How to handle a woman?

There’s a way said a wise old man,
A way known by every woman,
Since the whole rigmarole began!

Do I flatter her, I begged him answer,
Do I threaten or cajole or plea,
Do I brood or play the gay romancer?
Said he, smiling, "No, indeed!"
- Camelot by Lerner and Loewe

Women don’t buy porn. This statement is conventional wisdom in our business.

Logic dictates that some women must be buying some porn. Many paysite and affiliate sponsors claim that they have a definable percentage of female subscribers. Then again, few folks will go on record, with hard statistics, to prove that there exists a calculable female market for online smut. One begins to wonder if our industry even cares to measure the female audience. They should care. Women may not be buying porn but they sure as are hell buying something. They are doing it in droves and they’re doing it online.

"It doesn't make sense that women out-populate and outspend men online yet only an unaccounted few pay for adult entertainment on the web."

In a marketing conference hosted by Cosmopolitan Magazine and iVillage.UK, entitled Rethink Pink, attendees were told that women influenced 80% of global purchases.

Frank Feather of FutureConsumer dot com predicts:

“Women will utterly dominate e-shopping for the next decade and by far represent the best e-marketing opportunity of the millenium.”

In a 2004 release EbizRate made this claim:

“For all of 2003, online purchasing was split 60 percent women and 40 percent men - a 5 percent increase from 2002 where the split was 55 percent women, 45 percent men.”

In an article for About dot Com’s marketing section, author Laura Lake says this about a US Census Bureau report in 2004:

“…it showed that there were over 95.7 million unmarried and single Americans. Over 53% of them were women. This nearly tripled the number reported in 2001.”

What can we surmise from the above information? There’s a lot of single women out there and women buy a lot of stuff, in fact, the majority of stuff. I’ll go one better. Women have always been the heart of modern consumerism and those jerkwads that try to sell companies on that magic 15-32 year-old male demographic are full of shit.

Yes, the sausage-fest demo group tends to have opposable income. Males were once the majority of Internet users but the chicks beat them at that too. There are more women in the world, more of them online and they out-purchase all men by a margin of 60 to 40.

So why aren’t women buying our stuff? Why is this the conventional wisdom of our industry? The reason can’t a simple one like “Women don’t like porn”.

I like porn. Most of the female webmasters I know like porn and there’s a hell of a lot of adult female webmasters. All those models in our content seem to like making porn. Then again, I know women that are positive zealots in their hatred for porn. Some hate it for religious reasons. Some hate it for feminist reasons. Some don’t hate it but would rather find other uses for their free time. I’ve heard women who buy romance novel after romance novel, state that porn is bad but erotica is okay. I’ve met ladies crazy for gay porn and bondage porn but would never shop in public for it. I know plenty of women that have see more than one porn movie. Women have to like sex or there wouldn’t be so damned many of them. I find it hard to believe that all these women like sex but hate porn. It doesn’t make sense that women out-populate and outspend men online yet only an unaccounted few pay for adult entertainment on the web.

The song from Camelot that is quoted at the beginning of this article goes on to advise that one handles a woman with love. That method is fine when one is in a romantic relationship.

Sadly we have neither the time nor the capacity to love every female porn surfer. We have to reach our customers quickly and convince them to buy. Most of us would rather sell to males because they’ve proven that they will pay for our products. Our techniques for men are pretty straightforward and fairly standardized. We face a new challenge when we try marketing our dirty, little websites to women.

Chances are most women will never open your TGP gallery, free site or tour. Odds that are most women aren’t interested in seeing clips of chicks taking a load in the face. I’ll bet money that your female surfers have no idea that you sell dildos, wearable chocolate or feature sexual advice columns in your member's area.

In part two of this article: How to Handle a Woman, I’ll show you places where you can learn about the female market. I’ll also provide some tips on what kinds of sites attract female surfers.

If you want to learn to How to Handle a Woman as potential online customer, then stay tuned!

** Click Here For: How To Handle a Woman! - Part #2