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Some of my more regular readers will recall that in early November I looked into the popularity of ‘Celebrity Sex Tape’ downloads. This followed a Channel Four documentary detailing the history of the top 10 celebrity sex video downloads – a documentary which I felt compelled to correct on its statistical inaccuracies (I reordered the popularity chart based upon actual search volumes not just search results). As it turns out, that blog entry is now one of my most popular; bombarded with searches for ‘celebrity sex tapes’. However, we all know what these visitors are really searching for… and it’s not the correct video download chart.

So what’s my concern? Well it’s simple - that Google Adsense will not serve related adult adverts for the sex download ‘One Night in Paris’ (or similar) on the page in question – which seems a waste of potential click throughs and revenue. Instead I have all manor of innocent and irrelevant adverts for pay per click advertising. Last weekend I decided that I’d look into alternative adult affiliate schemes, from celebrity sex DVDs to celebrity sex website referrals. In reality, whilst this was more a bit of a giggle, it seems the adult entertainment industry could teach corporates a thing or two about affiliate schemes.

Having signed up as an affiliate with ‘Traffic Cash Gold’ (TCG) and ’Action DVDs’ I received my sign-up verification emails and I was away into the world of adult advertising. Probably not before time as I’ve been marketing websites for nearly a decade, and the closest I’ve come before was a PPC lead for a well known sex toy distributor. I logged into Action DVDs to see if I could find some referral links to specific DVD products – that was quite straight forward, but nothing else other than a few banners on offer to help me generate revenue.

However, at TCG I found more than expected – a complete kit for DIY website building. Within the context of everyday corporate advertising the offerings are quite astounding, providing ideas that we could all latch onto to further our businesses (not just Amazon):

Essentially all you need is the know-how and time to spend building an Adult site and promoting it, all the tools are there waiting in the affiliate areas. How many corporates can say their affiliate schemes have all of the following?:
1. Referral links to websites in every field of interest you can imagine.
2. Referral banner graphics in all standard sizes to accompany the referral links.
3. A portfolio of downloadable image and sample video content (again across every field of interest imaginable) for ‘build your own site’ webmasters.
4. Customised hosted galleries – don’t build your own, just take their one and stick your own domain name on top of it.
5. Banner serving - get paid by CPM for serving image or text adverts on behalf of other adult affiliates.
6. Free ‘bannerless’ web hosting as long as it’s used to promote Traffic Cash Gold affiliate programmes.
7. A support forum – ask all those questions you had about how to use this affiliate area, swap links with fellow webmasters and sell PageRank for SEO increases.
8. Complete statistics on click-throughs to primary, secondary and join pages - and of course conversion data.
9. RSS Feeds detailing the latest launched sites from other webmasters.

It’s all very impressively presented, I have yet to find a corporate affiliate scheme done in anything like as much detail or professionalism (Commission Junction and Tradedoubler are good, but not this good). The downside is of course that all of this is for the ‘adult’ industry - the very dodgy but lucrative side of the Internet that we all avoid discussing, just like the now rebranded ‘online gambling’ arena.

I know what you’re left wondering, have I made any money in the past week? The answer to that is ‘not yet’. Had it been a pay per click scheme on offer there’s no doubt I would have had the most revenue so far of any article, with CPA (Cost Per Aquisition) the wait will be longer. Rest assured I’ll post an entry as soon as I make my first ‘dirty’ dollar.

Technorati Tags: adult affiliate, affiliate scheme, affiliate programme, ppc, cpa, traffic cash gold, action dvd, celebrity sex tapes

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