of traffic and then if they cancel it you still have the domain name and perhaps some of that traffic? I’m curious if anyone does this… judging by the search results I mentioned in the first post it looks like every site that comes up has “tumblr” in the URL so maybe this domain redirect idea is not a good one.
And finally, the thing that really makes me scratch my head is that tumblr is still owned by Yahoo… I’m amazed Google is so willing to send so much traffic to their main competitor.
That’s what I do yes. And I also have a blog with the same name as one of my affiliate WP blogs. I just started them both, but I hear it is good for branding.
Sorry.