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Mainstream Thinks Dot XXX is a Bust

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Dot XXXAn op-ed piece was written on Mashable about the new dot XXX domain. It was a criticism piece about dot XXX being an irrelevant domain and that main stream people will only be buying it to prevent pornographers from using their trademark.

The author was ignoring the first non-adult trademark to purchase a .XXX with their own uses in mind..PETA. PETA was one of the first companies to buy a .XXX and they have every intention of using the site for their own marketing purposes. Since many people think that their ads are verging on pornographic anyway, it will be interesting to see what they do with their new domain.

The writer continued to criticize the adult industry and their history of domain names, saying that most of our traffic is based off of accidental web stumbles instead of specific searches, SEO and all the other traditional means of driving traffic to a site. He used the example of Whitehouse.com being an adult site and not a site for the White House. In that case, yes accidental traffic was the primary source. Of course the domain also gained a big reputation because it is not the White House and people liked the humor of it.  In this case the criticism  was more that someone was quick enough to buy that hot domain real estate and figure out a way to monetize it in a big way.

He also used Whitehouse.com as an example of a site not being what is appears to be.  According to this logic, your business URL and name needs to be reflective of exactly what you do. So if you make wool scarves, you better call your business Wool Scarves Inc and have the domain be woolscarves.com. Because branding like “Warm Sheep” is misleading. I think the marketing world on a whole would have a huge issue with this logic.

Is he right that most mainstream businesses will buy a .XXX domain to prevent someone else from using it? Yes. Of course that is why they also bought .net, .me, .com, .co, .info, .cc ….you get my point.  If your business is trademarked and branded you want to make sure that you are capturing every possible source of traffic. You don’t want someone else benefiting from your brands hard work. Is .XXX any different? No.

So will there be some mainstream .XXX that is actually used? Yes. Will some be parked? Yes. Does it mean that .XXX is a failure? ….no.

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Porn on LinkedIn? The Social Network You are NOT Using

 

Naked LinkedIn

Porn has a place on LinkedIn

Porn on Twitter? No problem.

 

Porn on Facebook? Yeah, its there. But a little more tricky.

Porn on LinkedIn? You bet! But not in the way you are thinking.

LinkedIn is currently the fastest growing social network. It surpassed Twitter in May after the company went public. But LinkedIn is often associated with people searching for jobs. That is not all it is good for. LinkedIn is the social network for business people. It lets you put up your resume and then connect with a wide variety of people, from colleagues to people you want to possible do business with.

The groups are a very powerful function. They are generally topic related. When you join you have to opportunity to post information or comment on posts about the subject topic. It is also a great way to begin networking with people you are interested in connecting with. For instance, there is an adult social media group for people to share and discuss issues in adult entertainment and social media.

But what about porn on LinkedIn? Because this is a business site this is not a place for content distribution. However, that does not mean that it has no value or place in adult entertainment. If you are in adult entertainment then that means you are in business. There are a lot of people in adult who are on LinkedIn, from entertainers to webmasters, photographers, studios, etc. Because this is not a place for posting content it opens up the potential to have a business related discussion or networking opportunity.

Through the groups you can reach out and get advice from other industry professionals, but you can also do some great networking for your business or brand. Interested in talking to a studio? You will be more likely to get a person who is open to networking if you contact them through LinkedIn.

Essentially the removal of the blatant sales promotional element allows you to focus on your blatant personal promotion. But the site is designed for that purpose, to promote you and your qualifications. So if you are in the adult industry and you are not yet on LinkedIn, it is time for your to embrace this social network.

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Adult Classifieds get a new venue!

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Friday Feature Photo: Kyle King

Friday Feature Photo: The sexy Hot House Exclusive star, Kyle King

The adult ad section on Craigslist caused a big scandal in the United States. Craigslist received a lot of flack for their adult ads.  The “Craigslist Killer” was reported to have trolled the personal ads to find his next victim.  Despite intense scrutiny and a very public lambasting, Craigslist was not particularly interested in removing this section. In fact, the law sided with Craigslist. According to first amendment lawyer Doug Mirell, “The Communications Decency Act says that essentially those who are simply providing a bulletin board by which others can post their content is not going to be liable for the content itself.” When people cried out about moral responsibility, or about the site being used to facilitate human trafficking, the site reminded people that Craigslist had actively helped authorities track down people engaging in human trafficking. In the end, their adult/erotic section was removed.

