The Definitive Guide to Driving Traffic to Your Adult Site

As one of the oldest industries (both online and offline), the adult industry has always been regarded as one of the most dynamic and competitive. The goal of this article is to provide a timeless plan of action that you can turn to whenever you're unsure about the next steps you should take to grow your adult traffic. Feel free to bookmark it, share it, even republish it if you believe it will be valuable to other people. A link back to this page will be highly appreciated ( https://traffdaq.com/articles/adult-traffic-guide ).

Although the players of the game and tools of the trade might change over time, the strategies provided here are meant to be timeless, as they tend to focus on human behavior, rather than specific tools. However, real-world examples will be provided and updated often. To get an up to date set of tools, please revisit this page often.

The following information has been collected after working with thousands of adult webmasters over the years. Now, let's dive into the actual strategies and tactics used by the best players in the game:

1. Publish Top Quality Content

Despite being one of the biggest online clichés ("Content is King"), creating top quality content should be one of your highest priorities. Everything you do will revolve around this. Every effort you put in the other areas will be amplified (or not) by the quality of your content. But isn't everyone out there doing their best already? What does quality content mean anyway? Let me give a checklist of the things you should be looking at when deciding how good your content is:

1.1 Unique

Having unique content that cannot be found anywhere else can be a rock-solid reason why people must visit your site. One way to get unique content is to produce it yourself. Producing content takes resources, of course, but it can pay off over time. It's not, however, the only way to get content. While many sites got extremely successful without having their own content, they had elements of uniqueness to them. Think of the giant tube sites. They don't necessarily own the content themselves, but they have publishers uploading tons of unique content every day. Same goes for cam sites. Many broadcasters are exclusively available on these sites and nowhere else, creating a unique experience for the visitors. If a visitor likes specific performers, they have to come back to the site to see them again, there is no other way. Before starting to create a new piece of content or before publishing one, always ask yourself "how unique is it?".

1.2 Memorable

There is no point creating unique content if nobody remembers it. This is becoming harder and harder since your audience is, probably, already spoiled with the most exotic content every day. It's the times we live in. Social media is an extremely efficient way of making exotic content known and popular. But that's both a blessing and a curse! If you manage to make your unique content memorable it will be an enormous advantage for you, because it will to be naturally discovered by your target audience. But doing so will be hard, because everybody else is competing for your audience's attention and mindshare.

1.3 Valuable, in the Context of Your Audience

Another thing you should look for is the value the new content is going to bring to your target audience. A glass of water can have very limited value to a person with access to clean and cheap tap water, but it can be a life and death issue to a thirsty traveler in the dessert. To bring this example back to our digital adult business, think of the toys that were specifically developed for the cam performers. They combined the old and boring sex toy with a "tip detector", making it possible for a remote viewer to directly interact with the performer, using tips. The company producing these toys instantly took over the entire market, because they've adapted the boring toy to a unique market and made it a lot more fun. This kind of unique value can be created as well in all markets, however, it's something for you to discover by yourself, otherwise, you're just a #metoo copycat. Remember this and always think of the context, then try to provide your audience with the content that will bring them the most value.

2. Optimize Your Site

2.1 Optimize For Humans

Everybody is so obsessed with optimizing their site for search engines that they almost forget about their human audience. It's tempting to tweak a few things, stuff a thousand keywords at the beginning of your site and hope to get the #1 position in the search engines, then forget it's the search engine's job to find the content that humans want and not the other way around. Make sure you give your visitors the best experience they can have. Have clear navigation, use good contrast, good page design and a super-fast page delivery. Make sure your best content can be easily found by humans first. People are the ones visiting your site, talking about your amazing content, secretly sharing it with their friends (yes, porn gets shared too!). Frequently experience what your visitors experience! Go through your visitors funnels over and over until you nail it.

