Making Money With Erotic Stories
This is a topic that is pretty close to my heart. My first adult website was an erotic stories site and I still make a decent amount of money with my erotic story sites. This article will show you some of the basic ideals behind making money in the erotic story niche.
BUILD IT
An erotic story site tends to come together much like a regular site does only instead of pictures or movies your content is erotic stories. When I make a smaller free erotic story site I have a warning page then I have a main page with 10-15 erotic stories on it and each of the stories is on its own page as well. Sometimes I put ads on the individual pages with the stories, sometimes I don’t, it just depends on where I plan to submit the site. Some sites have a maximum number of ads you can have per site so just make sure to read the rules for the places you are submitting to. Something else I try to do is put a decent mix of stories in the site. I’ll try to have a few lesbian stories, a few regular straight stories and others from other niches like teen, mature, fetish etc. Sometimes I will focus all the stories in one niche, but I’ll cover that more in a different article that talks about some more advanced erotic story sales techniques. For now we are working on building a site that has a selection of different types of stories to appeal to a wide range of visitors.
Something I like to do is put a short description of what the story is on the main page so that the visitors will know which stories they want to read. Sometimes it is hard to tell just by looking at the title. Search Engine Friendly Sites
PROMOTE IT
While most link lists focus on pictures and movies, many of them will also accept erotic story sites as well. The amount of traffic you will get from them isn’t as much as it might be with a picture or movie site, but you will probably find that it is very productive traffic. Erotic stories is a very specific niche and it lacks what I call the “browse factor”. The “browse factor” is where a visitor is at the link list or TGP and they are browsing through the list of sites looking for something they might like, see your site listed there and decide to check it out to see if there is anything that interest them. So they just happened across your site and decided to browse it. With erotic stories you don’t have as much of that as a normal pic or movie site does. There are no pictures or movies on your site so if someone ends up at your site you can assume they are there on purpose. What I’m getting at here is that there is less traffic, but the traffic is more focused and higher in quality.
In addition to link lists there are a few TGPs that will take erotic stories pages. Beyond that you need to get a little creative for traffic sources. You can run erotic stories blogs, or submit your site to toplists and optimize your sites for search engines. Don’t let the fact that the niche is under-promoted fool you; there are a lot of people out there looking for erotic stories. Last month alone between Google and Yahoo there were over 650,000 search queries for erotic stories. If you ask me that’s a pretty good size market that very few people working in it.
DESIGN FOR YOUR AUDIENCE
The erotic story audience isn’t your typical porn consuming audience. There are estimates that somewhere between 40%-60% of the audience are women. Women aren’t necessarily going to be turned on by pictures of other women naked or of hardcore porn and cumshots so if you decided to use some images in the design of your site keep that in mind. I do use graphics, but I try to use sexy graphics, things that will appeal to both men and women. If I’m going to use a hardcore picture I had to choose between a pic of a guy hammering away on a chick doggy style or a couple in a passionate embrace, I would go with the passionate embrace. The same might not be true if I were designing a regular porn site.
When you write your text keep in mind that you are not writing to a predominantly male audience. Instead of writing a text link that says something like: “guys, go here to read about how this sorority slut got fucked hard in her dorm.” You might want to write: “Check out this story about a horny coed having a steamy rendezvous in her dorm with a guy she met at a party.” You want to make the point that the stories/site is hot, but you also want to make it more erotic not necessarily hardcore. My rule of thumb is that I am trying to seduce the visitor and I’m not talking to a bunch of guys who are hanging out drinking beer.
BE YOUR OWN SPONSOR
There are sponsors out there that have erotic story sites and some of them are very good sites, but I personally have not had much luck with those types of sites. I’m not sure why, but for me they just don’t convert all that well. To remedy this situation I built my own erotic story site and made it an AVS site. I designed the tour and bought a bunch of erotic stories for the site and now I can offer it to the visitor as part of a large network of sites. For me this has worked out much better. I have come to the conclusion that this success may be for a couple of reasons. First, the erotic story niche is, as I said before, under-promoted. However, there are people that do promote it and many of them end up promoting the same sites. If your erotic story site is advertising the same site that every other site on the list is advertising, you aren’t going to have much luck. By building your own site to promote you can offer them a site they have never seen before. Second, I think the fact that the site is part of an AVS may have something to do with it. The visitor gets access to a ton of content so the risk of joining the site is greatly reduced.
ALTERNATE ADVERTISING
I also advertise alternative programs on my erotic story sites. I have found that erotic story surfers tend to not buy many memberships to traditional porn sites, but they will buy sex toys and join dating sites. Mixing these into your site along with pushing your own AVS site will give you more opportunities to make sales. I also push these alternative type programs as up-sells inside my AVS site since current members of the AVS will be getting access to your site.
STAY WITH IT
Erotic stores are one of those niches where success doesn’t come easily. Unlike regular porn sites you can’t just throw up some pics and/or movies and let them do the talking. It takes a little homework to figure out who your audience is, how to attract them and then how to sell them once you have attracted them. If you are willing to do some work and be patient you may find yourself enjoying some nice income from a niche few people think about and even fewer promote.
Here is a list of past articles I have written that you might find helpful in starting your erotic story career.
Improving Your Google Ranking
Basic Blogging
Advanced Blogging
An Introduction to AVS
