SAAFE

Websites and Search Engines

Once your website is up, many web masters will write to you offering some fantastic deals. In fact, if I had a penny for everyone who has offered to bring me in loads of extra business/increase my search engine placement/improve my site/increase my penis size (oh sorry, different sort of spam) then, well, I’d have a big enough jar to make it worthwhile to go down my local Sainsburys’ and change it up for notes in their coin counter.

Firstly, you should be reviewing your own website. Check out the wording, everywhere, and make sure it is relevant to the sort of searches you want to be found by. Search engine placement is far more sophisticated than it used to be so make your site relevant and try and keep up with the latest methods being used by search engines to rank sites.

As you may have noticed, search results on Google have declined badly in terms of their usefulness. In order to justify their massive spend on ‘AI’ in the form of automated plagiarism, results now typically start with their software’s often inaccurate summary of the answer. (Wonder how bad these are? Try a query for something you know a lot about.)

If you don’t have a decent ad blocker, there will then be some sites that have paid to be high up in the results. (Want a good ad blocker? Try uBlock Origin on Firefox - it’s so good that Google have crippled how it works on Chrome and many other browsers based on the same software.)

Following those are often sites that have signed up to feeding Google’s automated plagiarism system with their user’s content, hence the recent high ranking of Reddit in results. (Not posting on Reddit? Consider it.)

All this has changed from the days when Google search’s main aim was to get to you the best site for your query. Now it’s all about maximising ad revenue. (Putting someone from their ad division in charge of their search division was partly the reason for that.) Those AI results? It means Google can charge the sites who have paid to be shown to you without you going to visit them.. and possibly seeing ads Google won’t get money for.

It also means that most techniques to get your site high up in Google’s results no longer work.

Despite that, lots of unscrupulous “business people” see sex workers as their way of making quick cash. They see our hourly rates and decide that they need, want or deserve a share of it. But don’t be fooled; you should be the only one making money out of your body. If someone has a genuine skill to offer then pay what their skill is worth to you; do not let them rip you off by overcharging just because they see what you earn per hour.

It is very tempting when you start out, or if business isn’t as great as you’d thought it would be, to give something a go, especially when it promises so much. You will hear lots of talk about traffic and hits. Traffic to your site is only good if it is the right sort of traffic that will convert into business. A thousand visitors sounds less good if 99% of them are bots. (Until we blocked them, most traffic to SAAFE in 2024 was bots from two search engines, one in China and one from Amazon looking for text they could sell people via its ‘AI’.)

And as for hits, don’t let people get you confused between hits and unique user visits. Number of hits will not tell you how many people have visited your site, it will tell you how many items have been downloaded so for example if one of your pages had 10 pictures on it, that will generate 10 hits but only one person will have visited.

We advise that when the next ‘best thing that could ever happen to your business’ comes along, check it out thoroughly.

Ask if they give you a money back guarantee (given they are so confident they will improve your business).
Ask who they have done work for previously and don’t just accept a list of names and quotes, ask for contact details so you can talk to the girls yourself.
Ask for figures. You may get told that so-and-so had a 100% increase in business, well that is no good if all that translates into is that they had one client a year before and now have two!

Well, that is some of the bad stuff to look out for, let’s now talk about where is good to advertise…

Blogging

This seems to be the craze of the moment ever since Belle Du Jour burst onto our computer screens way back in 2004 (I think). Now it is tres chic to blog. Whilst it can be about anything, it would help bunches if you made your blog interesting. Some ladies like to go for the full “I had a gangbang the other night and I’m so horny I can just swing off your cock right now” kinda stuff. Or some ladies prefer the more subtle approach, talking about their day if they think it’s been interesting enough. For some escorts it’s not always about sex and if you don’t want to be continuously thought of as sex objects it’s nice to throw in a bit of human-ess about you.

I would suggest not giving away too much of your personal life, though. Unfortunately, this industry attracts the most, um, colourful, shall we say, of characters, so it’s always good to think about what you’re going to write first. Plus you also have to remember that the potential client might be reading what you get up to before he makes up his mind on whether or not he’d like to spend some time with you. So remember you’re writing for an audience - and they might pick up more detail than you think.

