Marketing is hard. Adult content creators are often deplatformed, shunned, and forced to rebuild. We battle shadowbans, full bans, trolls, the government.
Even without those hurdles, advertising is frustrating.
You deserve to make money. And, you don’t deserve to be de-platformed by rich CEO’s throwing tantrums.
Here’s why I think that SEO + a paysite’s internal traffic are the best ways to get your content in front of the right audience.
This is a multi-part article. Read more by clicking the links below.
- SEO Tips for Adult Content Creators Part 1
- Adult Industry SEO and Misinformation (Coming Soon)
- What to Know Before Google Ranks You (Coming Soon)
- A Step-by-Step on Best SEO Practices for Sex Workers (Coming Soon)
Read the table of contents for information most relevant to you.
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What Is SEO Marketing?
SEO is search engine optimization. Aside from paid ads, it’s the best way to market yourself on Google. If done right, Google rewards you with traffic via search results.
Why do you care about Google search results?
The search engine gets 83 billion+ visits monthly. Ranking on a high volume search result is the difference between $$$ and $$$$$$$.
When it’s done correctly, you don’t need to slave away on social media. The traffic comes to you without having to push out new Tweets 24/7.
Google isn’t the only search engine, but it is the biggest. There’s also the chance to rank on Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
My experience revolves around the first, so that’s where I’ll focus.
How Do You Start Getting Google’s Attention?
Every word and link on this page is being scanned (crawled) by a bot.
It logs individual words and splices them together into “keywords”. If I say a certain word over and over again, it decides that my article is about that keyword.
You can repeat this strategy on your profile, video descriptions, captions, social media, linksite, domain, blog, etc. Anywhere that the search bots find text, it will rank.
The title “SEO Tips for Adult Content Creators” is my best example. Google’s bots will read that and (hopefully) show it to the right audience.
I’m assuming that the audience will be searching “Tips for Adult Content Creators” or “SEO Tips”.
It’s common to show up in similar searches that don’t 100% match keywords too.
SEO is a strategy that you learn as you go, and I’ll try to give you some good places to start.
Ranking a Personal Website vs. Ranking Our Content on Paysites
As I wrote this SEO guide, I realized an error.
I interchangeably talk about ranking a personal website vs. ranking content (videos, photos, captions, Tweets, etc.) Later, I realized that someone with no experience wouldn’t know the difference.
Ranking a personal website means that you’re starting from the ground up.
If you buy a domain like www.xxx.com, it’s brand new. Google won’t have an impression of it until you fill it with information.
Because of this, I am not giving personal website advice. The majority of the time, I’m talking about using our paysites with established SEO.
Ranking our content on paysites is easier than starting from scratch.
Websites like Clips4Sale or OnlyFans already have a presence on Google.
The search engine understands what these sites are about, and you’ll appear in the appropriate results.
For example, creating a video titled “Long Tongue and Spit Fetish Clip” would put you somewhere in those search results. Whether or not they appear first depends on the SEO of the paysite + whether Google likes it + the relevance of the clip.
Most of the time, PornHub outranks our paysites. But, there are holes in the market. You just have to find them.
The Pros and Cons of SEO in the Adult Industry
Pros:
- Making a habit of good SEO practices will benefit you later.
- Google does not care that you’re an NSFW creator.
- As in, you won’t be randomly banned for being NSFW. They do avoid showing you to inappropriate audiences.
- You’re not going to get banned from search results unless you’re stealing or spamming.
- There is always room for improvement.
- If you’re not ranking, it’s because of clear-cut rules.*
- As opposed to social media algorithms, which will randomly deboost you and leave you wondering why.
- Google is transparent with their algorithm, and it has free tools to improve your rank.
*Not ranking in a search result could be because of:
- Lack of authority
- Including page authority, not just Domain authority.
- Fewer backlinks than your competitors
- Domain age (older is better)
- But, fresh and original content is prioritized, depending on the nature of the intended results. (With adult content, most users like to see fresh content.)
