PayPal has a strict anti-adult policy which they enforce to levels you would never even comprehend and this includes the sales of used clothing, articles, books, movies, artwork etc which is linked from an adult website.

Even a financial gift send from an adoring fan to your PayPal account with a note inside that is consider adult (vanilla or fetish based) in nature can trigger the investigation process.

Allow me to give you some examples of PayPal shutting down legit businesses which had a connection to the adult industry.

Recently a lovely webcam model opened up her webcam site. She didn’t try to sell any webcam shows, talk time or clips via PayPal. All she did was install an option to buy some of her used panties (a product which is openly sold via the non-adult and partner site Ebay daily). On her very first sale her account was frozen and investigated. She is going to lose her account completely if she hasn’t done so yet. What made the sale of an everyday product unacceptable in the eyes of PayPal? It was linked from an adult webcam site, which clearly broke their TOS rules.

The well known fetish and gay writer Jack Rinella had his PayPal account frozen and lost a large amount which came from the sales of his educational fetish based books, after PayPal decided to take offense to the subject matter. This was several years back, and a story he shared during a BDSM/ Fetish workshop. So it comes directly from the horse’s mouth.

Fetish Educator and writer Goddess Bella Donna had her account frozen and shut down roughly 4 years ago after one of her adoring fans send her a cash gift and wrote a note of thanks including the words “my Goddess”. Since at that time she had a chipin button (which accepts PayPal payments) located on one of her fetish educational sites, they decided to close her account down permanently.

Now this of course brings us to a predicament since PayPal is the widest known 3rd party billing provider out there. Most adult friendly billing processors do not allow the sales of tangible goods, but only allow you to sell digital delivery products.

What can you do if you wish to sell panties, stockings, shoes etc to your webcam site customers and fans?

You can open an Ebay store up for those goods if you like and now it once again becomes TOS acceptable as long as you do the following.

• Give it a vanilla non-adult name. For example “Jane’s used treasure box” is acceptable, but you may have problems with “Webcam Mistress Joanna’s used panties”. Keep it non-adult, non-fetish, and non-sexual and you will be ok.

• Do not under any circumstances put a link from your Ebay Store on your adult webcam model website or blog.

Now what about those Ebay stores that sell adult content? If they don’t shut them down they are in a mature section only and PayPal payments are not accepted. Which ones again brings us back to the original problem

Let’s say you set up a spanking new Ebay store, got it approved and are not accepting payments via PayPal. How do you get your customers to buy the products if you can’t link it from your webcam site?

Do the following two things. First secure your PayPal account up. You now have a legit online business via your Ebay Store. Add it in the merchant information section if you like under website URLs. Now you are nice and legit. PayPal loves Ebay Stores since they get to charge you twice. Yes the same people own both places.

Next put a note on your webcam site letting your customers know that you have used items for sale, but ask them to email you for the information. This way you can send them via email (away from your adult webcam site) to your Ebay Store.

Problem solved. As long as you NEVER connect your PayPal account from your adult webcam model site you can run the two different businesses without any problem.

Good luck and remember that nobody is exempt from the PayPal rules and sooner or later they will zero in on you. The more business you generate through them with adult content or perceived adult natured, the sooner they will have their little alarm software triggered. Your funds can be frozen up for many months, and none of us webcam models can afford that.

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If you are not familiar with SOPA (Stop online piracy act) it is time you start familiarizing yourself with it. Up to this point it really didn’t concern the webcam site sector of the Adult Entertainment industry too much, but with the newest changes being on the table this may change in 2012.

At first glimpse the SOPA law may not affect the mega webcam model sites, but once you start reading closer and a bit between the lines you can see the issues emerging.
Take a look at this article and read it very carefully. SOPA is planning on going after websites now as well and that will include the mega webcam sites like LiveJasmin and Streamate and many of the clips4sale stores as well, since they can not control all the products the individual studios offer.

