After reading last Sunday's post on SEO in pornography, I decided I'd have a bit of fun with it. Whether or not you are willing to promote pornography, there are some absolutely stellar tips hidden away in its vast, obscure world.

Disclaimer: I do not promote pornography. This is a result of observations, investigations, and discussions with a few people in the industry who gave me their consent to write about what we talked about. I will try and keep this as clean as possible.

Why Is the Pornography Marketing World So Good to Monitor? 

1. It is probably the most saturated niche in existence today. As with any other situation where something is taken to the extreme, we can watch the results of it in its situation, and take those lessons back into our own. Anything on such a large scale multiplies the effect of previously negligible/unnoticed problems, making them easy to see and fix in our own SEO setups. 
2. They have taken a market that is frowned upon by 90% of the world, is legally not available to anyone under the age of 18 (although many traverse its nude hallways before this age), and is visited by 99% (estimate) men (who make up only around half of the population), and turned it into the most ridiculous money maker on the planet today. Let's take a look at some of their sites and see how they're performing. Although it's a terrible standard, I'll use Alexa.com's data to give a good idea. Megarotic = Rank #20, YouPorn= Rank #30, Redtube=#62. Pretty impressive, eh? 
3. They have their own unique methods of promotion that rarely occur in the outside world. Since their links are not welcome in the majority of the internet and they cannot use most PPC programs, an odd mishmash of ads, TGPs, redirection, and a variety of other services has developed.  But that does not mean that we can't try to mimic these techniques.
   

How do they receive this kind of traffic?

They Realize the Potential for Long Tail Keywords 

Most people use long tail keywords as an afterthought, or just assume these things will come naturally. The porn world though, actually INVESTIGATES these "long tails," then expands off them. They have the unique reality of a lot of really weird people out there, who will search for specific things. Right now, according to Wordze, the most popular search featuring the word "grandma" is "grandma sex," with an estimated 16,148 searches per month. From there, there's a decent variety of long tails including things like "filipino grandma sex." For the phrase "teen sex," there are over 1000 recorded long tails that Wordze has, and in my experience, it misses A LOT (it only shows things with substantial search volume). The main reason they take home as much traffic and profit at the end of the day as they do is that they ACTIVELY EMBRACE these long tail keywords, seeking them out and marketing towards them. Which brings us to reason #2.

They Actively Seek Out and TARGET These Medium/Long Tails 

When there is complete market saturation for a topic, the only way to handle it is to divide it into smaller, more easily approached niches. As stated above, they not only created sites with vague references to these things, but they targeted them specifically. If someone is ranking for a seemingly obscure phrase, it's because they went out there and created an entire site devoted to that long tail phrase.

You should not miss out on traffic just because you failed to target a medium/long tail phrases properly.

If you can't rank for "car parts" (or even if you can), that's fine. Create yourself some different sites. One for "Ford truck parts," one for "Saab car parts," one for "Jaguar parts." Look at it like this. If someone searches for "ford truck fender in springfield ohio for cheap" (in any niche there are thousands of searches like this), and you have those words in your site, you're still probably not going to come up first. That smaller site who specializes in Ford trucks will. He won't have better backlinks. He might not even have good on page SEO. But if his site is targeted and has the proper anchor text, he's oddly difficult to defeat. Also, he'll be picking up hundreds of phrases per day that you just will not be getting.

They Use Affiliates to Offset Their Own Work Load (Great in combination with #1 and #2)

Targeting the hundreds or so niches, then the dozens and dozens of mini-niches that come off of those is hard work. Some would call it overwhelming. So, what do you do? Hire a squadron of SEOs? Outsource your site design? No!

Do like the porno-pros do. Get yourself an affiliate program, and market it. Sign up for affiliate networks. Find message boards where you're likely to find ideal affiliates for your product, and drop it in your sig. Talk to the top producers, and offer them special commissions.

Better yet, offer a second-tier for your program. Let your affiliates promote the affiliate program! People are tight lipped about niches making them money unless they have an incentive to share.

Affiliates are like vigilante armies in some ways. They spread your products everywhere, without you having to lift a finger. They're in the "know" of the industry, and are normally the first to find the new places to promote. They'll submit videos, become testimonials, do product reviews, and everything else you need to get your site out there. And it costs you what? 20% of a sale you wouldn'tve had otherwise? (Side note: Don't be stingy. 4% commission? Come on now.) Remember, this is their job. They are very good at it, and will frequently find and rank for keywords you yourself would never have thought of.

