Fancy making money by talking about sex?

Wondering how to start a sex blog?

We don’t need to tell you that blogging has changed over the last decade and has become something of a serious career choice.

Yeah sure, there are still plenty of wannabe diarists and niche specialists who just want a forum to vent their rants or impart their knowledge to the world but, if you get it right, a blog can be a great way to earn cash, and plenty of it!

Sex blogs pay particularly well because the adult industry is a booming one. With careful placement of sponsored posts and partnering with the right affiliate programs you could soon be onto the biggest money spinner going.

So, in this feature we want to take you through every step you need to create a sex blog, get it in front of as many people as possible and monetize the crap out of it.

Let’s get sex blogging!

Can You Really Make Money as a Sex Blogger?

Hand on heart, and a simple answer; yes, you can make a lot of money by writing a sex blog.

The adult industry is a huge and diverse one with plenty of opportunities to earn money by helping to market services, products and brands through the use of:

• Affiliate Marketing
• Banner Advertising
• Sponsored Reviews
• Guest Posts

All tried and tested ways to monetize content, you could eventually use your sex blog to sell your own products, membership and services. Even yourself! For instance, we know of at least half a dozen successful sex bloggers who have gone on to be regular guest speakers on podcasts, TV and radio.

As for the amount of money you can earn, the limits on this are very much down to you and how you go about setting up your blog.

Fortunately, we can help.

We’ve put together this comprehensive and detailed guide specifically to give you all the help you need to get started and to hit the ground running.

What is a Sex Blog?

This might seem like a dumb place to start but bear with us.

The term ‘sex blog’ can mean different things to different people and doesn’t specifically have to be about sex (as in sexual intercourse).

Instead, we use it here as a way to cover any informational website which centers around adult content.

A list of the potential kinds of product, sites and services that this could include would be too extensive but the kind of things a sex blog might cover are:

• Pornography and the adult industry
• Adult gaming
• Sexual wellness
• Sex toys and adult products
• Relationships and intimacy coaching
• Adult entertainment such as strip clubs and erotic dancing
• Sex work such as escorting, erotic massage and brothels
• Online adult work like live camming
• Fetish and kink markets
• Swinging lifestyle
• Casual sex and hookup sites

You get the picture. A sex blog is just a site with informative articles about anything with a NSFW interest.

Just how NSFW you get is up to you.

Time To Do Your Homework

Before you register your domain name and start building your site you need to know what kind of sex blog you are going to be creating.

You might already have ideas about where your own skills and knowledge lie but trust us when we say that this comes later.

First up, you need to decide what your goals for your blog are going to be.

Sure, you can earn yourself a shit ton of money but that might not be your primary goal.

So, your first question to answer is why are you doing this?

If you want to create a sex blog for money then you’re going to need to do your research to find out which kinds of products to promote can earn you the best money and which just aren’t worth the time. We’ll cover some of this later in our tips section and how to make money from your sex blog, below.

If you have a genuine interest in an area and just want to create a blog to inform others and maybe make some money on the side then, of course, you just have to go with that. Our detailed guide on how to start a sex blog can help you here too.

Whatever your motivations are, you are going to need to do some research first.

This means looking around at how other bloggers are using their websites to attract traffic, who they are advertising for and are affiliated with as well as the kind of content they are actually producing.

Pull a list together of some of the best ranking sex blogs in your target area. Spend some time browsing through their sites and make notes, paying particular attention to things like:

• Domain names
• Site layout and design
• Social media presence
• Type of content
• Regularity of content updates

It also pays to check out how individual sites are performing in terms of traffic figures. You can use free tools from sites like SimilarWeb and Alexa to give you some simple metrics about how many ‘hits’ (or, visitors) that a site receives.

Whilst you’re checking out these sites, look at the advertising banners and links they are using to send readers to other websites. This is where the money comes from so find out what they are promoting and check out the details of these affiliate programs. You can usually find details in the target site’s footer information. Look for links for ‘Affiliates‘ and ‘Website Owners’.

Some companies pay you simply for leads (or, click-throughs) whilst others will only shell out if your visitors actually convert to paying customers. If that’s the case then you’re going to need to a little bit of sales patter in your content to help that process along.