How could a studio or webcam show be in infringement? Belief it or not, even if you use music as a background for your show which is not public domain, or a snippet of a movie in the background which you have no license for, or use a dubbed background of a scene from another persons movie in your own product it is now copyright infringement and with that falls firmly under SOPA law.

Sounds crazy doesn’t it, but that is what SOPA is all about. Closing down any avenue that could possibly take anything from another performer and studio to use as part of your own product and persecuting to the fullest extend of the law those offending parties.

How does this affect you if you are not in infringement of any of those illegal actions, but are a performer on a mega webcam site like LiveJasmin and Streamate or use specific clips for sale outlets as your main income? The answer is simple. If the website is found to be in infringement of the SOPA law it is in danger of being shut down. Since they have no control and have no way of monitoring each individual Studios or Webcam Models content this can very easily happen. It only takes a couple of bad apples to cause the site to be shut down or heavily penalized. This means you can be out of a job without any prior notice and/or loose your already accumulated income since their assets will be seized during such a forced close down.

How can you protect yourself from this is the next big question which should come to mind and gratefully the answer is an easy one. The best course of action is to be in sole control of your webcam business. This means you are the one who controls everything that is available and you make certain that no infringement takes place. The only way you can achieve this is by running your own webcam business and website.

Aside from all the benefits owning, operating and maintaining your own webcam site already brings like keeping all your own profits, having complete control of what hours you work, which shows you wish to offer, you can now add the guarantee that you will not be shut down unless you yourself break the law.

As a smart business person, owning your own webcam site is really the only way to go in this time and age with the laws constantly changing and the adult industry being more and more restricted. By owning your own webcam site you can also keep up with the newest trends and do not need to seek the approval of a mega webcam site or clip for sale site who may or may not allow you to offer your particular niche due to their own “moral” stance on things.

Allow me to give you a small example on this. Zappa (clips4sale) has several months ago removed the hypnosis category from its listings which ironically is one of the better selling categories. Their reason was that it was “manipulation of the persons mind, without their consent”, which is hogwash since consent is given the moment the customer purchases the clip. You can still add this particular niche to your studio, but now have to place it under some other category which will not bring you the traffic to your product as it would if you could place it in the right category. If you own your own webcam site however you can offer this sort of product for sale, labeled correctly and with a much better chance of profit for you.

The motto for every webcam model or adult industry performer should be: “Know the laws, be smart, and run your own business the right way!”

Now of course you may be worried about the cost of owning your own webcam site, or do not have the technical know how to build it. Perhaps you just don’t have the time to learn to build a professional looking and attractive webcam site in which to house your personal webcam model business. Do not let this hold you back. iCamModel Service is there for you and will help you get up and running within days for a very small one time fee. Matter of fact this is the perfect time to get started since our already low price of $249.00 complete start up cost is discounted by 20% for the holiday season.

Take the worries about SOPA and any other law which may end up costing you your work environment by taking the bull by its horn and become an independent webcam model with her/his own website and full control over what you offer and your income potential.

I want to insert another quick thought into this before I close for today. The economy has taken a big effect on the spending habits of the over day consumer of adult products and services. If you have been working in the adult industry for a while you have already noticed the drop in income. Can you really afford at this point to give a large percentage of your personal income away to someone else? Can your really afford to price your shows and products in a way that will allow you to meet your personal monthly income goal each month while having to give anywhere from 30% to 50% of your earnings to a big company with hundreds or thousands of studios and performers? The answer more and likely is “NO”. Owning your own independent webcam model website is really the only way to go considering all the benefits and securities it will bring you!

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Let me show you the real example so you can see how dangerous this could be. I saw this tweet the other day from one of the models I follow on Twitter:

The link takes you to her Tumbler profile where she posted the candid picture taken via her smartphone. So I saved this picture on my computer, opened it in Photoshop, and viewed the picture file info. And here is what I see:

The picture file contains longitude and magnitude of the place where the picture was taken (most likely in the model’s apartment from what I can see on the picture). So I just copy these two coordinates, paste it into Google Maps and here we go:

It shows me the exact location of where the picture was taken. I can enlarge it and see the satellite view of the building where model lives.  So it becomes really easy for stalker to hunt the model down in the reality. You never know!

