Maybe you need extra cash and have some free time?
Or you are looking for an investment, your passive income source for early retirement?
Do you want to quit your job and work for yourself, from home?
A porn site, or several of them, is a great, proven solution.
So the only question is:
Do you want a part of all that money in the adult industry?
Friends are repeatedly asking me “How did you make the decision to start a porn site? Why did you do it?”.
And after I explain comes “How did you do it?” and “Can I do it too?”.
This tutorial is my answer to all those questions. It is based both on my firsthand experience and research, learning from others.
It can be your entry to this highly profitable business. Follow me and you can have a site just like this one, or even better.
Besides basic steps, it contains an introduction to Adult SEO and Affiliate Marketing. And many tips and tricks I learned along the way.
So… Here we go!
Why Should You Start a Porn Site?
Let’s talk about why we should consider starting a porn site. Most probably you have a daytime job and you are paid for every hour spent doing it. It’s nice. The more hours you work, the higher the salary. But if you don’t invest most of that money in something profitable, year after year you are in exactly the same situation, no change. If you can start your own business, that’s great. But for that, you must have a vision, capital… and courage to quit your daytime job.
But to make a porn website you need 10-15 hours a week (on the start, later less), less than $200 (first year), a lot of patience (don’t be easily disheartened)… and you can keep your regular job, working on the website from home in evenings. And it doesn’t matter if you live in the USA, France, Balkans, Turkey, or India – you’ll enter the game under the same rules and earn the same money just as everybody else, which is not true for almost any other job.
The effort you put into your site (or sites) will bring money today and tomorrow, also next month, next year… forever! That’s the difference from your daytime job’s wages: you work for yourself and not for someone else, you don’t rent your time and effort but you invest it. With time you can even hire others to do website maintenance.
Your porn site will never be “fully on autopilot”, you will never totally stop working on it, but as time passes the time you spend on it will be dramatically reduced. At the same time, the money you get from the site will just increase with time. And when you get to the point to have again spare time, you can open a new site! While profit rises linearly with the number of sites, effort rises slower. For example, two sites bring twice the money than one site but the effort (spent time) for two sites is just a bit bigger than for one porn site only. So we have excellent scaling here.
I know what you want to ask and the answer is: No, most probably you will never get super-rich, but… Yes, your sites are an investment and from its return, you can live. It is called passive income. If you are not after continuous work and big money but you’re in early retirement this is maybe the easiest way to archive it.
Can You Make Money From a Porn Site?
Yes you can! 🙂 The porn web industry is in many ways like most of the others, we are all here just for the money, there are ads, affiliate marketing… But it is also different in many ways from any other business: you can advertise/host ads just inside the same industry, most of the people you work with use just nicknames, opening a bank account is easier for a drug-pusher than for a cam model, most of website hosting companies don’t want your porn site, some countries block all porn sites or you can even go to jail for owning one…
But traffic is just incredible! All those people that are horrified with porn during the day, during the night they search for “family porn” and the like. Yes, it’s ugly hypocrisy but that’s the way this business works. I know no man, whatever religion, ethnicity or culture he belongs to, that has never entered a porn site… at least once a week. 🙂 So it makes a huge number of potential customers, ever-rising.
According to this old PornHub’s statistics it had an average of 81 million people per day (updated data is here)! First approximation (rule of thumb: every 1,000 visitors bring $2) gives $162,000 per day. And no matter how many sites there are around, the pie is so big there is a piece for everybody, there is always space for more newcomers.
So How to Start an Adult Site?
If I kept your attention up to this point it means you are at least interested in learning how this colossal industry works, especially small-to-medium adult websites. And of course where is your place in it, how you can get a piece of tasty cake. The porn industry is huge, both in involved money and in variety. You can invest in the production of professional porn films, be a porn actor, become a webcam model, open a sex shop, invest in a big site… or open one or several small-to-medium porn websites without much investment and enjoy the profit from it. We’ll keep to the last choice.
I’ll assume that:
- You know close to nothing about HTML, PHP, JS, CSS, WordPress…
- You have no desire to learn about programming more than it’s necessary.
- Have about two hours a day free (or for example plan every Saturday for this).
- Have a decent Internet connection.
- You have and willing to invest about $200 during the first year.
- Have patience and you are not easy to panic.
- Good enough command of English (if you had no problem reading this you’re good to go).
We’ll dive into details later but now let’s just list what starting an adult website consists of:
- Choosing your niche.
- Finding the right hosting company, choosing the right packet and enrolling for it.
- Installing WordPress (WP), basic settings, and getting comfortable with it.
- Installing a special WP theme and plugins for adult tube sites.
- Getting familiar with several standard WP plugins and installing some of them.
- Making decisions about your site’s basics, at least the first version, and implementing it.