Again, we’ll cover more about affiliate marketing and how to make money from your sex blog a bit later on.

For now, just hold on to this research and finish reading the rest of our guide. Once you reach the end, all of your notes should help you order your thoughts enough to be able to decide which direction to head in.

How to Start a Sex Blog (Step by Step Guide)

Armed with your research, what do you need to do next?

Pick a Domain Name

Right off the bat, unless you have six figures to spend, you won’t be able to get yourself something as prestigious as www.sex.com!

But that doesn’t mean to say that you can’t pick up a clever and memorable domain name for your sex blog.

And that’s the key. You need a domain name which is easy to remember and tells people something about the kind of site you are running.

Domain names can be pretty cheap and you don’t have to spend tons of money in registering a .com as most web hosting providers will give you a free one.

If your hosting company doesn’t give you a free domain name then you’ll end up with something a bit more long-winded like user123.sextoyreviews.blogcompany.com

Not a total disaster but far less punchy and memorable than simply sextoyreviews.com

Of course, most of the best names have already been taken but that’s where you need to get creative and add a little extra detail. For instance, a quick check on name.com reveals that, whilst sextoyreviews.com is taken, the following variations are available:

• naughtysextoyreviews.com
• kinkysextoyreviews.com
• justsextoyreviews.com
• saucysextoyreviews.com

Or you could just use your pen name (more on this below) as a starter and, lo and behold, mikessextoyreviews.com is also available.

So, just think outside the box and you will find yourself a good domain name.

We should point out though that choosing something as specific as kinkysextoyreviews.com really limits what your blog is about. On the other hand, if you want to position yourself as an industry expert in a niche area then the more specific your domain name then the more authority it gives you.

Warning: Don’t register that domain name until you’ve finished reading this guide as you might change your mind on the direction you want to head in.

Choose a Hosting Company

If you are publishing any kind of sex blog then you might want to consider a hosting company who is adult-friendly.

It depends on the kind of content you are intending to publish and the type of companies and products you will be advertising but some web hosting service don’t permit adult content on their servers. The risk you run is them withdrawing their services and suspending your domain.

Hosting with a company that supports sex blogs is easy, and you can start by checking out list of the best adult web hosts.

For a start-up blogger we would suggest choosing a provider who offers a simple and easy content management system (CMS) like WordPress.

The beauty of using WordPress to publish your sex blog is that you don’t need a great deal of technical know-how and there are tons of templates (known as themes) and widgets (little add-ons and tools) to help you get your site looking good with plenty of functionality.

Most templates come with extensive help files and there are plenty of video walkthroughs to help you build your site.

Also, WordPress is open-source software which means you can get plenty of cheap support to help you if things go wrong.

So, just pick a theme (a lot of them are free) and follow the wizard to get started! The best part of WordPress is that even once you’ve started publishing content you can always go back and change the theme.

Decide on a Pen Name

Before you start creating content (see below), you need to decide whether you are going to use your own name or whether you’ll be writing under a pen name.

Most people opt for the latter to give themselves some privacy but it really depends on whether you plan to use your sex blog as a vehicle for something else. Perhaps you are already an established expert in relationship coaching or you have built a following on Twitter for your candid opinions on legalizing sex work.

If so, then maintaining some continuity is important if you want to bring some instant traffic to your blog.

But, if you’re coming at this fresh then, you’ll want to think about what pen name to use.

Just like with a domain name, having something catchy or appropriate to your blog does work well. For instance, a fetish and kink review site might work better if it were penned by Mistress Rocks than by Susie Sunshine!

It’s also best to personalize your content and write in the first-person rather that just use a generic moniker like ‘Admin’ or ‘Staff’.

Set Up Google Analytics

In order to see how many people are reading your blog then you’ll need to tap into some form of analytical software and Google Analytics is free.

Google has are some great video walkthroughs on how to get this all set-up and its pretty straightforward if you have a basic knowledge of tech.

What Google Analytics gives you is some really useful information about which pieces of content on your site are attracting the most visitors and who these people are.

Yeah, this software tells you the age, sex and location of your traffic and can even determine the behavior they exhibit when they reach your content. Do they click through to one of your affiliates or stay on the site to browse for longer? Are they staying for a few seconds or ‘bouncing’ away from your site?