You must be scared to death now, at least those of you who have posted candid pictures of yourself on picture sharing sites in the past. But don’t worry. I’ll show you how to fix that.

First of all you need to make sure that geo location services are turned off for your smart phone’s cam. I will guide you through the steps you need to take assuming you have Apple’s iPhone. But if you have other smartphone device, the steps should be similar. So for the iPhone here is what you should do:

1. Click the Home button and go to the Settings

2. Find the Location Services option (if you haven’t upgraded your iPhone lately then you should click on General first). If you see OFF next to it, you should be fine and just do nothing. If you see ON then you could be in trouble. Just click the Location Services and it will take you to the next screen:

3. On the next screen you’ll see the list of applications on your iPhone that use geo location services. Look up the Camera application (it should be on top of the list). If you see ON next to it, you are in trouble:

Turn this option off and now you can safely share your candid pictures taken by this iPhone. Your geoloaction won’t be stored with picture file. Also, to be safe, you need to go to each of the sites where you shared pics taken by this iPhone and delete them as soon as possible.

Be aware that the same problem can exist when you use other similar devices such as digital cameras and camcorders. Check the user manuals of the devices you use to make sure that they don’t attach the geolocation information.

The virtual world of webcam modeling should remain totally isolated from the real world to keep the models safe. So don’t give up your physical location, follow the instructions above and you’ll never get into trouble of meeting virtual stalker in real life.

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Imagine having your own web site where you can perform members only cam shows similar to how you do it on cam sites and at the same time you don’t pay any commission collecting 100% of the profit. You can spend few thousands to have this nice feature implemented on your web site, plus your hosting costs will increase up to $100 a month because video chat eats a lot of bandwidth. So it looks like very expensive solution that cam models just can’t afford. Well, there is another solution that is absolutely FREE.

When you sign up with Streamate, OnHerCam and some other top cam sites they will provide you with videochat solution for your own web site for FREE. Here is how it works:

1. You have to sign up with cam site and be active model on it

2. You need to have your own membership site, i.e. web site where you charge fans for accessing your protected content (pics, videos, etc)

3. Once you have it, cam site will provide you with a special code that you can place on any page of your site that is protected (i.e. member have to be logged in in order to see this page).

4. Now you can announce to your site members that at certain day and time you are going to perform your members only cam show.

5. All you need to do is log in to your cam site’s account at the predefined date/time and start private cam show. Your site members will be able to see it on your site as so it belongs to it and will never guess that it actually comes from the cam site. They have already paid for the membership to access your private content (and to watch your cam shows) so you don’t have to share any profit with cam site.

You might be wondering what’s the catch here and why cam sites give this all up for free. Here is the catch (which is not really the catch). While you perform members only cam show for your site members, cam site’s members can buy access to it as well. They will pay per minute to watch your cam show and you have a chance to make even more money! This is the win-win for you and for the cam site – you have a powerful tool to provide regular cam shows for your site members; cam site gets additional content in the form of your cam shows that they have a chance to sell.

If you have your own membership site or thinking about having one, the solution described here will power your site with nice video chat platform and it’s FREE. The only drawback is that your cam shows become not exclusive to your site members only. But this is the only price you pay.

Does anyone use this solution for your own independent cam girl web sites? Please share your experience in comments if you do.

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Now my blog is not the same as real cam girl blog. I mean cam girls write posts that tease their fans to buy a cam show or picture/video content. My posts are targeted for cam models instead with useful tips and tricks (like this post). But Google doesn’t know the difference. It sees that I use key phrase like “independent cam girl” in my blog posts a lot so it shows my site in search results when somebody types this phrase in Google search:

So when I was checking my site stats with Google Analytics I’ve noticed that I got a lot of visitors to my site who have actually searched for cam girls rather than for how to become independent cam model. Obviously those visitors were leaving my site once they figured out that this is not what they were looking for.

