By AJ Hall

YNOT EUROPE – Tours are never perfect. What works for some visitors doesn’t work for others.

Sales can be maximized by targeting traffic to different tours. The reality of website promotion is that one tour format isn’t going to convert all your traffic, but using a combination of tour styles can lead to more sales.

These days, the three most commonly used tours are episode tours, tube-style tours and transparent tours.

A typical episode tour has long pages with a header, footer and “episodes” in between. Each episode contains a title, text description, preview thumbnails and often a sample video from one site update. Each tour page shows several episodes per page, and the typical tour consists of from one to more than 30 pages.

A tube-style tour usually includes a toplist and/or a list of what’s being watched as well as search options and a list of categories for surfers to browse. Site updates are shown as thumbnails, often with a preview of video frames when the user mouses over an update. Clicking leads to a page with an embedded sample video. Tube tours are feature-rich and offer some interaction. They also have the potential promotional benefit of better SEO, as the category pages result in dozens or hundreds of niche-specific pages.

“Transparent tours” are less common but often the most effective format. Because transparent tours essentially mirror what’s inside a site’s member’s area, viewing the tour is like window shopping: Visitors can see everything the site has to offer and browse thousands of pages as they convince themselves to sign up. Deep transparent tours have major SEO benefits, because they increase a site’s size by hundreds, if not thousands, of pages. The ultimate combination of bait and tease entices surfers to join, and the webmaster can pepper special-offer ads and join incentives strategically throughout the tour in creative ways. Big network cash programs and studio sites are adopting this tour option more and more often.

A variety of tour styles allows the webmaster direct traffic accordingly. If you’re running cost-per-thousand-impressions or AdWords campaigns, you know the search terms that bring surfers to your sites. You can capitalize on that knowledge by linking to niche pages that are part of a transparent tour. If traffic comes from tubes or free sites, link to a tube tour. If traffic comes from links, mailers or type-ins, try linking to episode tours that showcase only your best content in a specific niche.

If your adult CMS software has multiple tour options, setting up different types of tours is simple. Even if you don’t have the advantage of automated tour-management software, you can build smaller, static versions of tours in varying styles. Test their relative performance, and you can start getting more out of your tours.

AJ Hall is a 12-year adult industry veteran and the co-founder and chief executive officer of Elevated X Inc., a provider of popular adult CMS software for the online adult entertainment industry. Hall has spoken at industry trade shows and is a contributing writer for several trade publications. Elevated X powers more than 2,000 leading adult sites, has been nominated for industry awards six times and won the 2012 XBIZ Award for Software Company of the Year.