Tag Archives: Sex work

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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Escort Safety in the age of SESTA – From Harlot Advocate

Congress did it, 97-2 they fucked escorts in the name of human trafficking. Trafficking hysteria has captured to minds of our elected officials, once again. All except for Ron Wyden and Ron fucking Paul.

I’m going to try to collect all the best advice I  can to help escorts stay safe with this new law that is waiting the Orange resident of the oval offices signature.

First up is from: @HarlotAdvocate   On Twitter.

I don’t personally know her… BUT shes got some real solid, reasonable advice on how to be safer.  Her Step by Step Guide on  how to stay safe if advertising avenues are shut down. As seen on Twitter and posted here, with her permission.

1. Commit an entire day from your calendar to follow these steps. Then bring a bucket of green tea, water, coffee, a bottle of two of wine to set the mood cause it’s a lot of work.

2. Log into your current email & start to organize.. Listing in this order the A) The Contributors/Providers States.
B) Which Contributors/Providers Have Been Seen & Safe.
C) Which Contributors Are Just PreScreened.
D) Who is Professional.
E) Who Is Not.
F) Who is Blocked.

3. Open 2 Proton Mail Accounts.
A) One for professional business name.
B) Second for recovery email.

Or use the amazing @SafeOffice because they are literally that awesome!

4. After you have organized your original professional email into those folders… Transfer that information them over to the new professional email accounts I have listed above that you have made for yourself.

5. Yes it is a ton of work but trust me your email and organizing is your absolute best option for maintaining clients & contributor relationships.
“If it’s based overseas you are good to go.”

6. Make an announcement to the clients that you are closing your old email accounts associated within wonderful USA & if you so choose send them to your new email address.

7. Drink whatever you need, bathroom breaks were not done.

8. Go to each of your advertisement platforms that are based in the US and remove any and all special keywords that can be associated with sex work. Such as uncheck that incall/outcall, roses, gfe girlfriend etc, pricing unless on your website.

9. Treat each US based advertising platform as a profile for strictly dating.. Like think your looking for a breath taking “dating profile.” Keep that thought, and write your content appropriately.

10. (missing in the line up)

11. Go on your twitter and social platforms and clean house. Remove anything and everything that can or will be perceived as a worker verses a dating profile. This included comments, DM messages, paid profile links, etc that allude to worker status verses dating status.

12. Contributors This Is For You.
No MORE DMs.. You need to approach only through email… That’s it.. Do not waste a dating profiles time when you are just seeking an emotional connection.. This puts them at risk. Stop it and keep it professional.

13. Girls with phones…. We all have them or used too. DO NOT USE YOUR PERSONAL PHONE FOR ANY WORK PURPOSES. You have two phones for two reasons you do not ever mix the two. One is for booking dating spots, one is for checking your grocery lists.

14. Girls with phones.. USE A VPN AT ALL TIMES. Keep it on the minute that phone is on and the minute that phone is off. That simple! Your preferred form of contact should always be email, from the new email you have provided.

15. When posting photo pictures from your cell phone.. Keep that VPN ON. Make sure you always always screenshot at least 5-6 times, zooming in, and posting it then.

16. Providers DO NOT POST cell phone pictures from the hotel you are staying at unless there is nothing that identifies that room. Still for me personally it’s a huge no no hence I don’t do it.

17. Providers & Contributors quit tagging the location where you are at while you are still there. That is just blatantly putting it out there!

18. Discretion is key to staying busy. Supporting one another is the key to keeping safe. Avoid the drama like the plague. Follow all my steps listed above and you will be good to go!

There you have it folks. I know its a lot of work, you know whats more work? Trying to get out on bail for a federal crime or trying to make rent with no job. 

Stay Safe Ladies….

Helpful links:

Safe Office:  https://safeoffice.com/lp/

What is a VPN: https://www.techradar.com/news/what-is-a-vpn

Burner Phones: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/saltzman/2016/09/17/whats-a-burner-phone/90382874/

SWOP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_Workers_Outreach_Project_USA

How to find your government reps: https://whoismyrepresentative.com/

ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/

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Shadow Banning On Twitter

The term is tossed around a lot in sex work circles. I’m shadow banned! RT me because I’m Shadow banned! Help I’m Shadow banned Twitter hates sex workers! This explainer should help you if you feel you might be shadow banned on Twitter.

What is shadow banning on Twitter?

When you suddenly discover that your tweets are not reaching anyone other then your direct followers, you don’t come up in searches and your twitter feed cant be found in general. It’s still there but its as if your account has somehow been limited. You may have been shadow banned. There are shadow ban checkers but they are unreliable. If you think you have been banned you might have been. This is not a sex worker phenomenon many people get shadow banned. Beauty bloggers and You-tubers are hit especially hard. So that’s a strange mix right? Sex workers, beauty bloggers? But there is a method to this madness, there’s a reason those kinds of accounts get shadow banned more then others and don’t worry its possible to get yourself un-banned.