2.1 Optimize For Robots

This is my least favorite strategy, since I strongly believe that it's the job of search engine to serve the people and return the best results possible and it's your job to BE that best result that comes at #1. But still, a lot of people are focusing on "tricking" the search engines into thinking their content is more relevant than the other. I do not believe this is a "fair" strategy that you can build a serious business on, but I will mention a few things that can help search engines find your content easier:

Use plain HTML content when possible While search engines take big steps forward in better understanding how the the modern web works, these "reading" technologies can be quite shaky as new technologies are both launched and abandoned every day (remember Flash? Any content that you might have developed using that technology is not even supported by default anymore in most browsers and the search engines might not find your content as the best option for their results because of the potentially bad user experience, even if your content would be the best fit.
Make proper use of the HTML tags If you're using a standard CMS for your website (like WordPress), you might get some help with these out-of-the box. There are also a lot of plugins you can use, but don't obsess over them. Make the <title> tag punchy, as that will be shown in both the search results page and as a title of the tab in your audience's browser. That's your only chance to get the user back when they switch to a different tab. Don't stuff it with spammy keywords, but use it as a way to grab your users' attention. Structure your content using the proper heading tags (<h1>, <h2> etc.).
Speed matters Make use of cache whenever possible. Optimize your images and videos for web. Use tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights to get a checklist of things you can improve, but never sacrifice real user experience for a higher score in such tools.
Avoid all black-hat SEO A new "loophole" in Google's algorithm is is found every day. People develop and sell expensive products based on these things. Not a long time ago, people were paying huge amounts of money to get their pages "optimized" by SEO experts and get thousands of backlinks only to get penalized forever once the new algorithm was released. This is one way to screw up most of your other efforts. Think for the long term and avoid any "tricks".

3. Build Backlinks FOR HUMANS

Backlinks have been heavily abused since the first day the PageRank technology become public knowledge. Getting as many links as possible used to be a very good strategy for achieving high rankings, but one day, when Google decided so, all the spammy activity became a penalty for your web property and many sites simply disappeared from the search results.

I strongly believe that a good network of backlinks is one of the best assets your adult business can have and that it will stay like this as long as the web is in use, but I would advise you to build them with humans in mind. An article that recommends a list of useful tools is the way links happen naturally and that's exactly the strategy you need to emulate. A low quality directory with 10,000 links and no content is something a human being would almost never need, therefore, it's the search engine's job to discriminate between the two.

Adult businesses are unique in a way that prevents most sites from linking to them, making your life even harder when building links to your site, but here are a few strategies you can use:

Guest posting (article writing, tube uploads, image uploads)
Forum posting in your niche
Submit press releases in your niche
Run contests for other sites in your niche
Make it easy for other to link to you. Provide embedding codes with pre-filled links to your content.

Look at how the top sites in your niche are doing it, but don't blindly follow their model. Be creative and think for new ways to get new links that actual humans will follow and you're on track to getting a flood of natural traffic.

4. Get Social

Social media is a great place to get traffic to your site, but getting there under the radar can be tricky, just like getting into a new group of people and starting to scream about your products with a megaphone, direct approaches rarely work well. You will need to spend time to understand how each social network works. Some of the networks will tolerate better a direct approach, while other can get a very negative reaction towards you and you might as well get your account and site banned.

The key to doing this well is to provide more value to the community than you're talking back. If you're constantly getting fresh good content across, people will, generally, be fine with your small promotion at the end and some of them will visit your site and become your clients.

Invest in your social media accounts as they can be some of the best assets in your business. You need to nurture them, keep them active and, most importantly, do your best to not get them banned, but be prepared for it as it will sometimes happen!

Next, I will provide some of the networks that currently work well for getting traffic to adult sites, with the brief strategies of each one. For an updated list, please come back often to this article.

4.1 Reddit

Reddit can be a huge source of traffic for your adult site if you do it right. But if you don't, you can kiss your chance goodbye by getting your account and site banned forever.

Have a look at their NSFW subreddits as a lot of horny redditors are looking for some good porn on a daily basis.

4.2 Tube Uploads

Like I mentioned in the content section, the giant tube sites (and not only) are build on user generated content. The strategy most of the websites use is to upload watermarked videos, with their logo and URL. Some sites allow you to add an real link to your site below your video. This should help you get some people visiting your site.

Part of this strategy is to upload only a short part of the video, to trigger curiosity and get the users to your site for the full video.

4.3 Porn Pin Sites

Adult pin sites are also a good source of traffic. You can upload your watermarked pics with an URL to your main site to get interested users back to your site.

4.4 Images Sites

Watermarked pictures can be also submitted to images sites, but since most of the TGP sites are now dead, only a select few are still worth your time.

5. Traffic Trading

But what is traffic trading? The basics of traffic trading are:

You make a deal with another site to show their banner on your site, while they will show yours on their site.
When a user goes to your site and clicks on the partner banner, you earn a new visitor to your site.
From the new user you just got, you have a new chance to earn a new visitor and the cycle repeats.