They Use Porn 2.0 to Discount the Saturated Market

From friends in the industry, I've heard even medium tail terms are getting quite competitive. But this doesn't matter as much anymore.The porn industry realized that relying entirely on Google was a bad idea, so they got moving. You-Tube style porn sites (like the ones listed above) took hold. No rankings necessarily, just lots of traffic, lots of ratings, and lots of..well, you know. They brand the videos with their site name, and let the traffic roll in. Top videos on megarotic, for example, have over 3.4 million views. Think about it. If only 1 in 100 people actually GO to your URL after that, that's 34,000 clicks for uploading a single stinkin' video. Beyond that, they've expanded to not only "allow" services like Google images/Yahoo Video to access their content, but they specifically target it.

These techniques are not just limited to the pornography market. Notice how many successful software programs have YouTube videos on how to use them. I saw a site a few days ago actually that left its stats file open to the public by accident. All he did was post screenshots from video games maybe once a week. And he was pulling in several thousand visitors a week from Google Images alone! Once again, notice their technique here. They find multiple avenues within web 2.0 to promote.  They not only run blogs and comment here and there, but they expand to look at every single possible promotion angle that is available to them. Next time you create a YouTube video, why not look at Yahoo Video? How about DailyMotion?Even without ranking, these will bring you traffic. In addition, they get you noticed. Which gets you backlinks. Is it coming together now?

They Worry About Traffic First, and Then Allow The User to "Target" Themselves

Alright. Let's take a look at one of the common things within the porn industry: the TGP/thumbnail gallery. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a massive table of tiny pictures, in theory representing a larger movie or picture that you can get to later by clicking it. In reality, you have a maybe 30% of getting a video/picture, and a 70% chance of getting shot over to another TGP either owned by the same person, or made in a traffic exchange.

Why did these become so popular, and what is the grand advantage of them? They allow the user to target his own content. In a large topic, like pornography (or cars/home decor/electronics/shoes/toys/really anything) there are a lot of different end results people can be looking for. A lot of different tastes. Within a TGP, the user clicks on an image that takes him to another gallery. Ideally, this is targeted towards the picture he clicked. He starts out in a general gallery, and clicks on a picture of a lovely lady's substantial bosom. The gallery he should land in next should feature primarily other ladies with substantial bosoms (and, of course, ads immediately relevant to that). This process can continue for quite some time (or around 40 minutes, haha). During that time, the user can be taken to more and more targeted sites and advertising based on his or her choices.

How can this be ported into modern day, non-naughty SEO? By rigorous categorization. We can see another example of this inside of EBay. They do not have a "electronics" section, and then force the user to go through every gadget they have. The path goes (more or less) Electronics->Computers->Hard Drives->Hitachi->160gb+

By breaking our categories down into numerous subcategories, we allow the user to find everything more easily, and more importantly, we know what ads to show them. If you run an online electronics store, and you see someone looking at hard drives and hard drives specifically, you know that showing them the necessary cables or external cases is probably a good bet, much like the suggest functions on many proper retailers.

For a site that deals with a lot of articles, consider this: the difference between AdSense being more profitable or affiliate programs being more profitable is if the user is looking for information or to buy. It sounds obvious, yes? Then why do so many places have AdSense on articles that discuss what to look for when buying xyz? You'd rather have that 25 cent click than the $10 purchase? Well, if you separate out the sections properly, you'll have a much easier time telling what they're looking for. Maybe even include sections entitled "Looking to Buy" and "Looking for Information."

Conclusion

The strength behind the online pornography market is the same as its weakness: saturation. While ranking in Google has gotten infinitely more difficult for several terms, it created a unique kind of second life for the pornography market. It opened up new avenues of promotion, an entirely new level of targeting, and an affiliate economy that's second to none. By combining their tactics with that of the more mainstream SEO, we can easily increase our earnings and traffic using avenues that we previously neglected in favor of that "dream" that is digg frontpaging. Broaden your horizons. It only takes a little bit.

Regards,

XMCP of SlightlyShadySEO.com