- Loading first videos.
- Learning how to make money from hosting ads, applying for it and placing ads.
That’s for the basics, next level will be:
- Learning about affiliate marketing and implementing it.
- Applying for one or more Internet paying/banking/eWallet/money transfer services.
- Learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization) basics.
- Buying traffic basics
- Adult SEO
- TODO and NOT TODO list
- What you can expect in one month, 3 months, first year…
How to Host an Adult Website?
If you have your own server, fast internet connection with a public IP address, and know how to start a web server, set DNS, register domain, and the like – don’t read this. If while reading the previous sentence you said “WTF?!” this is the right place for you, just continue reading.
So what is a website hosting company (web host, web hosting service provider)?
For the money you pay you get access to their infrastructure and services: servers, internet connection, disk space, preinstalled programs, technical help, they manage domain registration… When all is set up you have a few links to access your site and work on it, everything else is their job.
Are there any free providers? Of course, there are, but they can’t be used for several technical reasons (porn sites draw a lot of traffic), economics (you want your ads on your site in order to make money, not your provider’s ads), and one specific: they don’t want adult content.
Ok, so I need a provider, how to choose the right one?
Let’s say you want to blog about coffee or fashion shoes, then you can choose between hundreds of website hosting companies. Compare them by price, speed, technical help, used technology, server allocation, upgradability… You control the situation.
But 99% of them don’t allow adult content and, even worse, it is not always obvious from their website. So it’s possible to buy their packet and spend hours, days or weeks working on your site, just to get one day message like “Upon manual inspection… we concluded your website contains adult content…. so your site will be deleted…”.
Well, before paying anything, you must be sure your provider will not kick you where it hurts. Learn it by directly and openly asking web hosting service providers, or from others in this business (specialized blogs, forums…). And be aware the provider’s policy might change, last year’s info might not be correct anymore.
TMD Hosting
So you chose a provider that accepts adult content, great. Now you have to choose the packet, domain, and (depending on the chosen provider) many other important or less important details asked from the provider. It is really hard to cover all possibilities so I’ll do it in one example, for my current provider. With the others, it should be similar.
TMDHosting is an example of an adult-friendly provider. I have good general experience with it and really excellent, above any expectation customer service. They work 24/7, but really – day or night, weekends, holidays! You get the answer and fix it sometimes in minutes, most that I had to wait for was less than an hour.
Tip – At some moment there will be a problem with your site and you’ll be spending hours trying to fix it, all in vain. We all have had those moments. Quick, educated, and really helpful technical help service makes a huge difference.
Let’s open the TMDHosting homepage… There’s a lot of info, offers, etc, but let’s keep it simple now. You can see the most common packets sorted by price, at the moment of writing there are 4 of them with prices ranging from $2.95 to $79.97 per month.
Yes, they all do the same job but, as you can guess, there are some differences. Without entering the details (if you want to learn more there’s all info you need on the TMD site) you can choose STARTER PACKAGE. It is the cheapest one but includes all you really need and it will fulfill all your site needs at least in the first year of working, probably much longer. If the site gets so successful that you need more, you can always upgrade the service or transfer the site to some other provider.
This very site for a long time used TMD’s STARTER PACKAGE, overloads were really rare and most of the time the reason for system overload wasn’t too many visitors but problems with WordPress plugins.
Last year we moved to VPS STARTER because of exponentially growing traffic – I wish you all the same problem 😉
Tip – TMD has data centers on almost every continent and you can choose where your server will be. It is important to choose this wisely because, in some situations, it can mean a few seconds difference in page loading, which translates to site visitors’ frustration, they are leaving the site and you are losing the money. According to your niche and other factors choose your preferred visitors’ origin and then choose the place for the server. Most of the time it will be the USA because money is there.
When you apply for web hosting one of the first steps will be to enter the domain you own (or want to own) and that’s our next subject.
How to Choose Domain Name, Niche, Keywords?
This is one of the most important decisions you must make, if you make mistake there’s no easy way to go back. SEO, SERP, CTR and many other things important for you depend on it. You most probably don’t even know what they mean but don’t be afraid, you’ll learn it. For now, don’t buy any domain or hosting service before you fully understand this subject.
Why SEO is important
We’ll talk much more about it later, but now just briefly: in order to get money from an adult site you must have high traffic (a lot of visitors). The most important (but not the only one) source of traffic is Google. So the story that ends with fresh money on your account starts like this:
1. Some person enters a search query on a Google page for some specific porn type, actor, niche, position, fetish…
2. Google lists sites, pages, videos, or pictures in order of importance for that query (SERP)
3. Hopefully, your site is there on the first page, and if you’re good at SEO then it’s among the first 3-5 results.
4. (Potential) visitor reads your site’s name, domain name, description (all of that is part of SEO), and if it looks like something he wanted in the first place it clicks and enters it (CTR).
