Today (11 Jan 2017) I entered the top 40 on the clips4sale main page (#39 2pee4you). A big success.

I probably have not been in there since two years and I will be out again soon, but it’s not a completely random event. I have identified five factors that made this possible.

Before I tell you about them, a little information about the toplists:

  • The Top Studios list on the main page is based on the sum of all sales earnings (tributes don’t count) of the past 7 days*.
  • The Top Clips list (below the Top studios list) is based on the sheer number of times an individual clip sold in the past 7 days*, no matter it’s price.
  • The Top Studios list in each category is based on the sum of all clip sales, from the past 7 days*, of clips assigned to that category. That means clips you put in that “clip category” when you added them.
  • The Top Clips list in each category is based on the total number of sales of each clip assigned to that category (past 7 days*)

It does not matter how old a clip is, as long as it sold in the past 7 days, it counts.

*The “past 7 days” seem to be the past 168 hours. Support told me it’s really about the past 7 days, but my observations tell me a different story. It’s not that important, but just so you know.

  1. Dedication

    Yeah sure. Blablabla you think. Working hard bla, staying active bla. And of course it’s lame to mention it when you expect really helpful (in human words: things that help overnight) advice. So I keep it short: Working hard bla. Staying active bla. That’s my number 1. I know there are studios updating once every week in the top, but I am pretty sure they work hard elsewhere – for example promoting.

  2. Descriptions

    I can barely say this in an unprotected post, but: I have had competitors over the years that made some fine clips. They never quite had the success I had, frankly because they put NO effort in their clip descriptions. I always wondered: You film the clip, you edit, you upload. You maybe had to hire a model, shoot different angles, write a script. Whatever it was, it was a lot of work. Then, shortly before you reach the finish line, before you add the clip to your store, you somehow cut corners. One sentence? Even worse: the same description on every clip, just changing the models’ name? Really? Is that it? I won’t link to studios now, you can find plenty of those yourself. It would not be fair to those studios.

    However, how would a customer know what your clip is about if you don’t tell them? From one preview picture? Okay, that might still be sufficient. But: it doesn’t sell your clip. If you don’t take the viewer into your clip, make it exciting for them, trigger fantasies, then the chances that they spend money (impulse buy) are pretty low. People don’t need the clips. You have to make them want the clip.

    A totally different issue with short descriptions is keyword density. If you don’t write a longer description, you can’t put in a lot of keywords. C4S has continuously updated their search function. It’s still not very good (e.g. you can’t search for two terms occuring together, it will just show all results for each term) but it’s become good enough to make longer descriptions with more keywords more valuable.

    My descriptions still suck by the way. Sometimes I put in the effort and they become way too long. Other times I am very pleased and make a nice description, only to notice that I massively sell a clip I don’t even like that much. I need to get better at this, but the new editor helps and is one of the reasons why I got into the top 40.

    If you want to read enticing descriptions speaking to the viewer, look at Natasha’s bedroom, Xev Bellringer or Tara Tainton. If you want enticing previews backed by long third-person descriptions, check Missa. For a combination of pictures and text, see Primal’s Fantasies. They incorporate several gifs into a long third-person description to paint an enticing, picture backed story. For a succesful studio with long, first-person descriptions, check mine. Just joking 😛 Check Kaidence King. Someone mixing it up is Mandy Flores. She has been in the toplist for ages and I think if you visit her studio, you can “feel” why.

  3. Google

    Ever since the new clip pages got launched, our individual clips became accessible by google. I noticed a rise in organic traffic (e.g. from googling) and I hope it will continue! I now get 27% of my traffic from google. It used to be lower than 1%

  4. Related clips

    I used to throw in related clips here and there. They really boost your sales. See my post about it or check the studios I linked above. Most are using related clips in their descriptions. Since the new clip pages got introduced, we all have related clips shown to our customers. It’s the column on the right. It doesn’t work too well in my case, because I have 1 category I post most clips in, so nearly all of them are somewhat related, but I have definitely noticed customers get more related clips in orders and bigger orders because of that.

  5. Mobile traffic

    I heard from a colleague that the mobile site has been improved. Since I am getting about 1/5 (19%) of mobile traffic now, this is great news. I must say I had a pretty good time the past ~3 weeks. End of 2016 / beginning of 2017. It’s just around the time that c4s introduced several big updates.

 

Trivia

My best placement ever was #15