Last weekend, exactly two months after it launched, PSP Porn received its millionth page view. Significant because it was done without any advertising and, contrary to what you might think, it’s not a domain that receives a lot of type-in traffic yet.
It would be easy for me to use this achievement as an opportunity to boast of my marketing ability, design skill and almost awkwardly large penis.
Yep – it’s a biggie.
However it’s probably more useful to you for me to share the tactics behind what I did with the site so that you can enjoy similar success. So…
- Know your niche. When I launched PSP Porn I knew that I wanted it to be a babelog. Before I did any designing or made any plans I spent months looking at other babelogs learning from what I saw. It meant that at launch, I could be confident I hadn’t made any choices which would confuse users and make the site less likely to catch on. I often see websites which have made ’strange’ decisions as they attempt to fix problems which already have well established solutions. It’s easy to avoid.
- Steal (almost) everything. PSP Porn has only one original idea (images formatted to fit the PSP ready for download). Every other aspect of the blog can be found in a thousand other places. It’s idiotic to copy a website and expect anyone to care. It’s brilliant to clone the best of what you see and then add a single differentiating feature. (It’s called ‘triangulation’ and is how modern politicians get elected – saying whatever the public wants to hear about most things, and making a ’stand’ on specific issues to create the impression they’re different and principled).
- Give it all away. Since launching PSP Porn I’ve not made a dime from it. I intend to, but knew that worrying about how to make money at the start would stand in the way of making the blog a great place to visit. It’s far easier to convince an audience to pay for what they’re enjoying, than to find an audience when you have a product to sell. It’s why street performers ask you for money at the end of their act, not before they’ve done anything.
- Pimp yourself. Use every appropriate opportunity to remind people of your website. If you get it wrong, and mention it when people aren’t interested, you’ll actively turn people off. If you ensure every platform you have can provide a link back to your site, you’ll give people the best chance to discover what you’re doing. That’s why all my blogs link to PSP Porn, except Podnography which isn’t a place I expect to find people interested in a softcore babelog. and therefore doesn’t.
- Listen. When you launch a website you’ll get feedback immediately. Some of it’s easy to understand, like email, other stuff requires more skill – like log reports. All of it tells you how people are responding to your site and what they want. Every day I track which photosets people are looking at, and which models people are searching for. I use that feedback to make the site increasingly effective as time goes by.
So there you have it. How to make something out of nothing with only determination, sweat and a few gigabytes of scans of hot women you’re friendly with. It’s the American dream…
Popularity: 21% [?]
Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have pictures of naked women when building traffic…(grin)
I think you have some terrific insights into Web-based success that go beyond the porn industry (e.g. your previous series on building buzz), which I thank you for sharing.
I’d be interested in an amplification of point #5 – what specific worthwhile feedback did you receive on PSPporn?
Mike – I knew your brother Patrick. Great actor.
To your point – I received a lot of feedback including:
1) ‘Normal’ looking women don’t sell
2) People LOVE Valentina Vaughn
3) Packaging files with logical file names makes all the difference
4) Fewer, better updates work better than more, generic updates
5) Delivering truncated RSS to feed-readers increases page-views
…and much more. Of course it differs site to site. All the real insights are result of a listen-assume-guess-measure-fix loop applied repeatedly.
Mike,
I learned a lot about which models are popular (Valentina Vaughn), what body types leave people cole (anything remotely ‘average’) and scheduling posts (evey day but with an empasis on quality, not quantity).
All of these insights is the reult of applying a listen-think-assume/guess-impliment-measure-listen loop repeatedly. The results it produces are different for every site (never be surprised if what used to work – doesn’t. Happens all the time).
Don’t discount the inherent marketing tools that are within blogs. Pings, trackbacks and blog networks provide instant “launch” capabilities (getting your site instantly “out there”) that a “normal” website doesn’t have. Yay web 2.0