Many people asked, “Where are adult ads going to go, now that they are gone from Craigslist?”  Duttslist has answered that question.  It is a site that is set up like Craigslist, following the same style of user interface. They have made no secret of their adult ad section, in fact they feature it; in their “Hottest Ads” section, you will see the most popular of their adult ads.  They also offer more traditional community ads, making the classifieds site robust like Craigslist. but they are catering to the adult industry.

Duttslist is a two-person operation. Mike is the owner and Jen is the media consultant. Their most popular city is Toronto, but they are quickly spreading into major US cities.  Active on Twitter, various message boards and escort review boards, Duttslist is actively promoting their site as the new source for adult classifieds.

Their promotions are working because they are averaging over 200,000 page views a day, with more than 15,000 unique daily visitors, and it just keeps growing. They offer three different levels of ads, from the free classifieds to sponsored ads.  Though they are not competing with Craigslist, since Craigslist no longer offers an erotic services section, they are raising some eyebrows over there, because they did receive a cease and desist from them.

Ultimately it comes down to the fact that the adult industry was looking for a good adult classified site and Duttslist answered their call.  Make sure you check out their site and visit them on Twitter

Friday Feature Photo: Kyle KingThe amazingly sexy Kyle King is this weeks Friday Feature Photo. I met him at the Phoenix Forum this past weekend, and was immediately captivated. Obviously he is incredibly good looking with a body I could eat sushi off. But he is also a really nice guy.  I had a number of wonderful conversations with him.  Kyle is a Hot House exclusive, and has starred in a number of great Hot House movies. He also has a blog where he shares his thoughts and pictures from his travels, talks about his life and presents some exclusive sexy pics.

Make sure you check out Kyle’s Blog

Find him on Hot House

And chat with him on Twitter @KyleKingxxx

 

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Tweet Dirty to Me at Exxxotica Miami

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Exottica Miami Seminar: Hot to Get into Adult A to Z

Learn about getting into the Industry from highly specialized business experts.

7 Veils is coming to Miami!  I will be presenting as part of Michael Fattorosi’s seminar series, “Getting into Adult – A to Z“.  Michael is heading up and moderating this 3 day workshop. He’s an Adult Industry lawyer, and you can find him on Twitter @pornlaw.

Getting into Adult – A to Z will teach you how to get into the Industry, in front of and behind the cameras. There will be valuable discussions about business strategy and career management.  Definitely a great opportunity to speak to highly specialized Industry professionals about your adult career, and get some personalized advice and tips.

I will be presenting: Tweet Dirty to Me: learn to use Social Media to get the clicks. You will learn how to use Social Media to reach your audience, get people to talk to you, promote your brand, and of course get them to click your links!

I will post more about the event as we get closer, and I am very excited to be taking part in this conference. Let me know if you’ll be attending!  While I am there, hit me up about your social media strategy – I just might have some good suggestions!

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Promote your porn on Twitter, promote your brand on LinkedIn.

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Veronica Vaughn LinkedIn Profile

Veronica Vaughn promotes herself as a business owner first and adult star second. Like Veronica, keep your social networks connected. Her LinkedIn is for networking but her linked Twitter account is for promotion.

LinkedIn is the largest business networking site.  It is where you go to post your resume, find jobs, meet people, make connections, create business alliances and have access to amazing business resources. This is not generally where you’d think of porn.  In fact, the public does not usually think of any adult star as being invested in business.  However,  the most successful porn stars have great business heads; that is why they are successful. .

LinkedIn has generally been the forbidden network in porn. Most people in the adult industry have not viewed LinkedIn as an adult friendly platform. This is true, it isn’t.  But it is not against people in the adult industry, it is against using the site as a promotion for porn.  In all fairness, it is against using the site as commercial promotion for any business.  The network is not actually about promoting business, it is about building business connections.

