Spanking Webmaster:

Resources for Spanking Sites   

Welcome to Spanking Webmaster:

Hello! Thanks for visiting Spanking Webmaster, a resources site for webmasters who operate spanking, caning, domestic discipline, and similar BDSM-themed websites. Whether you run a spanking blog, a kinky community site, or just like sharing your favorite spanking photos on your MySpace, Flickr, or social networking site, you should find something useful here. Specifically, if you run any kind of website that gets visitors interested in erotic spanking, you should be able to find links and resources here that will help you make money from that valuable traffic.

Spanking Affiliate Programs

Although there are other ways to make money from your spanking traffic, the core of your business will be sending traffic to affiliate programs, who will pay you a share of the money (often as much as 60%!) they get in sales from the web surfers you send them. These affiliate programs can sell a wide diversity of goods and services; most common is porn (spanking videos and photos) but there's plenty of money in kinky dating (memberships to kinky hook-up sites), sex toys (including whips and paddles and bondage gear of all kinds), phone sex, web cams (video chat) and many other areas of commerce.

Since spanking is such a narrow niche, it can be hard to find good affiliate programs who know how to convert spanking traffic. This site (Spanking Webmaster) represents the distilled experience of someone who has been sending spanking traffic to affiliate programs since 2002. It's not an exhaustive list by any means, but it's a good listing of tested and proven places to start:

Advice For Spanking Webmasters

There are a few things I've learned over the years about selling porn in the spanking niche, and about being an adult webmaster in general:
  1. Sex Sells: There is conventional wisdom in the spanking porn niche that says spanking fetishists don't want and won't buy sex, or anything else too hard core. This is not true. What is true is that you can sell the hell out of soft core spanking porn, because for many spanking fans, sex is not an essential part of the fantasy imagery they are looking for. But lots of people like to combine spanking and sex -- spanking is foreplay for many people -- so if you can find good spanking-plus-sex porn, you can sell it very easily.
  2. Be Woman-Friendly: You don't have to be a dick to (or about) women in order to sell porn. If you've seen very much porn, you'll know what I mean. A lot of porn people think you have to be woman-unfriendly (talking about filthy bitches and slutty whores and nasty cunts all the time) to sell porn. Maybe some of the men who buy porn like that sort of thing, but the secret is this: on the internet, there are a lot of women who enjoy porn (especially spanking porn) and will pay for it if they like it. But if anybody gets to call them a filthy slut, it's the man they love, who is not you. Be nice -- you can find a thousand ways to talk up how hot your porn is, to your male and female readers alike -- without having to be a misogynistic shithead about it. You'll sell more porn, to women, even.
  3. No Dating Sites: Dating sites, even kinky or fetish dating sites, don't convert well on spanko traffic. I can only assume that's because fetish dating sites that don't focus exclusively on the spanko niche don't have enough spanker/spankee profiles to make the sale. Maybe a good spanking-only dating site could thrive, but I've never seen one yet.
  4. Don't Chase Search Too Hard: Don't get too worried about the search engines, Google especially. When they are sending you lots of traffic, it can be sweet and profitable. But what Google giveth, Google taketh away again. Search engine placement is never permanent. And Google, like all big corporations, has a negative relationship with sexual material. If they could filter us out of their search results entirely, they would. Someday, they may. The lesson for you? Build good sites, build traffic relationships with other good sites, and let the search engine traffic fall where it will. At the end of the day, the engines have to help people find what they want. If you're what they want, and the engines don't find you, people will look for better search engines. Be what people want, and then put your energy into building more stuff people want.
  5. Keyword Domains: Having a good domain, with good keywords (especially "spanking" for our purposes) really matters. {keyword}spanking.com is way better to have as your site, than some random domain with hyphens or nonsense words in it. It helps a little with the search engines to have your keywords in the domain name, but more to the point, it helps with the surfers. Most people have a few keywords that are fetish triggers with them, the sex part of their brain lights up just by hearing or seeing the word. If "their" fetish trigger words are in your domain name, you've got their instant attention, and a chance to build a permanent relationship with that surfer.
  6. It's All About The Traffic: The key to making money is traffic, and if you don't want to be working every day just to stay even, that means you need to build a loyal community of surfers who return again and again to your sites. They may not buy today, they may not buy tomorrow, but if they keep coming back, someday you'll have a chance to put an offer in front of them that they will buy. And meanwhile, your site is the one they suggest to others. Your site is the one they link to.
  7. Go Light On Ads At First: Worry about the traffic (which means worry about pleasing your audience) before you worry about the money. If you're too quick to slather ads all over your site, people won't like it and you'll never be able to make your site their default surfing stop. And it's pointless anyway -- when you're just starting out, you don't have the traffic volume to make money on your sites and pages anyway. So don't litter your pages with ads until you've got the traffic to make it worth your while.
  8. No Monocultures: Keep looking for and promoting new stuff. When you've got an affiliate program that's really making money for you, it's tempting to build more and more sites and pages and blog posts promoting their stuff, because that's where your money is coming from. Trouble is, nothing good lasts forever. And if you've focussed on one good thing to the exclusion of everything else, you're cruising for hurt when that good thing stops being so good. My rule of thumb is, if any one program starts providing more than half my income, it's time to get very serious about building other income streams. If you've ever owned stocks, you've heard about the importance of diversity; this is the same concept in a different context. Don't keep all your eggs in one basket; eventually, you will start losing baskets.
Here are a few articles about blogging from around the net that I have found useful as an adult webmaster. Since almost everybody who is working as an adult affiliate these days uses blogs somewhere in their site network, if only as a traffic pump or honey trap for the search engines, you may find these articles helpful:

Other Webmaster Resources

All adult webmasters will find it useful to monitor one or two of the bigger adult webmaster discussion boards, such as:
  1. Go Fuck Yourself (GFY): One of the biggest adult biz boards. Very lightly moderated, lots of spam and chaos and stupid board shenanigans. But also, most of the serious players in the web porn business are there. Immense immounts of adult business information if you are clever about weeding wheat from chaff.
  2. Netpond: Another long-established board with plenty of industry power and expertise represented. Lots of handy tutorials and friendly advice. Much better moderation to keep the jerks and spam under control; more business and less goofing off.


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More to come!

[If you have a resource of specific interest to spanking webmasters that you'd like to advertise on this site, drop a line to webmaster "at" eroticadollars.com with your proposal. Or, if you are a spanking webmaster yourself and use a resource you find particularly helpful, by all means feel free to suggest it! Links to other articles about the commercial side of the spanking porn business would also be appreciated.]