So if your SEO&co is bad, you’ll get no visitors, so there will be no money.
SEO is a wide and deep subject and extremely important, so it will take more than one chapter. But for now, just trust me: it is important.
Choose your niche
Choosing a domain name starts with choosing your niche. Can you try with a “general porn” site, like PornHub, or Xvideos? Yes, you can, but you have no chance! It’s because you’ll fight against giants in this business, maybe the biggest sites on the Internet regardless of type. Many tried, all failed.
So what you can do? You can choose a niche, and it must be a narrow niche.
A niche example is MILF. But there are many too strong sites here too, again they are too big for you. To make it more narrow you can try Asian MILF, Black MILF, Blonde MILF, Cheating MILF, Lesbian MILF… In some cases even this might not be enough, you might need to go for even a narrower one. Now if your site is all about that sub-niche, with good SEO, you can get your part of traffic and beat big guys!
How? Remember, a potential visitor asks Google for some porn. If the query is specific enough (example: “blonde lesbians milf porn”) Google might find your site better, more useful for the visitor than some more general porn sites like PornHub. So for such queries, your site might rank above much bigger sites than yours.
Now, if the niche is too narrow, just a few people will actually search for it, so although most of them will end on your site you’ll never make serious money. So every niche idea must be checked if there are enough queries to make it profitable and if the target audience is big enough. That is also part of SEO so we’ll talk later on that subject.
Choose your keywords
If you chose your niche, now it’s time to find related keywords, at least the most important ones. Will you be surprised if I say that keywords are also an SEO subject? 🙂 So now just basics: keywords are words and phrases (one or more words) that describe what your content is about. Those are words that visitors will most probably use when searching for your niche. For example milf, hot milf, milf porn, blonde milf porn, sexy lesbian milf, cheating redhead pale milf…
Choose your domain name
For now, I’ll just say that your domain name (yes, we’re back on that subject) must contain one or more keywords from your niche, and if possible it should contain the niche’s name. Don’t exaggerate with keywords in the domain name, Google is hostile to anything that looks “spammy”. Also, your domain name shouldn’t be too long, should be easy to recognize and remember, don’t use any character except letters and it must be clear at first sight what is your niche all about.
Tip – Domains ending with .com are still the best choice.
And, when you find your perfect domain name, check if it’s free, unoccupied. If not, start all over again. Big players sometimes show money and buy the domain they want, but that’s not for us.
Warning – choose a niche that you know something about, maybe you got familiar as a user 😉 You will have to choose the right videos, understand slang, select products to sell or sites to advertise, chat on forums, run several social media accounts, etc. If you just jump in without understanding your niche, your success depends on pure luck.
WordPress Adult Themes and Plugins
If your porn site is powered by WordPress (WP) and you are not a skillful PHP/JS/HTML programmer with nothing to do for the next few months, chances are you’ll be looking for some adult WordPress theme and plugins. But first few definitions…
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a database-based web content management system. Data kept in a database is selected and glued together to form a web page by PHP. It uses a plugin architecture and a template system. It suits the best blogging sites but supports other types of web content including… well everything 🙂 WordPress powers 33.0% of all the websites on the Internet!
What is a WordPress theme?
A WordPress theme is a collection of templates and stylesheets used to define the appearance and display of a WordPress-powered website. They can be changed, managed, and added from WordPress.
What is a WordPress plugin?
A WordPress plugin is a piece of software (written in PHP) that can be added to a WordPress website. It extends functionality or adds new features to your WordPress websites.
Now back to business… If you blog about cooking or fish tanks you can try several themes or change them periodically, if they are good you will run into no trouble because of changes. It’s like changing clothes on a doll.
But adult themes are more specific, they are not made to be general so they are less interchangeable. More than that, they are sometimes made to be used with specific plugins (described later) so installing some new theme might be a catastrophic event for your site.
Just as non-adult, there are both free themes you must pay for (premium themes). Free ones are usually made by one man or a small team, so updates and support are according to that. Most probably there are no additional specialized (free) plugins to connect with, so your job you’ll have to do manually or find some other way.
All that said, I saw many successful adult sites run on free porn themes but few times I entered a chat with their webmasters I always heard sentences like “Yes, I tweaked the theme code…” or “I had to make a script myself…”, “PHP is fun, I enjoyed while…” etc. I guess you got the point.
Premium themes and plugins
On the other hand, premium themes (and plugins) cost some money but (if you choose well) you get all you need to run an adult site over WordPress in a single package, from one vendor, dedicated to quick updates and bugfix (well, they’re paid for it), new features, and everything else you expect from a quality product you bought from a respectable vendor. I guess you again got the point.
