Escort Website Design & Marketing Services Blog

In 2004 we expanded our adult website design company, Blue Design Studios to offer sites tailored to escorts. Initially we brought the same model of custom website designs that suited our adult site clients but today Escort Design is 100% template-based. The shift has been gradual, here’s some of what I’ve learned along the way:

Custom designs are expensive!

Our custom designs could take weeks to create. They involved a designer, project manager and programmer to complete. Hiring staff that can do these tasks at an exceptional quality was not cheap and in order to make any profit we needed to pass these costs onto our customers. We made sales at the $1200-$2400 price range but knew that these were a significant cost to independents and many new escort agencies.

Even if the price was within reach, we doubted whether our clients were seeing a true return on their investment. Large adult affiliate programs have websites that see millions of visits per month and each visitor has the potential to signup and spend $20+ per month, if they can increase their conversion rate then there is literally tens of thousands of dollars a month to be gained from a stunning design. Escorts on the other hand have sites that generally see significantly less traffic so to make the $2000 profit to pay for a custom design was not so easy to come by.

Restricted client numbers

Although we had plenty of resources available through Blue Design Studios, because each project benefits only one client there is a limit to how many clients you can take on. We were happy satisfying our small client base but we knew the quality of our designs would be of interest to so many more escorts and agency owners. Now, instead of a new design benefiting 1 client it benefits 100s! This means we can take the same approach to detail with our templates as we did with our custom designs.

Content Management System difficulties

Our custom designs looked fantastic but creating an easy-to-use content management system for each was near impossible. This was not a problem with the adult design business because the clients ran their own content management systems. The majority of escort clients had no such expertise. With custom designs you’d basically need a custom CMS to match the custom design if you wanted it to be easy to use. The costs involved with creating the software and providing support for clients was not something we wanted to expose ourselves too.

Read why managing your own escort website isn’t much fun without a CMS.

We learned what was important…

The greatest benefit to offering custom designs to escort clients initially was that we learned what pages were important to an escort business. Today the pages we offer include the disclaimer/warning, home, about, gallery, model profile (agencies), bookings and links pages. We knew these were the most important because they had been constantly asked for by our custom design clients.

…and created the Content Management System around that

Having fixed agency and independent website offerings means that we are able to offer stunning designs that don’t look like templates. An example of this freedom is shown below, we know the exact width that the footer menu will take up so we are able to space it perfectly and add a design feature in the middle. A CMS that allowed for adding 15 pages to the menu wouldn’t be able to create such a look because you would need to leave space “just in case” someone wanted a very long footer menu.

Instead of designing with “just in case” in mind, we take the initiative and design what we know works well – after all, if you are buying a site from us, aren’t you paying for our design expertise?

Your domain name is your website address. Our domain is ‘escortdesign.com’, i.e. it’s what people can type into their browsers to find our site. You should choose your escort site’s domain name while keeping a few things in mind. I’ve put them in order of priority:

Keywords, keywords, keywords

I can’t emphasize this enough, if you want to rank for a certain keyword then put it in your domain name. Recently I wrote about the importance of having your keywords used in links pointing to your site. Having these keywords in your domain means that people will automatically use your keywords in links to your website. For example if we were to setup a link trade with some one, the chances are they would use “Escort Design” – the exact keywords we want to rank for!

Length & Spelling

Keywords are great but I don’t recommend a domain like newyorkmaturetranssexualescorts.com. Having a long domain name that includes words that aren’t simple to spell (does transsexual have one or two ’s’?) is going to increase the chances of someone mis-typing it and never seeing your site.

Branding

Got a successful offline escort business? Using the same name is a good idea so people don’t get confused about who you are. A business card showing a completely unrelated business name and domain name doesn’t make much sense.

The price of setting up multiple escort websites also means you could create one site to match your brand and a second site that uses keywords you want to rank for. The branded site would be aimed at patrons of your offline business and the keyword-rich domain would be aimed at finding new customers.

Simplicity

The more simple you make your domain, the easier it’ll be for clients to remember. Avoid a dash ‘-’ if you can. Using a dash might enable you to get a keyword-rich domain but having to explain the dash to a client over the phone will become tedious. Plus if a client can only remember your escort business name they’ll probably misspell it and leave out the dash – giving someone else free traffic at your expense!

Avoid subdomains

A subdomain is a website address like newyorkescorts.escortdesign.com. They are generally offered for free with budget websites. Although they may contain your keywords or brand, they are generally going to be long and easy for your clients to misspell. In addition any of your marketing efforts will be helping the website whose subdomain you are on. For instance if you go out and get a ton of links pointing to newyorkescorts.escortdesign.com then escortdesign.com will be the domain that is getting the marketing benefits. No business is guaranteed to be around in 5 or 10 years time. Existing on a subdomain means that if that business goes down then so do you. A domain gives you peace of mind because you own it.

For security reasons you should also register your domain privately to protect your identity. All domains registered through us are done privately by default so no one can access your personal information.

We’ve all heard the story about the race between the tortoise and the hare, one a lightning fast bounder and the other a sluggish plodder. The hare is so confident in it’s ability to win the race that once it has taken the lead it decides to nap, meanwhile the tortoise has maintained it’s steady speed and ends up winning. I want to talk about how this applies to your escort website marketing.

Slow, steady & persistent
If the tortoise had been slow and lazy then he would have no doubt lost the race, it was persistence that lead to the win. It’s the same with your online escort marketing. Search engine optimization and other marketing strategies are much more successful when implemented with a long term view. This is hard to swallow for most of us that are used to getting things instantly on the Internet.

