How The Porn Guys Do Things

Earlier this week while I was out to lunch with Russell Brunson I made a faux pas that had us nearly in tears laughing. Here’s how it went down…

So we’re trading marketing tips back and forth, me with tips for improving his affiliate program, him with tips for my new coaching program coming out this month. When I bring up the topic of “how the porn guys do things.”

I asked Russell, “have you ever taken a look at how the porn sites market their membership sites?” Russell being the clean & polite mormon man that he is of course said no. Then I said “well I’ve been watching them a lot lately.”

Before I even had the chance to realize what I had just said Russell starts bursting with laughter. Which then made me realize the way my words had come out of my mouth. What came out was “I’ve been watching a lot of porn lately” but what I meant was “I’ve been studying their marketing methods a lot lately.”

After turning 4 shades of red and i’m assuming a few other colors, we had a big laugh and I explained myself. We both agreed on one thing, the porn industry has been making money online and more specifically running highly profitable, MASSIVE, monthly membership sites longer then most of us have even owned an email address.

Which is exactly what got me started researching some of the techniques they are using. After all, if I want to run a membership site who better to learn from then the guys who have been testing and perfecting this business model for more then a decade now.

Are you curious to find out what I’ve learned in my research? Good, then keep reading and I’ll give you a few of the big things I noticed that they all have in common.

Teaser Content

EVERY major porn membership site is using teaser content to lure their visitors into becoming subscribers. This means that when you get to their sites instead of a long and very obvious sales letter, you get to actually experience on a small level what the content inside will be like through pictures and video clips.

Low Priced Trial Periods

All of the more popular porn sites are allowing you to become a full fledged member of their site for just $1, you can download as much as you want, cancel anytime you want, but after 3 days you’re going to start getting billed monthly.

Multiple Site Access

Many of the bigger more popular sites offer multiple other thematic sites along with your membership as a bonus. Kind of like if you were running a membership site about dog training you might also offer them access to others on the topics of dog care, dog food recipes, breeding dogs, etc etc

$29.99 Per month

There is no price more common then $29.99 per month when it comes to porn membership. I don’t know the reasoning behind this but the commonality of that price is so overwhelming that I have to believe its the best converting price point. I would also assume that this price point has a high retention rate.

What Do We Learn From This?

These guys are smart as hell, they have their own conferences, they test this stuff relentlessly and share their results with each other. I would feel very safe betting a large sum of money that these things each site has in common is the way it is for a very specific reason.

I am currently seeking out a few site owners for an interview so I can solidify these findings from being just observations to learning the lessons behind them.

How Can We Apply This To Our Sites?

• Replace your salesletter with abbreviated versions of your articles, audios, and videos
• Make it obvious that you are just giving them a small taste of whats inside
• When they try to access more of or the full versions of your free content send them your order page
• Offer them a three day $1 trial that rebills at $29.99 per month when they get to your order page
• Build additional “nichified” versions of your site to give away as a bonus for becoming a member

Now that’s just on the outer layer. We haven’t even gotten into how they get people to their sites, how they run their affiliate program, or what they are doing in the members area.

Again, I’m still in the process of researching all this stuff and landing an interview with one of these site owners. So I can really get inside their heads as to why and if there are specific reasons for what they do. However, I have joined a few to see for myself what they are doing and to try get ideas for improving my own sites.

The three sites that I became a member of were the top 3 sites in the industry according to Compete.com traffic rankings. I would assume that because they are the top 3 sites then they probably know what they are doing.

What I found inside was that there was no page inside the members area that did not have prominent affiliate ads.

You try to watch one of the videos and on the side of the video is an attractive affiliate banner sometimes more then one for other sites. Same with every other area inside the site… There was always easily visible affiliate ads every where you went.

After canceling my accounts right away (to avoid charges and long conversations with my wife) I joined their affiliate programs to see if anything was different in there.

WAY DIFFERENT!!!

Our affiliate programs aren’t even a fraction of what they could be after see how the porn guys are doing things. Normally, in our world a good affiliate program will have some banners, emails, keywords, maybe a video or two that you can use to market the site.

In the porn world they practically give you a whole business to promote their site with. They have videos galore, whole galleries of banners to choose from, pre-built websites, and even scripts you can use to setup your own free access mini-membership site with all their video clips.

The biggest affiliate program is called NastyDollars.com and they run the affiliate marketing for like 30 different sites. I would say that of all the research I’ve done so far just seeing how much they help their affiliates has opened my eyes the most.

I mean they even offer their affiliates FREE HOSTING!

Anyhow, I thought you’d like to know what I found in my research. It’s given me tons of ideas for improving my own membership sites. I hope I’ve given you a few ideas now too.

P.S. If you don’t have a membership site of your own yet I’d like to know what’s stopping you. Chaunna got BizAwake.com and DailyAffiliateArticles.com built for $30 each. From there we just had to add content to them and drive traffic. We use either Joomla or wordpress to run our membership sites. And in our opinion WPWishlist by Stu McLaren is the best membership site software on the market.

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Tagged as: continuity, conversions, marketing, membership sites