If your site uses the WordPress software one way or another, it’s trivial to add a blog to your site. Otherwise either ask your webmaster/mistress, or check out something like Wordpress.com or dreamwidth.org for yourself and link to it from your site.

Escort Directories

Women:

This section used to be a lot longer. What happened was the arrival of AdultWork in the UK. ‘AW’ has always been so far from perfect that problems with it have their own section on the SAAFE message board but it had the advantage of being good enough for a lot of people.. and having a ’lot of people’ brings a lot of advantages just by itself.

The non-sex work equivalent would be eBay. That has never been a particularly good site on a number of levels, but once it got a large number of users, why would you try to sell anything on any other online auction site? And with so many people selling on it, why look elsewhere?

Some answers to that are “because eBay won’t touch it” or “because the market is smaller and elsewhere” (the ‘fine art’ auction houses are still in business…) but many alternatives vanished.

Much the same happened in the UK sex work scene.

Within a few years of AW arriving, traffic to a bunch of other sites fell off a cliff. Some have vanished - PuntingZone is one example - while others are a lot quieter than they used to be - PunterNet and Captain69 are two examples, but the original owner of ‘PN’ is no longer associated with the site. SelectAnEscort is still around (but it looks like most escort ads on it are placed by agencies) as are Tryst and Massage Republic.

Some specialist and local directories survive: for example, Pretty Big Escorts lists UK working girls of size 14 and over, while London Escort Guide and London Independents for London are still said to be useful.

Similarly, some general ad sites have an escort section: VivaStreet is the classic example.

All this will doubtless change over the next decade. Competition from apps like Vinted lead to eBay dropping selling fees for almost everything in 2024. What will be the thing that topples AW? We’ve no idea, but something will…

Men:

The vast majority of clients for male escorts are other men so you need to be where gay and bisexual men look for partners. Gaydar has specific escort rooms, Sleepboy is an escort directory, and people doubtless hustle on Grindr.

For many years, local ‘gay scene’ magazines Boyz and QX carried numerous pages of escort ads, but both have now closed down. If there’s a surviving print scene magazine where you are, have a look to see if it does escort ads.

Message boards

There used to be more of these too. If a directory you’re looking at does, have a quick scan of the message board to see what type of person frequents it and what types of posts they allow. A board/site struggling for traffic will allow gossip-fuelled personal attacks on people which shows the admin will stoop to anything to promote the site and so we suggest you avoid, as you could be their next innocent target. Also look out for sites which allow racist abuse to go unmoderated. Generally spend a little time having a look around and decide if the site is somewhere you want your name associated with.

Regional and Other Country Directories

There are a few regional directories around so look out for ones that cover your area but also remember that if you go off on tour to another part of the country, many of these directories will accept a touring ad which is ideal for drumming up business outside of your own catchment.

How much should you pay for advertising?

In reality, if you are clever with your marketing it shouldn’t cost too much each month. £50 a month including the cost of hosting your web site is more than sufficient in most cases and remember many girls do not pay anything near that amount yet make a good living.

One thing AW has done is force most other places to cut their charges - I would be surprised if there’s anywhere still charging you £50 a month and more just to be listed…

Try pretending to be a client and think what you would put into Google to find the right kind of escort in the right area. “independent escort London” or “mature escort Manchester”, for example. Remember, nobody searches for “red-haired escort who works 1.2km from Slough but sometimes travels to Dundee” so anyone who tries to tell you they’ll put you at the top of Google listings is likely trying to sell you a silly listing for a never-used search term. It’s mostly directories that will be at the top of “independent [town/city] escort” searches (and they’ll therefore be the ones clients are most likely to find, too) so see what those directories are and how much those listings cost.

Google Analytics is a popular way of monitoring who is visiting your site and where they’re finding it and what they’re looking at on it. Google Analytics is free so don’t let anyone talk you into paying for this sort of information. It’s quite simple to install yourself but if you have trouble, your webmaster should be able to do this with no more than 20 minutes’ effort - so don’t let them try to charge you £100 for it, either!

GA is also another abuse of Google’s power: they’ll show you the search a visitor made on Google to get to the site in question, but do not let anyone else, including the logging records of site itself, see that. It also enables Google to track people on any and all sites using it, so plenty of people block its script, meaning they’re invisible to GA.