The Importance of the Paysite Tour
The paysite tour is probably one of the most important marketing tools in the world of online porn. The difference between a good and bad tour can actually mean a variance of potentially thousands of customers. When webmasters talk about promoting sites, the number one measurement that they use to determine whether a site is worthwhile is conversion ratio. The conversion ratio is essentially the number of people who actually sign up for a membership after visiting the site. Let’s say that 1000 surfers visit an adult website and out of those people 250 sign up for a membership. This means that the conversion ratio is 250:1000, or 1:4. The first goal of every paysite owner is to get traffic to his or her site. The second goal is to actually convert that traffic into buyers. Once you actually have the traffic to your site, there is only one thing standing in the way of a good conversion ratio, the tour.
So now we have established that the tour plays a pretty important role in the success of the paysite, both to the site owner and the webmasters promoting it. The tour is what guides your surfer and what convinces him or her to become a buyer. Its your sales pitch. Therefore, the tour must be enticing. It must grab the attention of the surfer and make them want to see more. For a tour to gain perfection it must be error-free, truthful, contain clean quality graphics, display images that gain surfers interest (but do not give away the farm), and last but not least it must contain enticing text.
When I talk about a site being error free I mean that there should not be any spelling or grammatical errors of any kind. I cannot tell you how many site tours I have seen that are just riddled with spelling errors, and that just happens to be one of my biggest pet peeves. Do not assume that all of your surfers have a grade three education. In fact, I would say that it is probable that many of your site members and surfers are well educated. If you do not possess the ability to write eloquently without error, then have someone else do it for you. A paysite tour that contains spelling mistakes or grammatical errors looks extremely unprofessional and does not exactly give people the confidence to lay down their credit card.
When I say that a paysite tour should be truthful, I know that can be a laughable statement in this industry. However, I do feel that it is important not to promise a surfer something that is not in your members area. We all know that paysite tours will promise the world with things such as “hundreds of thousands of pictures”, or “thousands of video clips”, or “updated weekly”, and then we get into the members area and quickly realize that the truth might have been stretched. While you may not think that it will matter after youve made the initial sale, your recurring memberships will be non-existent, and so will a large chunk of potential revenue. Also the surfer may charge-back their purchase. Trust me when I say it will be more rewarding financially in the long run to actually be truthful with the surfer from the very start, and the start is the paysite tour.
Graphics are one of the most important selling features of a paysite tour. They are the first thing that a person sees when they arrive at your site. They must be enticing, high quality, and last but not least fast-loading. If you are an expert site designer then you can probably design your own tour. If you are not, then I would firmly suggest that you farm out the design of your tour to a professional. A poorly designed tour with un-optimized (slow loading) or over-optimized (grainy or blurry) graphics can make a website look very unprofessional. If the site is an amateur niche site, then poor graphics may be accepted, but for any other type of site it can really hurt your sales.
Any paysite tour will of course feature a sneak peak of what the surfer will get inside the members area. The question of how much to show is widely debated in this industry. You want to show enough to get the surfer horny and eager to purchase a membership but you do not want to show so much that the surfer can get off right from the tour. I cannot tell you how much to show, because every site is different. Reality site tours tend to show a little more than normal sites, as they give surfers actual movie trailers. Some sites also offer a couple of free pictures in their tours. My suggestion would be to give the surfer a little, but try to persuade them more with your text and high quality images.
Like I said before when I was speaking about spelling mistakes, your text is a very important selling tool. You will want to talk about the features and benefits of your members area in a way that will get the surfer so excited that they will want to join as soon as possible. While we all know that a surfer is viewing your tour because they want to see some porn (unless you spammed them with your link promising printer cartridges), the words and text, will be their guide to joining. Your words have to explain in clear detail exactly what the surfer will get and the benefits of purchasing a membership with that particular site, while at the same time sounding sexy. Once again, I will say that if you do not have the experience in writing convincing sales copy, then your best bet is to have a professional do it for you. There are plenty of talented writers in this industry that work at reasonable rates.
I hope that I have stressed enough the importance of a paysite tour, from the graphics right down to the wording of the text. The tour has one goal in mind: to make sales. I have spoken several times in this article about having professionals help you out with different elements of your paysite tour and there are many available in every price range.