"But how am I going to make money if my visitors always leave my site to the partner site?"

...and you have a point. But, when your users click on your partner banner, make sure they don't actually leave your site (you can accomplish that by simply opening the link in a new window). Also, you'll be placing promotions to your "money site" or affiliate product, or other CPC or CPM banners and some users will see that, will click them and will buy. Some users will even buy from both your website and your trading partner website, if they're good. It's a win-win.

I absolutely love traffic trades, but managing them used to be a big mess, which led many people to completely abandon them. Not a very long time ago, you would have to look for sites in your niche that were worth your time, then contact the owners and ask them to trade with you. Many would simply ignore your messages. Others would simply not want to trade with you, because your small site is, usually, not worth the effort. But some would, finally, accept your offer and start trading with you. Then, you would have to keep track of how many visitors they send to your site and what kind of quality you were getting (is it in the right geo? Is it artificial? Does it actually convert?). Nowadays, a few software solutions exist to help you automate some of these processes and there are also dedicated networks doing just that.

But, traffic trading, also known as traffic exchange, has a very bad rep these days, because of the poor job most of the traffic trading platforms did in the past and are still doing today. Most of the platforms only serve incentivized clicks that have zero value for the web site owners or completely fail to address one of the greatest issues of the digital advertising industry today, which has to do with fraudulent clicks and artificial traffic that just blow up your servers and bring you nothing but trouble. The biggest reason for this is that it's actually a very hard business. The same issues that determined people to abandon good, old traffic trades still exist with these tools, but the incentives to abuse them are now much higher, because the perceived rewards are higher as well.

But in the next sections I will provide two good ways to go about traffic trades that will amplify your other traffic strategies and help you multiply your results.

5.1 TRAFFDAQ

TRAFFDAQ solves most of the issues mentioned above and will make your life much easier if you want to increase your traffic via traffic trading. Some of the benefits of using it are:

There are no limits to the amount of traffic you currently get. You're never too small to trade.
Automatic matching with other trading partners, based on your chosen criteria. This means you will never have to search for trading partners again.
Your trading activity will automatically scale up and down based on the volumes your site can provide at any given time. This means you don't have to constantly monitor your trades. You can, literally, set it and forget it.
You can use geo targeting to increase your results, by precisely matching the traffic you receive with the type of site you're running.
A real-time bidding system will ensure fair trades, based on geos, traffic quality and partner reputation.
There's an auction for every click you send, so your traffic will always get the highest bid possible.
Fraudulent clicks and artificial traffic is dealt with automatically using AI, real-time feedback from other trading partners and manual review from the network admins.
You can route the traffic however you want, by creating unlimited campaigns. For example you can generate traffic with multiple sites and get back visitors directly to your main pay site, or have multiple campaigns, each with its own targeting options (niche, geos, sources etc.)

Full disclosure for the users reading this article on a different site: TRAFFDAQ is a traffic trading platform that I've been building and that I own since the beginning of 2014.

5.2 Classic Traffic Trades

Although the trading process can be fully automated by using a trading network, sometimes it makes sense to trade traffic directly. These trades can be very profitable and there are tools you can install to make your live easier (trading scripts).

However, because of the issues mentioned in the beginning of this trading section, I only recommend trading traffic with partners you fully trust, otherwise it's very easy to get scammed.

6. Buying Traffic

Nobody seems to like reading about paid traffic, but in most cases, it makes so much sense! If you have your own product or you're promoting an affiliate product, if you're a broadcaster and you want to focus on that, buying traffic is the fastest and easiest way to get results! Don't forget, paid traffic costs money, but free traffic costs time. You can make more money, but you can't make more time.

Investing a small amount of money in traffic will allow you to get results right away, to tweak and improve your website and get you to the fast track in no time!

It's a great way to test new ideas without a 2-year marketing plan, just to find out that nobody is really interested in your product. Take advantage ot fast, paid traffic to find out what works, then scale it up with even more traffic, paid and free.

The big players in the paid advertising industry don't currently allow adult websites, but there are places where these sites are welcome. TRAFFDAQ will be a handy place get started, since you might be already using it for trades. If your sites is not yet generating enough traffic for trading, you can always buy it, as there are a lot of members willing to sell it and you don't have to worry about it, it's all automatic.