So I thought why should I give up these visitors? Why wouldn’t I point them to what they were looking for in first place?. I.e they wanted to hook up with cam girls so why not to point them to the place where cam girls hang out.

So I signed up with OnHerCam affiliate program. They pay 20% of what customers referred through your affiliate link spend on their site. No matter if they spend money today or in a year you still get your 20%.

Then I did 2 things:

1. I’ve put a nice banner at the top right of my site that says “Came here for cam models?”:

This way when somebody searches “independent cam girl” in Google, gets to my site and figures out that there are no cam models in there he would see this banner with intrigue question and most likely clicks on it. As soon as he clicks it he will be tagged as being referred to OnHerCam by me. And whatever he spends on OHC from this moment on, I will get 20% out of it.

Note that there is a good chance that he’ll spend some money because remember, he was looking for cam girls at the very beginning when he typed “independent cam girl” in Google

2. Whenever I mention OnHerCam in my blog posts I link to to it using my affiliate link. You may be wondering why would I do this if I’ve already put the banner. Well, the thing is that many Internet users were so annoyed with all different banners for the last few years that they just don’t pay attention to it anymore. It’s called “banner blindness”. That’s why text links are so effective these days.

So going back to my example, when somebody types “independent cam girl” in Google, gets to my site and sees the article about OnHerCam there is a good chance that he’ll click on one of the text links. This may be because he’ll be intrigued by the OnHerCam site’s name (that’s why it’s so important to pick the right domain name for your own site) or may be he’s already heard about this site before and decided to check it out. You got the idea.

Results

It was a pleasant feeling to see how money started coming in just in few days after I made the changes above (which took me about 15 minutes to do). Here is the screenshot of my earnings for time period September 15 – September 30, 2010:

It shows that 4 new members signed up through my affiliate links and I earned $346.99 which means that these members spent $1734.95 in total.

Note that in most cases member referred by me was coming back to OnHerCam and was spending money on different dates and not all at once (it’s called “rebills”). And I was still getting my 20% cut each time they purchased cam show. If it happens he comes back in a year from now because he misses his favorite model I will still get 20% of what he spends.

Conclusion

As you can see affiliate links is the very effective way to generate passive income for cam girls. You may be slipping or you may be out for vacation and they will still bring you the money. You do need to have your own site or blog though to use this method of making money.

If you already have your independent cam girl site or blog then use any opportunity to put affiliate links and you’ll be surprised how easy it could be to make money this way.

Related posts:

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But first a little bit of theory. There are two types of links – text and image. You need to hunt for the text links because they are very good for search engines like Google. When Google sees text link pointing to your site it starts showing your site in search results (when somebody types certain phrase in Google). This can bring you tones of FREE traffic.

The process of getting text links to your site is very easy. All you need to do is find other sites that somehow related to your site and exchange links with them. By exchanging links I mean when site that you found puts text link pointing to your site and your site has link to that site in return. It may sound all complicated so let me show you exactly step by step how to get text link to your site. It’s going to take you only few minutes

Go to webcams411.com . As you can see this website is related to webcam modeling – exactly what you need. It has reviews of some webcam sites and also features independent cam girls. If you scroll down a little you’ll see the section called “Freelance Webcam Sex Girls who run their own websites”:

As you can see this section has links to independent cam girls sites. At the bottom of this section you can see this message:

This means that the site owner offers you to exchange links. All you need to do is send him an email to specified email address where you should specify what text you want to use for the link (in most cases it could be your website name) and address of your website (URL). For example in this section you can see a link with the text “Cam Girl Nikki” that points to http://camgirlnikki.com/ .

Note that this kind of sites like webcams411.com will ask you to put a link back to them. You can put this link in the sidebar or on special “Friends” page.

Conclusion

Getting links to your site is one of the most important factors that determines either your site will succeed or will be dead like many other sites in the Internet. So if you decided to run your own site make sure you constantly hunt for the links. There are tones of other sites like webcams411.com that offer link exchanges. Just make sure that the site you exchange links with is clean without crazy popups and some other “stinky” stuff.