- Posting about irrelevant topics that get no searches
- Content isn’t helpful enough
- Content doesn’t satisfy the searcher’s question/intent
- Spam
- Keyword plugging – spamming the same words over and over
- It hasn’t been crawled by the search bots yet
- The content doesn’t give Google the impression that you are an “expert”. (This has a different context in the adult niche.)
- On the other hand, content is inconsistent and not up-to-date.
Cons:
- It’s a high-effort marketing strategy in the beginning.
- It won’t pay off until later in your career.
- Just because Google is transparent with their algorithm, doesn’t mean the search bots listen. They have a mind of their own.
- Because of these inconsistencies, it’s not 100% reliable.
- It’s easy for someone to steal your strategy to rank higher than you.
- Backlinks are hard to come by.***
- Not all of our paysites use good SEO practices, and we can’t control that.
The “Backlinks Don’t Matter” Argument
***It’s common for adult SEO’s to say that backlinks are irrelevant in the adult niche. This is not true.
Oldschool SEO’s strategies revolve around getting 10k – 1 million+ backlinks quickly. This is not how I rank my content. It’s spammy.
I find relevant backlinks that fit my brand, and post my links there.
An adult SEO who’s never been a sex worker wouldn’t know the difference. We have plenty of opportunities for relevant links.
- XHamster lets you attach a unique banner link to every video.
- We have bio links.
- There are tens of thousands of adult forums if you know where to look.
- Content creator blogs seem like a thing of the past, but… Here I am. I’ve found 75+ other creator blogs since creating mine.
- We are popular, and magazines, blogs, journalists, and news outlets want to talk about us.
- We have fans who will share our links.
- We have peers who will also trade links.
- Get creative. The possibilities are endless. Since August, I’ve built around 2000 relevant backlinks to this blog, and only ~100 of those were manual.
Why am I writing this?
I’m not satisfied with the SEO advice that I see for adult content creators. There’s a lot of misinformation, or not enough information to be helpful.
We need a resource by creators for creators. Advice that applies to everyone does not apply to us. I’ve seen nothing that takes our unique workflow into account, or how to leverage the tools we have.
Before We Continue, Use My Referral Codes
I never charge for the advice I give. But, I do appreciate it when new adult content creators use my referral codes. It helps me make money while you make money.
Note: I get 5% commission or a flat fee from these sites. They do not come out of your paycheck. You get 100% of what you earn, and I get a thank-you payment from the site.
Notes About My Particular SEO Strategy
Keep these in mind before diving into SEO strategy. There is a particular way that I use it to boost myself as an adult content creator.
- Google search is the top of my sales funnel.
These are either potential clients, searchers who stumbled upon me, or people who want to learn more about me.
When they see my videos in Google Search, it’s probably their first time seeing me. The process from first impressions to a purchase would look like:
Discovering me > visiting my social media and/or blog > following or subscribing to my newsletter for a while > deciding to make a purchase when I create content that appeals to them.
A small percentage of them would make a purchase or subscribe the moment they see me.
Those are the customers whose “questions” I 100% answered. They were satisfied with the descriptions I provided, length of my videos, thumbnail, price, etc.
That’s why it’s important to be detailed, accurate, and present value from the very beginning.
- I spend a lot of time on SEO because I have time.
I decided to cut 80% of my social media strategy.
Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and my other accounts were not growing in the way I wanted. If you’re one of the creators who loathes social media… Same lol.
SEO was what I knew.
I decided to use my strengths a couple of years after my return to sex work. I shouldn’t have procrastinated, but I was burnt out from my previous marketing job. So, I tried to make money without SEO, and it simply didn’t work for me.
In the same way, social media may be the better choice for you. If that’s what you’re good at, I’d stick to it.
Note: You still need social signals for SEO, but it’s simpler than posting 24/7 to get fans.
- SEO is my strength, and so is writing.
My blog, website, long descriptions, newsletters, easy-to-click titles; all of these appeal to me.
If you’re cringing at the thought of that, this strategy might not be the right choice.
