Validation
Today, I got validation.
Let me back up a few and explain :) When we started in Adult full strength back in June, Lucky and I sat down and did what we advise everyone to do - we wrote up a plan. We were going to do galleries for six months (for a quick cash infusion), then do a 50/50 split on galleries and SEO optimizaed sites, eventually ending doing about 90% SEO and 10% galleries. This way we had a strong takeoff to pay for the time we’d be investing (time we’d normally have spent doing work for clients), and then we’d roll over into a more stable, long term income.
Wouldn’t it be nice if everything worked out exactly the way we planned, every single time?
When the new 4472 regs came out, that pretty much screwed us. We hadn’t planned on being labeled a primary producer, or on keeping full 2257 documents (who had?) and we quickly found out that sponsors weren’t going to make that data available to us. And again, who would? It’s terribly risky for the models and basically a paperwork nightmare for the sponsor. Nor did we have hundreds of dollars of disposable income laying around to buy content - our priority list simply didn’t have that on it, with good reason. We’re currently paying for two dedicated server hosting accounts, about 30 domain names, phones, utilities… not to mention our personal expenses.
All our plans were suddenly completely useless. We had to think, fast, and find another way. A way that let us do what we were committed to doing (adult marketing) but keep us strictly within the law. We have not, and do not intend, to play games with the current regulations. So what were our options?
#1 - Go back to mainstream. To be honest a much harder sell, and one we do intend to pursue down the line. But our goals and investments were all made with adult in mind - so simply walking away was out of the question.
#2 - Do galleries anyway, and don’t worry about the law. Not an option either. I have no interest in becoming some prosecutor’s ‘test case’, or worse yet, his free election ticket. So no more galleries.
#3 - Find a way to do adult without any pictures that fall under the new regulations.
We decided to go for #3 - and to do this, we decided to convert our entire operation from gallery/hub structures to blogs. Yup, blogs - and all the work that implies. Daily (or at worst every other day) updates. Lots of text and pictures that tease rather than show penetration or other activities (which is probably a good idea anyway, because who’s going to buy the cow if you’re giving away free milk?). To be honest we were in a split decision on whether this would work, as well. Would it pay? Would we still get sign ups? We knew it meant we would have a slower start than we’d planned for, and that meant we’d have to take a few new clients in our ‘public’ business of web design - something we really hadn’t counted on. The freedom to NOT take clients is one reason we’re entering this business.
But the Universe has validated our decision. Today, only about 4 weeks after launching our blog network and fully committing ourselves to it, we got our first signup. The first one that wasn’t a ‘holdover’ from our gallery days (we’ve been getting signups regularly from that older work, as much of it did get indexed in search engines - a nice bonus). And we also signed up a web design client which will fill in the gaps between promoting via the old system (galleries) and the new one. Which means that we’re going to make it, and we’re going to grow. It may take a bit longer than I wanted (I was hoping for $1000 a month by christmas, now I’m hoping for that by Easter) but I believe it will happen.
For anyone who’s interested, our first signup was through OC Cash, who provides a lot of good blog tools for webmasters - plenty of RSS feeds and so on. The site? Orgyental, their new asian/orgy site (and by the way the content is H-O-T… so no wonder it was my first blog conversion!) We made a sale on it within 2 days of the post, for a 1:59 ratio - I can definitely live with that.
Thanks Universe 
I needed that.
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