I’m a software developer for many years, writing software in many programming languages on many platforms, and even if Web development is not my job description I’m able to understand and even write basic code in HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP. But I never seriously thought about writing my own code for a site in order to save some money, it’s just not worthy of it. Yes, I did tweak a bit of theme code but it was more for fun and later it proved a mistake, costing me a lot of time to clean the mess I made.
So while your site is still new and almost empty I suggest you try free themes, play with them, see what they can do. Then try some premium themes (if they have a free trial period), together with associated plugins, and see what they can do.
For a site that will make money and not be just a hobby I do recommend you to use some premium theme, or a better package together with specialized plugins – but the decision is yours.
This site uses WP-Script‘s premium theme RetroTube and plugins Adult Tubes Mass Videos Embedder and Clean Tube Player.
All-In-One Adult Site Solutions
Here I describe in detail what I use on my site because that’s the product I know best 🙂 There are other more or less similar packages and I recommend you to look around before choosing (and most probably buying) one. But after reading this you will at least know what features to look for.
When I say “a package” or “a solution” in the context of this text it means a combination of WP adult themes and plugins, specialized for porn sites. Sometimes they might be bought and used separately or in different combinations, but their full strength is shown when used together, in combinations recommended by the vendor.
Now about WP-Script’s solution…
They have many products, with themes covering the same ground (same functionality, visually different) and plugins offering different features, so you can choose the plugin functionality you need and combine it with the chosen theme.
RetroTube theme
RetroTube theme contains all features expected from a WP theme plus many specialized for a porn content tube site: organizing videos thumbnails, reserved places for ads (on video and other pages, header, footer, sidebar, pre-roll in-stream ads…) and many others.
Although the theme is responsive (automatically changes the visual appearance and page layout according to screen size) it makes possible different settings for mobile users – for example, you can show different ads to mobile users and desktop users!
If I want to keep it short I can just copy the vendor’s own description: RetroTube – Create Professional Tubes with our Full Options Responsive WordPress Adult Theme.
Adult Tubes Mass Videos Embedder plugin
Together with the theme, I bought the plugin Adult Tubes Mass Videos Embedder because they together made my site work in the shortest possible time and least possible effort.
The plugin collects porn from 50+ biggest porn sites (including PornHub, Redtube, xHamster, XVideos…) and together with the theme shows them on your site. Video files are not downloaded but embedded – there are still on original sites, just their location, description, keywords, actors, etc are stored on your site. It’s really good because you don’t need to pay for the storage of thousands of videos, or for the bandwidth they use – those expenses are on original sites!
You can choose porn videos to embed by selecting categories and by searching for keywords. And it can be saved so every time someone enters your site, the script activates and automatically searches for new videos, using the same criteria. So even while you are sleeping your sites are growing, adding more and more videos without any effort from you!
Clean Tube Player plugin
The second plugin I use is the Clean Tube Player. Do you remember the first plugin was importing videos from other sites? So why do they allow it, even encourage it? Because although the video is playing on your site, ads shown before the video starts, on pause, over video, etc are shown by the original site and they make money. Some of the sites even force opening a new page for watching the video, actually kidnaping your visitor.
Well, this plugin is our hero. According to the vendor “Clean Tube Player removes redirections and ads from Pornhub, Redtube, Xvideos and Youporn embed players.” It is nice by itself, but when this plugin entered the market new feature was added to their themes: pre-roll in-stream ads!
You know, a short video ad you must watch before porn actually starts? It came out watching and clicking on that kind of ad brings about 10 times more money than a normal banner. Before this plugin that money was going to already more than rich sites, now it goes to my pockets.
Easy Porn Niches
Since the last blog update, WP-Script did something that will help you, even more, to start from zero: one-click-tube-site integration.
At the moment there are 4 of them and more is coming. And how does it work? After activating the theme, with just one click you can turn it into a specialized lesbian tube, or cams tube, or…
For more details visit WP-Script’s site, you’ll find more info, both technically details and otherwise.
How to Monetize an Adult Tube Site?
Let’s say you have your small-to-medium porn tube site up and running. You’ll definitely see no money before you hit at least 100 visitors per day. You’ll earn enough for coffee and breakfast when the site rises to 1.000 (1k) visitors daily, and you can quit your daytime job (in some countries) if you can push it over 30k – it’s 1.000.000 (1M) per month!
So on the start don’t worry about monetization, work on your site’s growth. That’s the best investment you can make.
To earn money you need two things: visitors (a huge number of them) and ads, affiliate links, etc. How to get visitors is a separate subject, complicated and wide but really important, and we’ll talk about it later. For now, I suppose you have enough visitors, which means between 500 and 10k visitors daily.