How did you get shadow banned

The easy answer is you look like spam to Twitter.  Twitter is a small company. They a staffed really low. Its not like the old days when you could get @Jack to email you back (yes, that used to happen) Tons of things are automated now and one of these things is a spam algorithm. So that’s the first thing you need to know. The second is how Twitter is accountable to its shareholders. Twitter is publicly held they are also very unprofitable and rely on a lot of VC investment. Twitter’s metric for profitability is “user accounts”. So the more Twitter user accounts, the better twitter looks when measuring this very important metric. This is also one of the reasons that Twitter wont do anything about Russian Bots but that’s another story. To delete those accounts would drastically reduce the number of user accounts. Same thing with accounts that trip their spam filter. Twitter doesn’t want to delete spam because they need that user account but they also don’t want spam to take over its platform and essentially ruin for lack of a better term user experiences.

Enter the spam filter that can get you shadow banned, its because you look like spam. You tweet like a spammer not a real live human. This happens to sex workers a lot because lets face, it were heavy promoters. Just like beauty bloggers and you tubers. See now there’s that connection i was talking about. Twitter isn’t targeting you because you’re a sex worker, they think you are spam. I get how that’s an easy conclusion to jump to since social media is often made inaccessible to sex workers but Twitter is actually one of the few social media platforms that doesn’t discriminate against us. I know color me shocked.

Steps to take to get un-shadow banned

You can get un-banned but it takes a commitment to changing how you tweet. You need to tweet like a human being and not a promotion machine. Some simple steps…

  1.  Keep your promotion tweets to approximately  20% of your feed.
  2.  Use auto tweets sparingly. (especially since they are promo tweets)
  3.  Don’t over hashtag. One or two targeted hash tags work better then 100 anyways
  4. Be careful who you retweet. If you are RTing  banned people or known spam accounts you could in turn get banned yourself.
  5.  RT with commentary some of the time when you RT people, add to the conversation
  6.  Interact with people on Twitter be a “good twitter citizen” engage
  7.  Not every tweet needs a link and a hastag. Again, think human being

If you take these steps and change how you tweet in 72 hours you will see your feed be searchable and your tweets will be able to be  located. Now you have to keep this new tweeting style up, of you don’t you will just get banned again and have to start all over and its possible tripping the filer a lot could get you a permanent shadow ban or extend your time to get un-banned. No one wants that.

Jenny DeMilo: Dominatrix, Hypno-Domme and former GFE Escort
Follow Jenny DeMilo on Twitter

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Increase sales, know your customer

In order to serve your customer the content they want, you have to know who that customer is. Dude who likes porn is not enough. All dudes like porn, what you want to know is, who is this person who’s buying my content. Why do you want to know? So you can better serve them what they want and in return you can increase your sales!

Create a customer profile. You need to know who’s buying your content.

Odds are you can go with male but how old is this man, is he married or single, is he submissive or dominant, what kinks or fetishes does he have. The more you know about him the more targeted your marketing to him can be. The more targeted your marketing, the more you will sell. It’s the number one mistake a see all kinds of business make is not knowing who their customer is.

Example: Escort advertising sites. They get this wrong on the daily. An escort advertising sites customer is the escort who pays for the ads on the site. Many sites get this wrong and do things that infuriate escorts (their customers) and direct the marketing/features to the person surfing the site. That person is not the advertising sites customer. That person is the ESCORTS customer.  This creates frustration for the customer (the escort) and in turn can cause loss of loyalty to a site, retention of business and the deterioration all around good will. It’s a problem.

So knowing who your customer is, is important. Knowing this customer profile or profiles will help you target your marketing to get your message out to the right person(s), and also help you to take away any barriers the potential customer might have to making the leap from observer to making an actual purchase. After all, what you want is more purchases. You want to serve the customer you have better because keeping a customer is easier and less costly then getting a new one. So customer loyalty should be something you think about and consider in your marketing strategy.

Building a customer profile is not always easy and you you will likely be fine tuning it for a while but its worth the effort you put into it. You can do polls, surveys, watch your analytics  like a hawk, how are people finding you in searches, what sells the most what wains on the shelf only to sell a handful over a long period of time. All this will help you make up this valuable customer profile.

Then craft your sales message to that person and viola you’re on your way to working smarter not harder and increasing your sales.

Jenny DeMilo: Dominatrix, Hypno-Domme and former GFE Escort
Follow Jenny DeMilo on Twitter

Backpage went poof!

Backpage was shut down. What happens next is panic. I know, I lived though the shut down of the Craig’s List Adult Services shut down. Try to stay calm. You will be okay, develop a new plan. Get to work implementing it.

Read this from a couple years ago, it was written after Redbook disappeared:  http://fairywhoremother.com/4-things-you-can-do-when-your-advertising-venue-disappears/

Here is a running list of places to advertise that still exist. (as of Jan 2017) Some of these cost money, some don’t. Some might be for local areas, others are nationwide. Do your research, see what works for you. Most of all know you will be OK. This happens, it sucks but you are a sex worker you’re already resourceful.  (if you have any sites to ad to this list  please reach out so i can add them. jenny@goodtimejenny.com or on Twitter @jennydemilo )

http://www.eros.com/

http://www.cityvibe.com/

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