Few new webmasters understand that this industry is not just about porn. It is all about marketing, porn just happens to be what we market.

There is no doubt that marketing is an art. To begin you need some basic skills that are not difficult to acquire and the fact is that most people have them. It's hard not to have them because we are all exposed to marketing right from the time that we become aware of what is going on around us. So we absorb it and it sits in our subconscious just waiting to be called up.

To grow your business you also need to develop your marketing skills beyond the basics. You need to understand what appeals to people, what attracts them to look at advertisements and what encourages them to make a purchase. You also need to understand that no matter how good your advertisements are they will not make a sale if people do not see them.

There is no doubt that marketing is also a numbers game and working the numbers is most definitely a skill that you need to develop. You need people to see your advertisements to make a sale and the more people who see your advertisements the more sales you will make.

"Lots of webmasters concentrate on one form of marketing almost to the exclusion of all others."

Porn marketers refer to the numbers game as traffic. Traffic is made up of individual surfers who come looking for porn and there are millions of them every single hour of every single day of the week. The quantity does ebb and flow depending on the time of day, the day of the week and the time of the year but it can always be measured in the millions.

There are quite a few sources of traffic that the adult webmaster can tap into. Some sources are very productive, some are not so good, some are even worse and some are so bad that it is probably better to avoid them all together. Let's list the sources in order of productivity – that is in order of which type of traffic produces the most number of sales compared with the number of hits that the source sends.

At the top of the traffic tree is search engine traffic. At one time it was considered to be the most productive of all types of traffic. Even though it is not converting as well as it once did it still produces good sales.

The number of hits a site will get from a search engine is also very low. Any new webmaster who decides to base his marketing campaign on search engine traffic alone usually changes his mind very quickly because it can take two to three months before any search engine traffic begins to appear.

I guess that if you wanted to liken marketing via search engines to marketing some mainstream product it would be like to placing a small advertisement in a technical journal with a small circulation.

Then there are the link lists that list free sites and AVS sites. The traffic begins to appear almost immediately but the quality of the traffic is not as good as search engine traffic and the amount of traffic that a list will send is variable. Some lists will send lots of traffic in most niches while others seem to supply traffic for some niches more than others. Regardless of the list, the amount of traffic will begin to drop off after a couple of weeks as newer sites are listed and older sites drop further down the list and gradually disappear out of site.

Marketing via link lists could be likened to placing a small advertisement in a number of high circulation magazines that you might find on a newsstand. If you want to be seen in every edition you have to keep submitting sites.

TGP traffic is legendary. If you want traffic then build a TGP gallery, submit it and watch thousands of hits roll in every day for three or four days. The quality of TGP traffic is not so good; TGP really is the home of the free loader and so it does not convert well for most people. There is no doubt that you can make sales from TGP but most new webmasters struggle to make enough sales to cover their costs.

A TGP gallery also has a very finite life and so to maintain a flow of sales requires webmasters to build and submit new galleries every day. TGP lists, like link lists, are variable. The good ones will send you lots of hits, some will send you nothing. Some will charge you to list your galleries, some will not. Making the right choices is not easy and just because a TGP charges you for a listing does not mean that it will send you good quality traffic.

Marketing via TGP could probably be likened to putting up an advertisement on billboards all around a major city for a few days. It is expensive, millions of people will see it but you may not make many sales from it.

At the very bottom of the tree are the traffic brokers. These are the guys who will sell you traffic measured in the thousands of hits. Some traffic brokers are excellent and keep meticulous records so you can see what you have bought and how much they have actually supplied up to any given point. These guys will work with you to help you achieve the best results with the traffic they supply. It is in their best interests to keep their customers and their surfers happy.

Some are not so good and provide poor statistics and are simply not interested in anything but the money. Once again, it is often hard for a new webmaster to tell the difference between the good and the bad. Only time and experience will teach you the difference.

With each traffic source there are variations. Some search engines will send far more traffic than others. It is harder to get a good listing in some search engines than others. Competition for a good placement in Google is fierce but the amount of traffic a good placement will get is good. Competition in some of the smaller search engines is light but the amount of traffic is poor.

Link lists come in many variations. Some are very focused on only a couple of niches while others cover every niche but still seem to send better traffic for less popular niches. Some link lists will send modest amounts of traffic but that traffic comes from search engine queries that are more likely to buy than traffic that comes from big link lists that have a lot of bookmarkers.

TGP also has its fair share of niche specific lists. Experience of traffic from these lists seems to vary. My personal experience is that while the niche lists will send a reasonable amount of traffic the quality of the traffic is not all that good.

I know that lots of webmasters concentrate on one form of marketing almost to the exclusion of all others. However, when you look around at the examples of marketing in the non-porn world you will see that most products are marketed via a variety of methods. For example advertisements for major mainstream products will appear in technical journals, magazines, billboards etc. You will find an advertisement for the latest model just about everywhere that an advertisement can be placed.

The same approach should be applied in marketing porn. Every form of advertising should be used because each form will either result in sales or will lead to making a sale further down the track. We should never pass up a chance to get our advertisements in front of a surfer.