Tip – You’ll have to learn acronyms like CPM, CPA, CTR, Rev-Share, CPC, banner, header ad, footer ads, sidebar ads, under-video ad, affiliate, landing page… The ad business is full of it. But don’t worry, all of them are explained in a separate chapter. And I promise I’ll avoid using them here.
Impression, click
The simplest case is revenue from presenting and clicking on banners (and Iframes etc) you got from your adult advertising network. Of course, first, you need to apply to an advertising network (usually you’ll have more than one) and be accepted, that way you become their affiliate. Promotion material (banners…) you got from them you put on your site and they count the number of presentations and number of clicks. Usually just clicks bring money.
The amount of money depends on your affiliate status, kind of ad, quality of your traffic,… or it can be fixed. In any case, it is an extremely small amount of money, so you must have huge traffic to earn anything meaningful. But even if you don’t earn much, by following banners performance statistics you can learn more about your site and visitors: which ad position brings more clicks, which ad type your visitors like more, etc.
Tip – At the start, you can try to guess what your visitors like, but just hard cold statistics tell truth and you will get it after several months, not before. So on the start don’t choose the type of ads (niche) or landing page on your own, let your porn advertising network do it for you. They usually call it smart ads, smart links, or the like. Until you know your standard visitor inside and out, they’ll do it better than you.
For this type of revenue, I have good experience with several advertising networks: JuicyAds, PopAds, and my favorite ExoClick, but there’s much more and you are free to explore.
Warning – You are free to experiment with different adult advertising networks but at the start keep to big ones, well established and recommended. Because sometimes there are newcomers in that business, they have too-good-to-be-true offers for affiliates but when the time comes for paying they just disappear with the money. With time you’ll learn to recognize them but now it’s all new to you, so be careful.
Registration
The next step in the adult ad business is getting money, not for a simple click but if the visitor finishes predefined action on the target site. If it sounds complicated let’s break it into steps:
1. A visitor on your site clicks on a link, banner, etc
2. Target website’s landing page opens
3. User registers, or leaves email address, or credit card number… (requested action)
4. You get money.
The amount depends on the niche, requested action, and quality of traffic (visitors’ country of origin) but it’s much more than the first monetization method. For leaving an email in order to register you can get $0.5-$5, if registration requires leaving credit card data it goes to $20-$70. Oh yeah, now we are talking about real money.
The problem is here that this kind of offer is highly targeted, both as a niche and as a country, even age often plays a role, so you must know your visitors really well. If the ad is not optimized for your site’s profile of visitors, the click rate will be low and rare ones that end up visiting the target page will not enroll for the offer. And you get nothing. So get to know your visitors, their wishes, age, paying capacity, origin – any bit of information might help.
Leaders in this kind of marketing (for general traffic) is CrakRevenue. Also, check iStripper. There are many more, specific for a niche, and you will find them in time.
Warning – While for the first type of monetization we presented here, money comes almost the same amount every day so it’s easy to plan, see trends and get statistics, for the second one it is totally opposite. For several days you will have zero, then again zero, then $2, then zero, then $75, then zero… So be patient, don’t be hasty in making decisions if the offer is good or not. Give it some time, if the site is old week or two, and if your site is still growing a month or two. Then you’ll have enough data for valid statistics.
Sale
The last kind of monetization I will present is Revenue Sharing (rev share, rev-share, revshare). We again have banners, Iframes, text links, etc but neither visitor’s click nor his enrollment in offer brings you money. If and when a visitor you brought to the target site spends money there, you get your part. It can be anywhere from 8% (online shops) to 50% (games, premium sites). Again, if you present the wrong ad to the user, even if it clicks, enrolls, and uses the free version of the offer, you get nothing. But if you know the soul of your standard visitor and carefully choose offers to present, you will get money from him the first time he/she pays, and every other time paying occurs, it can go on for months or years! For experienced affiliates, this brings the most money.
Tip – Till you get to know your visitors really well, you’ll fare better with simpler methods to earn money. Jumping immediately in Revenue Sharing will just discourage you.
Here there’re no general adult advertising networks, they are all specialized for a niche. So you can find adult games, cam sites, premium porn websites, online sex shops… Here are several I worked with (for learning niche just visit them): Gaming Adult, Bonga Cash, and Chaturbate.
My Favorite Affiliate and Advertising Networks
What works for me might not work for you, and what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow.
But these are offers that worked best for me, some of them for years. It’s up to you to check them and choose which ones to test.
Advertising Networks
ExoClick – an old one, respectful, trustful, big. You do not risk when you work with ExoClick.
CrakRevenue – It’s better if you know a bit about CPM/CPL and the like, so you can choose the best offer. Maybe the best site for such kind of advertising. It is also an old and established ad network.
JuicyAds is something different, it is a place where you can rent your banner place to the highest bidder, or buy a banner place on some other site. It is not an ad network you want to start with, build some experience and then try it.
