UPDATE: What Every Escort Should Know About Online Marketing Part II

June 24th, 2008 by myhoneysuckle -

(+16 rating, 4 votes)

 Loading ...

Part I of this article was written in the spring of 2007 and we published it on our blog in January of 2008. It was written by Sean and carries loads of useful information regarding SEO. However, it seems to be a growing trend that adult web designers and escorts alike are dangerously confused as to what SEO’s role should be to an escort’s site. The article was written to bring everyone up to speed.

When you hear the word “marketing” in regards to online marketing, you might think of SEO.

Now, many of you write me questions, saying you are a little confused by what SEO is, so let’s go ahead and review it. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is the online art and science of making your website show up as close to 1st as possible, when someone types in certain words or phrases into a search engine, such as Google. Your “ranking” can be increased by doing certain things to or with your website. Generally speaking, the closer to #1 your site is in Google for a certain keyword, the more traffic you are going to get to your site for this keyword. So SEO is essentially one of many strategies use to increase traffic to your website.

Now, while you might think “increasing your traffic” is a great goal to have for your new website, it is not the main goal you should be focused on and is certainly not the first goal in a marketing strategy.

WHAT?
I know, it sounds really strange, right? Stay with me.

As an escort it is much more important for you to focus on relationship building rather than impersonally increasing generic traffic. It is much more valuable for you to attract 9 quality visitors to your website, rather than 900 empty visitors.

SEO is a part of SEM - Search Engine Marketing. It’s fine and great if you need to market yourself in the search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo).

However, Online Escort Marketing should not revolve primarily around SEM, and certainly not SEO.

Why? Well…
The truth is you need to first start building your traffic with directory ads.

Want me to prove it? Ok…

How many times do you think a hobbyist/upscale gentleman goes to Google and types in “redhead escort in long beach” when he’s looking for companionship for the evening?

Not very often. Why is that?

Well, because there is a little thing in online existence called a “directory” and most hobbyists know that going to directory to search for the red head in long beach will lead to a much quicker find.

If I were to get online looking for a cute red head in Long Beach, I’m NOT going to Google.com to look for her. I’m going to the Eros Guide, baby. Not only do they separate their girls by location, but also by hair color.

I’ll further my proof… let’s say I’m a newbie. I don’t know about the Eros Guide or that escort directories exists. Not knowing much about the industry, I simply go to Google and type in “red head escort in long beach”… take a guess about what comes up 1st, 2nd, 3rd?

ESCORT DIRECTORIES

Eros, ThatMall, countless others… they have those keywords cinched-up when it comes to SEO. If you type in just about any word escort-related into Google, I bet you Eros shows up for the top results.

You see, Eros is a giant, and they can afford to have an amazing SEO/Marketing guy working full-time to get them high up in the search results. It’s pretty safe to say that you won’t be able to beat them in the search engine for any escort keywords.

And I getting my point across here?

Let me share a funny little story with you. It’s about Sean, myHoneysuckle’s tech guy and the love of my life. Sean is hands down the most knowledgeable SEO guru in the adult web industry. I say this with the utmost confidence.

Sean spends significant time each day researching SEO and keeping up with the current trends. He participates in online SEO challenges, belongs to several online SEO groups, and knows enough about SEO to get himself into trouble, literally (which I’ll explain in a moment). Most importantly, Sean spends tens of thousands of dollars each year attending seminars and purchasing courses teaching him SEO secrets. Information you can’t find on a blog, or learn from reading an article, or assimilate from watching a free video on YouTube.

The guy knows his stuff.

A few months ago, Sean helped one of our clients get her page ranking extremely high in the search engines. It got so high that it started out-ranking a big directory for some of their terms. He got a call asking to remove the terms. He kindly obliged and we were both shocked at those results. I knew he was good… but, that was really impressive.

SEO can be great and do great things, however your focus should first be placed in other areas regarding your “marketing.”

My goal is to help you make more money, first and foremost, always.

As an experienced web developer, it’s my opinion that you should have basic SEO done to your site when it’s developed, which includes: keyword rich page urls, well-formed titles for each of your pages, auto-generated daily sitemaps, keyword rich alt tags for images, keyword rich image names, and content optimization (LSI).

I also strongly suggest your site be converted into a WordPress site. myHoneysuckle was the first web development group in the adult industry to take this stance a couple of years ago. Since then, a few other adult designers have jumped on board with it, slowly but surely. I am hoping to see more in the future.

All of the optimizations I mentioned above are easy-peasy for any half-brained web developer to do and should NOT cost you an arm and a leg, with the exception of the LSI and a conversion to WordPress. Those are both time-consuming and more on the high-end of things.

If you would rather not convert to WordPress, that is fine too. Search engine optimization is still available for your site. You are still able to do standard optimization which would include keywords, optimization of your URLs, title tags, alt tags, image names, etc. and optimization of the content. And of course, link exchanges, which is another very important part of search engine optimization.

Ok, now I want to mention something I’ve been noticing lately and I will be writing a longer article on in the future. A very odd trend I see occurring with adult web designers is the desire to stuff SEO tutorials and articles down escort’s throats. Some even offer CMS tools for you to do the SEO yourself.

Hello?

SEO isn’t that interesting. It’s not that fun. Also, it isn’t expensive… or it shouldn’t be for what an escort needs it for.

I would understand this need if it were expensive… or if it were just so much fun I can’t contain myself!

I’m baffled by who started this trend and why on Earth they thought you would find it a wise investment of your time to do it yourself. It’s time consuming and tedious. It’s also very tricky. You can read 4 hours of SEO research a day for 4 years and still not be a pro. It’s not like making pie. It’s like making concrete.

I have an employee who does my SEO projects. He is very good and cheap, making the rates cheaper for my clients. Sean checks over all his work and then we track and test the results.

Do you get what I’m saying?

If you really think reading boring tutorials and implementing SEO on your own site is what you need to do, then more power to you.

My advice would be, pay someone $200 and save yourself a lot of trouble. Unless you are looking to change careers and become an SEO nerd, there is really no need to bother. I would consider reading articles on how to be more seductive or watching videos of cool new make-up techniques would be a much more enjoyable use of my time. But, that’s just me!

If you really want to get involved with your site, research something a bit more interesting… such as blogging tips and techniques. Do some creative writing exercises. Book a photographer and take some new photos to post as an update.

Where does myHoneysuckle place their focus in regards to escort marketing? Zoning in on quality traffic from your existing sources. Cleaning up errors preventing you from more quality visitors. Designing a site using real marketing techniques. Building up your clientele. Creating new sources for quality traffic. Tracking. Testing.

Depending on your specific goals, we could actually come up with several different strategies. In some cases, we would use extensive SEO. A lot of factors depend on when and how we use it and how deep we go.

I’ll end this article with much of the same sentiment as Sean ended his… in the world of marketing, things are always changing. What works today might not work tomorrow. It is important to take real metrics, examine them, see what works, what doesn’t, continue doing what does work, and throw out what doesn’t.

The fastest way to failure is to find out what works and stop doing it.

Written by Erin Ann Myer for myHoneysuckle.com