Much like Facebook, it is primarily a self monitoring community. If your profile is essentially spam, you risk being deleted. If you spam groups, your posts will be deleted and you may be removed from the group. If you are obviously engaging or promoting illegal activity, you will be deleted.  But if you are focusing on developing your business connections you will be fine.

LinkedIn is a place where adult stars can focus on the business side of their networking –  meeting producers, studios, agents, distributors, managers, etc.  LinkedIn groups are  your greatest resource.  There are groups for every possible topic. Interested in Social Media? Join the group Adult Social Media and keep on top of what is happening in social media in adult entertainment.

Join a group, read the discussion and then take part. The more you use the groups the more they will benefit you.  As you participate, you will meet people and expand your network.

Are you needing information? Ask the group.

Are you needing help? Ask the group.

Are you looking for business connections? Ask the group.

To network on LinkedIn you just need to position yourself as a business person.  Promote your porn on Twitter. Network your brand on LinkedIn.

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New Fan Page; Good for the Adult Industry!

The Facebook logo on top of a diamond engagement ring

Facebook is getting engaged. Now you can interact as your brand! Will the adult fan page become useful?

Facebook is getting engaged! On Friday the new Fan Page design was released. The biggest news from the announcement is the ability to use Facebook as your Fan Page. For the adult industry, getting the full benefit out of the Fan Page has been a challenge.  However, things just got a little easier.

Adult industry Facebook sites have been relegated to posting only on their Fan Pages, and even then they tend to get deleted because of these posts.  Often times, people’s admin profiles get deleted as well, if they have used their admin profiles to network on Facebook on behalf of their Fan Page.

The rule of thumb for having an adult site on Facebook is: keep it rated PG. Other people are posting PG-13 and R rated content, but if you are in the adult industry you are going to be scrutinized more heavily. So tread lightly and you will be fine.  The real purpose of your Fan Page is to get people off Facebook and onto your site, so use it to transition platforms and as a way to engage with your fans.

The new engagement ability makes this last part much easier to do. You no longer have to network with your personal profile; you can focus all your engagement efforts onto your Fan Page.

What this means

When you go to your Fan Page, in the right hand menu bar, at the very top, there is a line that says “Admins”. This shows you who the administrators are for your site, and is only visible to them. Fans do not see this. Directly under that line is a list of Fan Page operating options:

The menu to help you use Facebook as your Fan PageThe first line says “Use Facebook as…”. This allows you to operate Facebook as your Fan Page. You can post comments on people’s posts, “Like” other pages and post on walls as your Fan Page name. You can do nearly everything you would do as a profile.

This means you can use Facebook as your business or brand, while keeping all your brand activity tied to your Fan Page.

Previously, if you wanted to comment on pages or posts as your brand you couldn’t do it. Many people would create additional profiles for their businesses just so they could talk to people on Facebook in a location other than their Fan Page. There are many businesses who opted to only have a profile instead of a Fan Page because of this limitation. However, this limited them to a fixed number of friends. They also risked being deleted, because you are not supposed to use personal profiles for business purposes. That is why Fan Pages were created .

How it affects engagement

The simple Facebook rule for business is this:

If you want to have an effective Fan Page, you need to talk to your fans.

If you talk to your fans you will increase your reach. You will be passively networking through your interactions with people. This was easy to do with a profile and hard to accomplish with a Fan Page. Now you can post everywhere! You can put your business page in front of as many folks as you are willing to talk to! You just increased your capacity to network infinitely.

Where Adult has to be careful

The new engagement puts you at a higher risk for being flagged for spam.  Just because you can now post anywhere, it does not necessarily mean you should. You can still be marked as spam if you are not using your new communication channels with care.

Remember, engagement is about talking to people, not about putting your link out there as much as you can. If you join conversations, and have something interesting to say, you will get people to your page and your website.

Adult Fan Pages cannot have profile images that are too provocative or sexy.  Make sure your comments are not just limited to posting links or photos – in fact I would avoid this. Join conversations and try to encourage people to visit your Fan Page, then make it easy for them to find your website.