Here are several more ad networks I tried and liked: PropellerAds, PopAds, and ClickADu.
Affiliate Networks – Premium Sites
GamingAdult – it has several games, and one huge hit – Hentai Heroes. Must-have for hentai sites.
ManicaMoney – a lot of offers, my favorites are VersoCinema and CouplesCinema.
JAVBucks – JAV (Japanese porn).
RadicalCash – a lot of sites in all possible niches: JAV, VR porn, blowjobs, rough sex, POV…
PaperStreetCash – many sites, different niches: MILF, Asian, incest, lesbian, teen, interracial…
FameDollars – part of Gamma Entertainment, which sells for AdultTime Network, which holds several hundreds sites – maybe the biggest porn network. You have at lest 10 sites for every niche you can imagine, and some niches you have never heard about before. Some of the the biggest premium sites are here, for example: EvilAngel, Wicked, SweetSinner, TransFixed. You can live just from FameDollars.
CarnalCash – this network contains a lot of kinky gay sites. Just check the names: FunsizeBoys, Gaycest, GrowlBoys, MasonicBoys, TwinkTop, and 10+ more.
MrSkinCash – the biggest nude celebrity site MrSkin.
FPNCash – several niches, but they are famous for BBC and anal niche, especially the site Analized.
Affect3D – the biggest site for 3D animated porn.
JerkPay, CaramelCash, MasturPay, and VRBCash – VR porn.
PornoMental – VR porn, Czech, about 10 sites.
NaughtyRevenue – home of the famous NaughtyAmerica, one the the most important premium porn sites.
StandAhead – a lot of gay sites in all possible niches.
iStripper – they have several innovative products, my favorite is a successful VR porn game.
Affiliate Networks – Webcams
BongaCash is the home of BongaCams, and I’m sure you’ve heard of them. Their tools are among the best.
CamSoda – one of the old, established cam sites.
Chaturbate – the biggest, the richest, the best converting… – Chaturbate is the most important sexcam site.
Xcams-Power – covers Xcams sites.
SoulCams – a big webcam models site.
StripCash – it holds relatively new but aggressive and fast-growing StripChat.
CherryCash – you’ve heard about Cherry.tv
Affiliate Networks – Sex Dolls
I bet you didn’t expect this 🙂 But every year this business grows exponentially, so it would be foolish to ignore all that money.
RealDoll – one of the biggest, they have their own R&D. Have you heard years ago about AI driven Harmony?
Affiliatly – they handle SexyRealSexDolls.
OnlyDolls – they sell sexdolls made after real porn stars, and right now they are hit.
Acronyms in Adult Affiliate Marketing
TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is extremely popular in the online marketing industry. I’ll put here everything that comes to my mind, without a specific order. I hope in time all-important ones will find their way here.
Besides acronym meaning, the context and related concepts will also be presented.
CPM – Cost Per Mille – This model refers to paying ads according to the number of impressions. Value is equal to the price paid per 1000 impressions. So if CPM is $0.5 you’ll earn $1 for 2.000 impressions.
CPV – Cost Per View – See CPM.
PPV – Pay Per View – See CPM.
CPC – Cost Per Click – No matter how many visitors see the ad, just click count. So the value is equal to the price paid per click. For example, if CPC is $0.2 for 10 clicks you get $2.
PPC – Pay Per Click – See CPC. Meaning is actually slightly different but most of the time it just doesn’t matter.
CTR – Click Through Rate – Ratio of the number of visitors that clicked on the ad to the number of impressions. If CTR is 3% that means for 100 impressions there will be (on average) 3 clicks. CTR is the easiest way to measure which banner is more successful. If the content of the banner is bad on not relevant for visitors, or the design is bad, it will have a lower CTR than some other (better) banner put in the same place.
LP – Landing page – Page where a visitor “lands” after a click on the ad, link, banner… Click on a banner was a victory for its designer, but in order for the user to do the action that really counts (registration, leaving email…) it’s not enough. Link in banner leads to a landing page and its job is to keep visitors’ attention and persuade him/her to do desired action (conversion).
Conversion – Visitor’s desired action (registration, confirmed email address, credit card data…) on a landing page. If the visitor does it, we have a conversion.
CR – Conversion Rate – Used for example for a landing page, represents the ratio of conversions to the number of visitors. So CR of 15% means out of 1.000 visitors 150 of them will actually leave data/register/buy/… Conversion Rate is the easiest way to measure how much some landing page is more successful compared to some other page.
CPA – Cost Per Action – In this model, you get money in the case of conversion on the landing page. It works this way:
1. Visitor clicks on a banner on your site
2. On the landing page visitor does whatever is defined as conversion (registration, paying…)
3. You earn money.
If CPA is $50, for 2 conversions you get $100. The CPA model is often different for different classes of traffic you are “sending” to the advertiser’s landing page, and the “traffic class” is usually defined by the visitor’s country of origin. So most of the time you’ll get much more money for traffic from the USA than from some African country, for example.
