Tag Archives: control

Escort safety in the age of SESTA – From Escort-Ads Dot Com

Escort-Ads.com is not a US based escort ad site and they had some solid advice on ways to stay safe. The most compelling on their list is Host your personal website on a server in a country where prostitution is legal. This  is very good advice. Though SESTA takes aim at advertising sites where sites can be held responsible for their users behavior, no one really knows how US Hosting sites will react and what preemptive measures they will take with hosting escort websites.  You might find your site has once day been disappeared.

My suggestion is to put up a second site hosting in a country where prostitution is legal and forward your current site to  the new one.

Here is the link to the Escord-Ads post about ways to stay safe. Also there is some very good information about ICANN and what the US has jurisdiction on.

https://www.escort-ads.com/news/sesta-update-list-solutions

Yes, this will cost some money but honestly its not cost prohibitive and its important to do even if its just for your own peace of mind. No one knows whats going to happen. City-Vibe, Reddit, Craigslist Personals  have all made changes and the law isn’t even signed yet.

Be proactive! Be safe!

 

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Work Smarter – The Marketing Edition

Marketing is probably the most time consuming aspect of success in the adult industry. Actually, I should correct that statement to encompass all industries, not just the adult industry. Because there is no one sure fire way to be successful at marketing, it involves a lot of trial and error. Sometimes you’ll find that one venue of marketing works amazingly, but then six months later maybe it’s a completely different venue. This royal pain in the ass also happens to be your best friend in the path towards success. Be careful though, it sometimes feels like an uphill battle. In stilettos. Since marketing is an ongoing trial and error process, your first instinct may be to advertise one month on one website and then the next month switch to another website. This can definitely have its ups, but an ad needs to be seen at least 3 times for the audience to make a decision on the product or service. Assuming someone goes to a website once a week, your ad would have to be guaranteed to show up each time they visit that website for them to remember you. That seems like it would be easy, until you factor in that you are not the only advertiser on a website. Most websites use banners that either change every 5-7 seconds or that change each time you click to a new page within the website. Give your ad on the site a 3 month trial period. If you haven’t gotten at least a 10-20% return on your investment, it is definitely time to look elsewhere.

When you’re paying for advertising, be smart about where you spend your money. A fellow producer friend of mine decided to invest by advertising on a popular fetish based tube site, which seems like a great idea except he advertised on a niche fetish tube site and his site doesn’t cater to that specific niche! Of course he was really disappointed by the results since he didn’t get a return on his investment, but he made the mistake of not investing intelligently! Make educated decisions on where and how you spend your advertising budget (do your research!!) so that you don’t end up making the same mistake.

If instead of paying for advertising, you’re doing your own advertisement, consider where and how you’ll be doing it. Are you sticking primarily to forums and interaction with potential customers to drive traffic your way? Maybe you’re running a blog or twitter? Consider this for a moment: what is your hourly rate for a cam show or session? Are your efforts at marketing bringing you that rate for each hour devoted to the cause? If you’re spending 3 hours a day tweeting, and your hourly session rate is $250, that’s $750 worth of work. Did you make that money up? Did you book a session during those 3 hours directly off twitter? No matter how you are advertising, you need to expect a return on your investment, which means not only did you make back the time and money spent, but your earnings go above and beyond that.

If you are advertising by your own means rather than a third party site, use tools that are readily available such as Google Analytics, keywords/search terms, social media sites, and forums (where you are allowed to market yourself. Check the forums TOS before posting ads!). Remember that time is money, and if you’re spending all of your time posting ads and trying to drive up traffic there needs to be a return. Perhaps you spend 10 minutes writing a blog post, be sure to add keywords to make finding you easier. Or maybe you’re tweeting, spend 30 minutes scheduling your tweets to post at popular tweeting hours. See if people you know are willing to do a banner exchange to help drive traffic to each others’ sites or blogs.

There is a lot that can be done to advertise on the internet, and taking advantage of all the avenues is one of the best thing you can do. Whether you decide to pay for advertising or do it yourself, make sure that you’re smart about it. Don’t present yourself or your brand in a bad light, choose the right venues for advertising, and make sure that your ad or banner catches the eye and is memorable!

Follow Sydney Screams on Twitter @sydneyscreams4u

Sydney Screams: Fetish Model, Clip Producer, Adult Actress, Radio Talk Show Host

Buy Your Dot Com

I see it happen all the time, not just from the novice sex workers or those new to the business. It happens over and over, it causes people much stress, sometimes embarrassment and most importantly…. Money. What is this dreaded scourge on the sex business? People who don’t buy and own their own web domain. Yes, I know you think thats rudimentary, everyone knows to do that, right? Wrong! I own my own working name web domain (I also own a whole bunch of others because  I’m a digital hoarder) but I own the important one, I pay every year to renew it like clockwork and you should too.

There is a prominent porn actress who shall remain nameless as to not embarrass her. She is a niche performer with a good sized following, shes a former escort, she owns a couple of niche porn sites, she also been known to sell her services to other sex workers and those hoping to get into the biz as a “consultant” in all things social media and Internet marketing. Awesome right? Well yeah sorta, until you  find out that she doesn’t own her own web domain. Her “insert working name here” dot com website is owned by someone else, someone she used to do business with whom she had some kind of parting of the ways. Since they owned her domain name she walked with out it. I’m not sure I’d hire her to tell me about all things adult/social/Internet marketing when the very basics of how to control your won work, image and content in this often shady business is beyond her but  thats another tale for another day of be careful who you give your money to. I don’t want to come down too hard on her as we all make mistakes, but this is adult business 101. I’m sure this mistake cost her a lot of dollars, someone else getting monthly checks on all her content sold, on her membership site, not to mention the loss of control over her image and persona. They can use that domain to drive traffic to any other sites they want to, they also make money when people search her name and content and find their way to what looked like her official dot com. It’d her name plus dot com and she’s not profiting from it, someone else is. I cant even imagine all the time and energy thats now required to rank her NEW domain, the one that’s some variation on her porn actor name. Lots of work and time investments she wouldn’t have  to engage in if she actually owned her own domain instead of leaving that  very important task up to someone else to buy. You must be the owner of record on your own domain, to not do that can be disastrous.

This doesn’t even address squatters. People who will buy your working names domain in hopes that you will buy it from them for a much inflated price, it happens a lot. Do you want to shell out hundreds of dollars for something you could have bought for 17 bucks?  Or maybe they will load it with banner ads to affiliate programs where they get money for each click or sign up trading off YOUR name for THEIR profit. Yes, that happens

Buy your domain, you don’t have to create a site but you must own your name. Don’t let anyone buy it for you. You buy it, its easy to do. Make sure to add the extra money for privacy. Seriously do that. If you don’t you are opening the door for a world of trouble to save yourself 10 bucks. If you can buy it for 10 years, if you cant buy it for one and renew it when it comes up. Own your own stuff, take control of your business, your image and your domain. This is a business not a hobby and you must make smart decisions. Bad ones can cost you time, effort and most of all money.

 

Jenny DeMilo: Dominatrix, GFE Escort, Fetish Clip Producer, Phone Sex Operator and Hypno-Domme.