- Google is not the perfect strategy.
It’s inconsistent and finicky.
Sometimes, things that don’t deserve to rank do. Whatever it thinks will satisfy the user’s search, it’ll push first. I can’t guarantee that you’ll rank, but I will be honest about what I do.
On top of SEO, I also rely on internal traffic. That same internal traffic finds its way to each paysite via my newsletter or social media.
- I employ these strategies among all of my sites.
This advice isn’t for a specific website.
It’s also not particularly for your domain or blog. (Most of it can be used for a domain/blog, depending on the context!)
I’m talking about how to rank the content that you post specifically on your paysites.
All of our paysites rank in the Google search results.
Googling the title of your content should (hopefully) return you as a result. Figuring out what your clients are searching for could put you right in front of them with little to no social media involved.
A potential client is specifically searching for your content.
They Google exactly what they want to see. Unlike social media where they stumble across you at random, search engine optimization is how to target specific clients.
Using my posts on LoyalFans as an example.
My workflow on that paysite would look like:
- Researching keywords, tags, and categories
- Finding a “blind spot” that’s low competition (i.e. PornHub isn’t dominating the search result.)
- Creating a title and description that includes those keywords.
And…
- Uploading the content.
- Linking to the content on social media, my blog, my main website, and literally any similar space on the internet that will take my link.
- I’ve spent time building relationships with bloggers, webmasters, journalists, and other creators to achieve this. Networking is essential.
- If possible, I link older content in the description.
- Such as an old video or a similar older post.
Afterwards…
- I encourage my fans to like, comment, and share it.
- This is easier to do when you build meaningful relationships with your fans.
- I will go back a few months later to improve it, add value, and make it better.
- A few months later, I manually search my keywords to see if the content pops up.
And I cross my fingers that it ranks.
Because we don’t own our paysites, we can’t monitor them with traditional SEO tools. We have to hope that our sites are doing the heavy lifting with good SEO practices to help our content rank.
I do this for every paysite: Clips4Sale, LoyalFans, iWantClips, etc. Each paysite requires a different strategy to rank, depending on the tools it has.
- When I say “competition”, I’m mostly talking about PornHub.
PornHub absolutely dominates the search results. I don’t want to say that it’s impossible to outrank them, but… It pretty much is.
If you’re interested in a keyword, and “PornHub” is in the first 7 results, put a pin in it.
On the bright side, we are content creators.
Signing up to PornHub and posting a preview with the keywords you want is possible. As a matter of fact, I strongly suggest doing that.
Note: I’ve found that adding “clip” or “subscription” to a keyword changes the results in the favor of paysites over PornHub. The results vary.
Why Am I Being the SEO Police?
I don’t mean to act like I’m the all-seeing authority on SEO.
But… I see a lot of misinformation and unhelpful information.
Getting into SEO without a straightforward plan is a huge waste of creators’ time. This is a strategy that takes months of hyperfocused dedication. If it’s done wrong, you just lost months of progress.
It is also hard to measure. Search engine optimization is traffic, first and foremost. That traffic is never guaranteed to get you a sale. Will some results make you more likely to make money than others? Yes.
You can get 1 million views on TikTok and only 3 new subscribers, and search results are similar. You need to understand how to funnel your audience appropriately to make it worth the time.
Here’s my experience with SEO:
- It was my vanilla job before I became a sex worker and during my 3-year hiatus.
- I decided that I wanted to use SEO in August 2023 after hitting my final straw with Twitter. As I edit this post in January, I’m seeing results.
- Another SEO who ranks Naughty Fable proofread / fact checked this post and gave me suggestions. We didn’t agree on everything, but I still took his advice. Thank you for your help. <3
SEO is the long game. You will not see results for months, or a year at the very least.
If you don’t have the time, it’s better to focus on other marketing strategies. This is not a strategy for people who need money quickly. It’s for those who want longevity and gradual growth.
If you need faster money, I recommend camming, sites with internal traffic, and social media over search engine optimization.
Read Part 2 (Coming Soon)