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My, What a Sexy Twitter Voice You Have!

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Paris Hilton tied up in a microphone cord

Anyone can be sexy. What makes your voice unique in the Twitterverse?

Finding your voice is an important part of the social media process. It seems like this should be easy, especially if you are in the adult industry, but it is not. All you have to do is be sexy, right?  Maybe not.  Crafting your online personality is an important part of your branding.   Thousands of people in the Twitterverse are sexy, so how are you different? What makes you unique?

The crafting of your personality needs to be carefully based around your objective and your audience. Although you may have an idea of who you are online, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be what elicits the most responses from your audience, or drives the most click-throughs.

Are you a dom? Do your followers want to be bossed around? Are you a vixen? Do you need to be coy and illusive? Are you a Diva? Do you need to be strong and demanding?

You not only need to figure out who you want to be, but you need to figure out who your audience responds to strongly.  For some people, primarily talking to other porn stars works for them. Their fans want to see the behind-the-scenes of the porn life.  For most, this is not enough.  You have to actually talk to your fans and relate to them.

When I first start working with a client, I take a splatter approach to posting. I experiment with a variety of posts, with different tones and content. I do this to begin establishing what their audience will respond to. Your online followers are a unique group, thus you cannot base your communications on the success or failure of someone else.

If our online personalities are a product of our branding, they can also be extremely formative to the evolution of our branding. Pay attention to what your audience responds to, because if your goal is to reach them for sales, support or awareness, you need to know what approach and tone will engage them. Remember, you can’t just bat your eyes on Twitter and get people to do what you want, you have to offer substance and make that substance uniquely yours.

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AEE: A Panoply of Porn

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I made it back from Vegas and the Adult Entertainment Expo.  The show was great. I met some amazing people and had a blast. The women were beautiful, the men were strong and the booths were entertaining. All in all it was a pretty awesome conference.
I gave a talk about social media with a panel of my peers. It was moderated by Jay Kopita from Ynot.com, and also featured Pete Housely from Pornstartweet.com, Eric Bernstein from Embalaw.com, Danny Dover from Seomoz.org, and Matt Pierce from Pink Visual. We spoke to a packed room and fielded some interesting questions from the audience.  It was great fun and we shared a lot of valuable information.
Here are some of my pictures from the show…enjoy!
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RTA – Get it? Got it? Good!

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RTA label

Recently the ASACP released their “Social Media Best Practices“. It is extremely important to keep children away from age inappropriate websites. The ASACP makes that much easier with the RTA Label.  The RTA label is a free label that identifies a site as being unsuitable for children. Not only does it identify your site, but it shows that you have done due diligence to protect children and it will help your SEO (search engine optimization) ranking.

How RTA works:

RTA means “Restricted to Adults”.  When you put the RTA label on your site you are embedding code in the header of every page that tells child protection monitoring systems that this site has adult content and it will allow the site to be automatically filtered. By alerting the plugin, your browser will not let a child go to that site.  Most browsers have safe surfing options built into their security options. There are also tool bars, plugins and widgets you can use for further security.

Why use RTA?

RTA is important to help prevent children from accessing adult sites.

RTA is also beneficial from an SEO perspective. When you use the label, you have to verify that you have properly installed it on your site.  The ASACP spiders your site to make sure that every page has the label, to prevent any accidental entry by a child.  The site is then checked to make sure that there is no content or text that would indicate child pornography or exploitation.  Once the site has been verified it will be approved.

The RTA is approval is excellent for SEO.  Getting good SEO ranking in search engines is notoriously difficult. However the ASACP has been working with the search engines to garner better search results for sites that use RTA.

Adult Entertainment supports RTA

In the adult entertainment industry we have a responsibility to make sure that our children are not exposed to inappropriate material. Adult entertainment is meant for adults over 18.  These types of images, content, videos, audio and chat rooms need to be restricted.  Parents have a responsibility to make sure that their children are surfing the net safely. But the industry also has a responsibility to make sure that we are putting up the proper safety precautions as well.

RTA is primarily funded by the adult entertainment industry.

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