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CanvasPeople website provides a service where they will take your digital picture and print them onto canvas. Once you upload the picture you can choose the frame and many other things to improve the final painting. In about 5-6 days they will ship you the resulting painting. It looks so great and real that you can easily sell it to your fans for the top price.

Although I think that this new service is good for cam models, it can be used in your non-virtual life too. It could be nice and unusual present to your family members, friends and loved ones. You simply pick the best picture that you have related to that person, order painting of this picture through CanvasPeople.com and present it to them.

CanvasPeople are running great promotions right now until July 6th where you can get 8 X 10 painting of any picture you want for FREE. You’ll have to pay for shipping only. Also you can order paintings of bigger size for as cheap as size 11 X 14 for $9.99, size 16 X 16 for $23.99 and so on. I’ve personally used the free offer for 8 X 10 painting and the final product looks just great. I would definitely recommend to try this FREE offer.

Do you sell posters to your fans? How does it work for you? Please share in comments.

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1. Search Engines Traffic

Search engines can bring you crazy amount of traffic. But for this to work your site has to be constantly updated with the new content that should combine text, pictures and video. Blogs are ideal for this since the whole nature of blog is to be regularly updated with short text stories and search engines just love them.

Although for search engines it’s not enough to keep your site regularly updated. You need to have links pointing to your site from other popular sites. Only then search engine will take your site seriously and show it higher in search results.

2. Links From Other Sites

As I mentioned above having links to your site plays very important role for search engines. But these links also bring you traffic from people who actually click it. The most affective and valuable links are text links and not banner ones. People are so used to banners these days that they just ignore it.

There are many ways to get text links from popular sites. For example you could have a review on a popular site that features cam models. Review will be in the form of text article with your picture or video. This article will link to your site in multiple places and you will get two wins at once: fresh traffic from those who read the review and clicked your link plus search engine will notice these links and take your site more seriously.

3. Mailing List

You should build mailing list from the very 1st day you start your site. Email is the most affective way to reach your fans. They most likely will read your emails because they intentionally gave their email addresses to you. You should put sign up form on some prominent place on your site and encourage your visitors to sign up. The more your web site exists the bigger mailing list becomes. With thousands of email addresses in your possession you can be sure to make money with every email you send out to the list. For example once a month you can send out an email announcing a feature show with link to your site where they can easily buy it. Suddenly hundreds fans will click that link and get to your site and most likely some of them will buy the show.

4. Be Active On Social Networks

You should be active at least on two the most popular social networks – Twitter and Facebook. Your site name must be present in your social network’s profile and any new updates you post to your site should be shared there. Once you build a big following on social networks your updates will become viral which will bring you a good traffic. For example let’s say you  have 3000 followers on Twitter and you sent out a tweet with URL to your new video. It gets re-twitted by your fans and friends of your fans start watching this video and some of them become your new fans. These new fans will find out about your site through your profile or tweets. The same thing happens on Facebook. The key is to keep your fans active by spoiling them with some free content like pictures and videos.

5. Watermarking Content

You should watermark your pictures and video with your site name in it (that’s why it’s so important to have short and easy to remember domain name). This way you can get free traffic from those who view your pictures and video. But to get this traffic you need to promote your picture and video  content mostly through social networks. For example you can post non-nude video on YouTube or share your picture/video on Twitter and Facebook.

Conclusion

If you decided to run your own web site you got to realize that online marketer should become your second job. It will be tough at the beginning but once it starts working you’re going to be surprised with the results. So you’d better love being marketer of your site.

Do you use any other ways to get traffic to your site?

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1. You Will Need To Invest Money Into Web Site Setup And Design

Membership site software is not cheap. If you want to build a top notch membership site expect to spend $3,000-$4,000 for the set up and design. There are cheaper options of course but they will require more of your time and effort. Or you can use video chat solutions that charge you around $200 a month for using their video chat platform and you’ll still have to build a website around them. The point is you got to invest money to have membership site.