Going out and emailing 50 escort-related sites to ask for a link trade in 1 hit feels good but unless you are going to back that up on a regular basis then you might as well not bother. Taking just a few hours a week to work on building links to your site is going to see you with a lot more success a year from now than completing one enthusiastic thrust. Setting goals too high (eg I’m going to spend 10hrs a day marketing my site) is a sure fire way to set yourself up for disappointment. Whereas setting goals within your reach will lead to greater satisfaction as you’ll have a higher chance of success.

Don’t run so fast you need a nap
Too many times I see people show a great initial enthusiasm and drive to make their escort website a success. They get a great looking site online (spending large amounts of money up front on beautiful custom designs) then when they don’t see their phone ringing off the hook after a week, they give up… The media and how-to-make-money-online industries have done a great job of fooling people into thinking that creating a successful website is quick and easy. Getting a site up quickly then investing a ton of time and money into your website initially without giving it much thought is a great way to burn yourself out physically, mentally and financially. One of the reasons we have moved to a pricing scheme of low monthly fee after a free trial is that it means clients aren’t forking out hundreds of dollars up front then feeling dejected when they haven’t made a return immediately. This means clients can now get an escort site up for free with us then be making a positive return in the first month, leading to a more sustainable optimism.

Recently apple announced they have sold three million iPads in 80 days, this is a revolution in computing. One of the most profound changes the iPad brings is the way people consume the internet. Not only can you now comfortably lie in bed or on the couch to browse the web but the 3G version allows you to conveniently browse the web practically anywhere (try comfortably working from your laptop the next time you’re in a taxi). I believe the number of people browsing the internet from tablet computers in the near future is only going to increase as the idea catches on.

Seeing as escort-related searches are massive, we can only assume that as time goes on people are going to be looking for escorts using their iPad. Thankfully the iPad browser is awesome so if your site looks good on a normal computer it’ll most likely be fine on the iPad.

Here’s a screenshot from one of our client websites, all of our escort template designs are iPad compliant and will show up much the same as on any other computer:

Now that you are managing your own escort site, adding links and getting traffic it’s time to take things to the next level. Although any link pointing to your site is better than none, not all links are made equal. Here are a few of the basics in link quality. Next time you get offered a link from another site, check the following:

Google PageRank (PR)

This is the ranking between nothing and 10 that google gives every site on the internet. If you feel like boring yourself to death read more about PageRank but if you just keep in mind a few points you’ll be set, in general:

• Higher PageRank means that a site has more links pointing to it and google thinks the site is more credible than a site of lower PageRank
• You and a competitor have 2 sites with similar content and number of pages trying to rank for same keywords. The one with higher PageRank wins and shows up higher for those keywords
• The PageRank number is determined by the number of websites that link to you and the PageRank of those links, so a site with a lot of links (especially from sites with high PageRank) will, in turn have a higher PageRank
• One PR2 link is not equal to two PR1 links, it’s a logarithmic scale so it’s more like 10xPR1 links = 1xPR2 link

The best way to check the PageRank of different sites is to download the firefox browser and install the Search Status Toolbar – then you’ll see the number in your bottom right corner. Keep in mind that for a small site a PR of 2 or 3 is decent, no one in the adult industry will have a PR of greater than 5.

Number of outbound links

You’ve been offered a link from a PR1 page, excellent! You then find the page has 500 other links on that page, not so excellent… The PR of a page gets divided up between all of the links that are on that page, so if 2 pages have the same PR but one has less outbound links on it then that is the one you’d prefer the link on.

Nofollow tag added to link

Even if you manage to get your link on a site, there are tricks a webmaster can do to prevent that link from passing on the PR juice. Thankfully the Search Status firefox toolbar I mentioned above also has a nifty function “highlight nofollow links”. This will highlight in red any link that has the “nofollow” tag added to it, if your link is one of these then don’t be fooled by the value you are seemingly getting from a link.

Without going into too much detail, webmasters can also add a tag to their meta information that does the same as the above except for every single link on a page. View the source of a page and keep an eye out for:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW“>

The “nofollow” means that once again you aren’t getting the link juice from your link being on that page.

Link text

What’s google’s main goal when they are coming up with their search results? They want the person conducting the search to be presented with the most relevant results from credible websites. This means you have to get links pointing to your site that use the keywords that you want to rank for. So if you are trying to rank for “New York Escort Agency” you’d better make sure you have some links to your site with those exact words! If you get 1000 links to your site from a completely irrelevant site that uses keywords you aren’t trying to rank for then they’re pretty much worthless.

Forget your banner

A banner might look awesome and attract a lot of attention if it’s in the right place (probably not if it’s on a page with 100 other flashing banners) but unfortunately it doesn’t pass on any link juice. So although they may be great for getting traffic directly, they are useless as far as SEO is concerned. A text link that uses your keywords is going to be a much better option and the person giving it to you probably prefers it to a banner anyway.

Now fix your link strategy

Now you know a little about link quality, there’s a few things you should do to optimize the time you spend trying to get links to your site. Target websites with higher PR, low outbound links, related to your site (yes, competitors are a great place to get relevant links so suck it up and offer to trade links) and make sure they link to you using a text link that includes the keywords you want to rank for. Good luck!

Please note: These steps will help you get better links for your website SEO so you can rank better in search engines like google. Obviously if you have a huge banner link on a high-traffic website that is going to provide value in the extra visitors it brings you directly, in which case the above rules don’t really apply.