CTA – Call To Action – It’s those loud buttons with big letters “Buy Now!” and the like. Usually on landing pages, but can be on banners too.
EPC – Earnings Per Click – How much money a click on a selected link/banner brings. It’s calculated for a period of time, by dividing total earnings by the number of clicks.
For example, if some offer brought $100 during last month, and in the same month it was clicked 50 times, it has an EPC of $2.
This is a measure of the profitability of an offer and is used for comparing two offers. Inside enters everything that happens after clicking on your site: landing page quality (CR), payment model (CPA or CPM…) …
CMS – Content Management System – Content (of a website) is kept in a database and on a request web page is dynamically formed. The oldest sites were static, the server was serving ready web pages. An example of CMS is WordPress.
WP – WordPress
CPL – Cost Per Lead – see PPL.
PPL – Pay Per Lead – It’s an advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying leads. And a “qualifying lead” is generally a signup involving contact information and perhaps some demographic information; it is typically a non-cash conversion event. A lead may consist of as little as an email address, or it may involve a detailed form covering multiple pages.
CPS – Cost Per Sale – see PPS.
PPS – Pay Per Sale – Advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying sales. So you get money when visitors not just register but actually pay, not before. PPL payments are much more often but PPS payments are much higher.
ROI – Return On Investment – That’s the ratio of profits (or losses) to the amount invested. For example, if you entered a project with $10.000 (investment) and earned (profit) $1.500, you have an ROI of 15%.
ROI is the easiest way to measure the profitability of some projects and to compare two projects.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – Such a wide subject! It includes EVERYTHING you do, or don’t, both on your website and its pages and out of it, both technical and non-technical subjects…
That ends with your site (or some pages) placing well on the result page of a search engine when the user is searching for something and with some intent that is relevant to your pages.
SERP – Search Engine Results Page – Page of search engine listings, typically the first page of organic results. Why stress on “the first page”? Because it almost doesn’t matter if your page is ranked on the third or 56th page of results, almost all visitors click on the first 3 results on the top of the first page, all the others don’t get much attention.
Organic – In SEO “organic” means everything (traffic, results) obtained without paying for it.
Organic traffic – All traffic coming from SERP, after visitors click on organic search results links.
Paid traffic – SERP traffic that is not organic 🙂
Organic search results – All results on SERP except paid search results.
Direct traffic – A visitor came to your site directly, not from some other page. So he/she probably typed the address directly or selected it in Bookmarks.
Referral traffic – All traffic that is not from SERP and not direct. It usually means visitors clicked on a link to your site on some other web page.
Social (media) traffic – A visitor clicked on a link to your site on some social network.
TLD – Top Level Domain – For example .com, .net, .org…
UV – Unique Visitor – That’s a visitor that has visited a site at least once in a fixed time frame. Second and any later visit don’t count as unique. Sites typically use cookies to follow this.
So why is this important? Well, you usually won’t sell the same thing to the same guy again and again, especially in a short time. So when calculating statistics, almost always it’s better to use UV instead of the total number of visits.
SOI – Single Opt-In – For registration (on the landing page) to be accepted and you to get money, a user just needs to leave an email address.
DOI – Double Opt-In – Visitor’s email address is not enough, it must be also verified. It’s usually done by replying to the email sent to that address.
Adult Affiliate Marketing Payment Methods
As you can guess: there are many, and they change from time to time. If you live in the USA most of the time you can even ask for an old-fashion check, or if you live for example in Turkey (where PayPal is kicked out, besides other restrictions), you must use imagination and move money through one or two extra nodes (payment services) before being able to access it. And if you live in some EU country, you can get your money by using just one payment service and then just forward it to your bank account.
Paxum
Paxum paying service dominates the adult market. This company handles and moves your money without any problem. Yes they are slow, and they take a part of your hard-earned money – but all other services do it too.
Like it or not, you will have to open a Paxum account because many adult affiliate programs have it as the only option, and almost all have it as an option. So get used to Paxum, learn how it works, and make it your friend.
PayPal
PayPal doesn’t directly support adult business, but some ad networks support it, or online sex shops, so for sure you will see it around. In the case of online shops it might be the only payment method they offer so sooner or later you will end up with a PayPal account. If you live in a country not supported by PayPal there are ways to open an account but you can enter serious problems and even lose your money, be warned.
TransferWise
Sometimes you receive money on Paxum but for some reason (like leaving in some specific countries) you can’t (or don’t want to) directly move it to your bank account. In such cases, you must be creative because different problems ask for different solutions, but there are services to help you. One of them is TransferWise.