2. Filling Your Membership Site With Content Will Cost You

You can’t start membership site without having pretty solid amount of content in membership area. This content should combine high quality pictures and videos. It’s almost impossible to produce this content all by yourself which means that you’ll have to hire professional photographer for this. And it’s going to cost you money as well.

3. Lack Of Traffic

Ok, so finally you’ve got your membership site out. You’ve spent money on setting it up, design and filling your site with content. If you expect to start getting paying members right away you will be very disappointed. It’s just doesn’t happen this way when tones of people start hitting your site right after it went life. Your site will be one of many thousands other similar solo girl sites out there. You’ll have to work your butt off to promote it in order to get some traffic to your new site. In many cases you’ll need to pay for the traffic in terms of buying advertisement on other sites and Google. And only fraction of this traffic will buy the membership. Don’t be surprised when it will take weeks! to sell a membership for the first time.

Conclusion

As you can see it’s not wise to start from membership site once you decide to be independent cam girl. Your membership site won’t survive taking into account the amount of competition out there, amount of money you invest and no return for long time. The smartest way is to build up a large fan base first and then build a membership site selling memberships to your hungry, ready to buy everything from you fans.

Solution

To build a large fan base you do need to work hard promoting yourself on cam networks, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, forums, etc. And you do need to have a web site which in contrast with membership site shouldn’t charge anything. You should keep it updating with teasing content and more and more funs will stick around it. Because you don’t charge anything to access your site you shouldn’t worry about professional design and quality of the content. You won’t have to spend thousands of dollars for professional design and photographers. You will be able to shoot it all by yourself with regular digital camera and camcorders. Blogs are perfectly suited for all these needs. They are easy to setup and it’s very easy to publish your content with blogs. If you haven’t started your blog yet, do it now and start becoming independent cam girl.

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Here are 4 key metrics that Google Analytics gives you (screenshots are taken from analytics data on my site, I’ve just blurred the real numbers he-he):

1. How Many Visitors You Get Every Day

As you can see it shows how many many unique people visited your site every day. If the same person visited your site 3 times a day he still will be counted as one person. See those spikes in traffic on the graph above? This is when I was sending news letter about my new articles. So you actually can see how certain actions you do on a web site are reflected in traffic increase (or decrease).

2. How Long Visitors Stays On Your Site

Bounce Rate means what percentage of visitors came and left right away from your site. This shows how your site is appealing to the 1st time visitors. So if bounce rate is high (above 70%) you need to put work into better design.

Avg. Time on Site shows how long (on average) your visitors stay on site. If this value is low (less than 2 minutes) it means that visitors don’t find your content interesting and you need to changes something (put more pictures, video, etc).

New Visits is the percentage of new visitors to your site. If this value is low it means that you have many repetitive visitors which is always good!

3. Traffic Sources

Shows what sites send you the traffic and how much of it. As you can see Google brings most of the traffic for my blog. And this is the case for many other web sites out there.

4. Keywords Your Visitors Used To Get To Your Site

Shows what keywords people used in Google to get to your site. For example if you see that “Asian Girl Fucking Blog” and other variations of this keyword brings you the most of the traffic, see if you are on the 1st page of Google for this phrase. And if you are, then there is a good chance that you can get to the first 3 spots on Google for this keyword. So start publishing more articles with this keyword putting it in a title and body of the article. Once you get to the 1st spot in google for your top keyword you’ll be amazed how much traffic you’ll be getting.

These are just 4 the most important key metrics that you can view through Google Analytics. There are other metrics that will give you even more details such as the most visited web pages on your site, top pages people leave your site from and so on.

It’s very easy to set up Google Analytics for your site. Here is a nice video I found that explains how to set it up and use:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Conclusion

Running your own web site is like running your own business. You can not just start it and let it go. You should pay attention to what’s going on around your web site and do necessary tweaks to make it better. Checking key metrics through Google Analytics is the must for every website owner.

If you have any questions about how to set it up for your web site or what different metrics mean don’t hesitate to ask in comments.

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