By AJ Hall

YNOT EUROPE – Here are three ways to keep your pay site business growing by optimizing your sites and your business model.

No. 1: Cut production costs
One way to make more money is to offer customers something new or something better, but this isn’t the only way. Henry Ford quickly rose to the top of the auto business and McDonald’s dominated fast food like no other, but neither offered anything new. Many people think Ford built the first automobile and McDonald’s was the first fast food chain. He didn’t and it wasn’t.

Ford’s success didn’t come from being first or building a better car than his competitors. His success came from being able to build more product in less time. Ford took advantage of technology and automation — the assembly line. This let him lower the price he charged for his cars and sell more … lots more. Other automakers had limited production resources and had to keep their prices high to turn a profit. Ford opted instead to take a risk. He pumped out more cars and drastically cut his prices. His sales skyrocketed. By the early 1920s more than half of the cars on the road were Fords.

Similarly, Ray Croc built McDonald’s into what it is today by offering customers a simple menu and a consistent, reliable dining experience that was quick, convenient and affordable. Once he realized the draw his approach created, he simply found ways to expand and build more restaurants. Profits soared.

Questions to consider:

• How much does it cost you to maintain a website? How much time do you spend each day, week or month working on your existing sites?
• Aside from fixed-cost items such as content and web hosting, how much does it cost you to build a new website?
• How long does it take you to build a new site?
• Are you doing things by hand or paying staff to do things that could be automated? Could your time be better spent doing other tasks? Could some of your work be delegated to someone else?

No. 2: Cut acquisition costs
There’s a good reason our industry has been dominated by affiliates who control traffic and ruled by the companies with the highest payouts: Acquiring traffic is difficult. It takes time and/or money. Both are things many new businesses don’t have. The easiest, cheapest solution is to seek affiliates and pay them 50-60 percent or a hefty flat rate commission in exchange for sales. The downside: The cost of acquisition is insanely high. Long term, the cost is absurd — and this doesn’t even begin to account for your operating costs or any profit you hope to realize.

Back when traffic was plentiful and money came easily, it made sense to pay the lion’s share to affiliates. I’m sure if a lot of cash program owners could go back in time, they’d hire a marketing guru and pay that person $100,000 a year instead of shelling out the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars they paid to affiliates. It’s money they can never get back. Worse: Once a benchmark has been established, it’s extremely difficult to lower the bar. No one entering the market today with an affiliate program paying only 10-percent revenue share would be taken seriously, for example.

Maybe you already made your fortune and this is of no consequence to you. If that’s the case, congratulations on becoming rich, and I hope you’re enjoying your wealth. If not, maybe it’s time to consider focusing on lowering your acquisition costs and keeping more of each dollar you make. Balancing reliance on affiliates with in-house promotion will help increase your bottom line.

No. 3: Be flexible
Things change, people change, businesses change. Most of us don’t wear the same clothes we wore 10 years ago. For most of us, the clothes wouldn’t fit anymore. Sadly, if the question becomes “Does your business still wear the clothes it wore 10 years ago?” the answer is yes a surprising amount of the time.

Are you using the same basic content, design styles, sales approach, marketing methods, hosting company and software to run your websites? How different is what you’re doing now from what you were doing one, three or five years ago? You should mount a thorough inspection and analysis of your business every year.

As part of this analysis, take a close look at your competitors, noting what they’re doing and how they’ve changed. Do some research and see what kinds of services hosting companies are offering and what kind of software is on the market. Chances are you may be missing out on something you didn’t even know existed.

I can’t tell you how many times an Elevated X CMS customer has told us they had no idea we released a new version of our software. Maybe they didn’t get our email newsletter or see the press release posts or check our website. Make it your responsibility to keep your business up to date. This is one of the biggest factors that separate the uber-successful from everyone else.

Look at a successful company’s products at any time of the year … they’re always fresh and shiny. Yours can be, too, if you’re willing to adapt and be flexible.

Keep these three pointers in mind, and you’ll stand a better chance of putting your business on top and continuing to grow.

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. He has spoken at major industry trade shows and is a contributing writer for several industry publications. Elevated X powers more than 2,000 leading adult sites and is a six-time YNOT, GFY and XBiz Software Company of the Year award nominee.