TransferWise is a money transfer service specialized for sending money abroad with lesser fees for transfer and eventual conversion than most of the other services. It also does something no one else does: it will show all fees and transfer time, in detail! On the screen, you will get the exact amount of money that will come to the destination and when, and all fees are shown separately. If you’ve ever done any big moving of money and currency conversion, you know how rare is this.
You can open several accounts with different currencies and, the most important thing, for some currencies you are getting real, your own, unique bank details: bank name, address, account number… For someone sending you money to that account, it looks like you are living in that country and money is sent locally. If you are from the USA, Canada, or EU you most probably don’t know what I’m talking about and why all that excitement about TransferWise, but some of you might cry tears of joy while reading this 😺
Of course, before applying to any of these services read all info you can find, especially small print. And if something looks too good to be true… you know the rest. And if you really want to try some obscure money transfer service, do I need to say first try with as small amounts as possible before throwing something like $300 into unknown and hope best.
On-page Adult SEO Basics
On-page SEO is everything you do on your site (or specific page) in order to make it lovable for search engines.
It is usually in conflict with making the page user-friendly or even human-readable. But our visitors are not here to read, and search engines are still far from actually understanding the text, so most of the time there’s no problem.
“Normal” SEO
This image from SEMrush contains the most important on-page SEO advice. Like everything else in SEO, read, learn, check for other opinions, and then make your mind.
Adult SEO
Adult SEO is different from the “normal” SEO. Google is less interested in porn than in health or news sites, so for us, SEO didn’t change much for years.
You can obtain any kind of backlinks without punishment, you can make text unreadable by humans with keyword stuffing, and all your anchors can be keywords. Google just doesn’t care.
This describes really well how to do link building for porn sites: The Evolution of Link Building: Web Rings, Spam & Penguin… Oh My
Here are a few more tips just for adult SEO:
- Meta description must contain your main keywords (not ALL of them!)
- The title must contain your main keyword(s)
- All headers (H1, H2,…) must contain your main keyword(s)
- H1 and the title should be almost identical or at least contain the same main keyword(s)
- Actually, the title, H1, and meta description should match as much as possible
- Paragraphs should contain keywords, to the point that someone out of the adult industry would cry “It’s keyword stuffing!”
- Category names should be keywords
- URL parts should be keywords
- The site’s name should be made from keyword(s).
I think you got the picture.
Advanced
Warning – For the following subjects, I expect at least a few months of experience and a basic understanding of modern Web technologies (PHP, JS, HTML…).
So you started an adult website using WP, plugins, and specialized themes, and it works! Videos are loaded automatically, ads started bringing some money on their own, you are checking statistics, negotiating link exchanges…
But you got bored. You feel you learned a lot during these few months and believe if you tweak this, change that, try something you read in some SEO article – it would raise your traffic a lot!
Be careful, don’t fall into the micromanagement trap! We’ve all been there 🙂 Yes you learned a lot, but it’s just a few steps on the long road. If your site works and makes money to you it’s because of good plugins and a theme behind it, your role was clicking buttons. Sorry, but someone had to tell it 🙂
So just let it work, don’t mess around.
All that said, this is about advanced subjects, what comes next after you master all plugins and what the theme can do for you. When you are sure you can leave shallow water, come here again.
Btw if you screw around, use protection. I mean BACKUPS!
Banner Rotation With Ad Inserter
Let’s say your theme has predefined places for ads and is flexible enough. But maybe you want that banner in some other place? Or just on some pages and not on others? Want to rotate banners and see what works best?
Try Ad Inserter plugin. We all use it. But it’s a different kind of plugin from the ones you got used to. There are no default settings that work magically with just one click, now is the time to show what you have learned.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a help, a perfect and detailed guide, but it’s so huge you’ll need an hour to read it. And to understand it you’ll need at least the basics of “that JavaScript shit”.
But once you master it, you’ll feel the freedom. WP theme will become just the base of your site, not its blueprint anymore. Ad Inserter plugin took you out of that jail that is now too small for you, now you are free to make the site just the way you like it… or totally screw up 😉
Other resources
There are more sites that have useful information on the subject. Sometimes they are too old (this business changes really fast), or biased, but everything you read is useful. So check them too.
ViceTemple.com has a step-by-step tutorial on how to enter the adult website industry using adult web hosting.
onlineadrian.com/how-to-start-a-porn-site-and-how-to-make-money-with-porn-sites/
www.blackhatworld.com/seo/start-a-porn-site-in-2019.1081317/
www.wp-script.com/how-to-start-porn-site/
www.wp-script.com/blog/adult-seo-guide/
A really good list with reviews of different types of adult affiliate programs can be found here qualityadultaffiliates.com. Many niches are covered.
