Quote:
Originally Posted by KevinG
I have not done members area link trades before, but had a request for one from a decent looking site, that could be considered competition, but could also be considered a relevant link since it's in the same niche.
I am wondering what the folks around here think of sites trading links in their members sections?
Here's some good and bad points I thought of:
Good:
Targeted to the same niche, and a proven "porn buying customer" it could deliver highly qualified prospects to both parties.
It could become additional revenue if you use an affiliate link.
Bad:
You may be competing with yourself by sending your customers elsewhere.
There could be inequities involved, like if one site has 5,000 members and the other site has 100.
It can be difficult to monitor the recip since it requires a login.
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It's usually done with affiliate links now, that takes care of the inequities in traffic size. But then it looks like an upsell to the user and can impact your retention either by losing them to another site or just turning them off by hitting them with what they see as ads in an area where they expected to get everything all inclusive.
Not much different than a cross sell.
Now I will tell you one area where this still works well...that is solo or amateur girls where they are shooting with other girls. You do a content share and also swap some traffic if you can get them to shoot together.
There's also still room for the good old fashioned "friends" list in my opinion. That's a great way to seed new sites. We do a lot less of it than we used to just because there's so many people who'll jerk the surfer around and a friends list is an implied endorsement. Send 'em somewhere that they encounter pop-up hell, get zango'd or ripped off in any way and you've violated a trust. We still go for LOOOONNNNGGG retention over churn and burn cookie cutter paysites.