It’s powerful information than can really help you hone the type of content you publish and learn from what works well and what doesn’t.

Start Blogging

With the site up and ready, all you need is some content to start bringing visitors in.

What you write for your sex blog is totally up to you but if you are trying to make money then you are going to want to be looking to publish content which either:

• Complements the brands and companies you are advertising and/or
• Showcases the brands and companies you are affiliated with.

What’s the difference?

If you don’t want to be recommending products then banners are a useful and non-committal way to use your sex blog as a simple advertising vehicle. Your content will stand alone without having any embedded links or recommendations to other sites. But, if visitors to your site like the look of a banner and click on it then they will be redirected to another site which can potentially earn you money.

Banner advertising is a simple and pretty passive way for your site to be making you some money.

On the other hand, some affiliate advertising will require to do a little more. If you are using hyperlinks within your content to direct visitors to your affiliate’s website then you’ll need to send them off with a good feeling about the products, services and site that they’ll be visiting.

This means producing content that has an appropriate link to the affiliate and in which you are offering some kind of promotion, praise or recommendation.

For instance, let’s say that you have signed up to an affiliate program for Fleshlight (a male masturbation sex toy).

To promote this product, you could do a simple review and include links within this. Easy, right? But that’s just one piece of content.

To get more mileage from your blog and to maximize the opportunities for visitors to use these links you could produce other reviews of similar products and compare them to the Fleshlight. If you include links to your affiliate program within each of these reviews then you are increasing the number of ways that traffic to your site can reach your target.

More opportunities to funnel business to your affiliates = greater potential to earn money.

Writing Content For Your Sex Blog

Let’s get back to the nuts and bolts of blogging.

Honesty Builds Trust

Okay, so you want to monetize your site but that doesn’t mean to say that every piece of content you publish has to be a sales document promoting your affiliates.

Far from it!

It’s actually really important in the blogging world to create a relationship with your audience that is based on trust. And the best way to do this is to be honest.

Let’s take the sex toy review blog as an example.

Even the least cynical visitor to your site isn’t going to be blindsided by your reviews of the AMAZING Fleshlight if you aren’t being honest.

Don’t treat people like fools, they’ll see right through you.

Give a balanced review of the product and include some of the negatives whilst (of course) making sure you cover the best features.

Our analogy works for a sex toy review blog but you get the picture, right? Whatever you are blogging about has to have integrity.

Create a Diverse Range of Content

Whilst you may be using your blog as a vehicle to make money and promote certain products that doesn’t mean to say that you can’t write about other things.

Of course, we don’t expect you to start publishing posts about bird-watching or couponing but just because you make money from a single affiliate doesn’t mean to say that you can’t cover the same subject from a different angle.

Let’s say that you are making good money from one VR porn site. Well, there is only so many reviews you can publish to give this platform an airing. Isn’t there?

Wrong.

You could include this site in plenty of different ways, all of which will target a different kind of audience and, ultimately, widening your potential reach to new traffic.

How about a review of technology in the porn industry or a history of VR itself? You could do direct comparisons between your affiliate’s product and other similar platforms. What about a review of the VR headsets and the summing this up with recommendations of where to find the best content?

Do we need to go on? Just don’t feel limited to a single format when you are trying to creating new content.

And it pays not to put all of your eggs in one basket too. Whilst one affiliate might be working out well for you now, you need to have a fallback and look at multiple streams of income.

So, diversify your content as much as possible whilst staying true to the core of your blog.

Don’t Compromise on Quality Content

With the last comments in mind, you should never let your goal of making money from your blog get in the way of delivering great content.

Though you might see some initial rewards in churning out low quality material with little value or relevance, this is not the way to create a sustainable business model.

Poor quality content won’t rank highly in search engines, it won’t be bookmarked by audiences and it won’t earn valuable backlinks from high ranking sites. Without all of this, your blog will eventually fade away.

Making good money and publishing great content are not incompatible goals; the trick is to give them the same importance as without one you don’t have the other.

Make It Visually Exciting

Some people are avid readers and pages of text are a breeze to read through but for most people endless pages filled with just words can be daunting.

Research suggests that adding images to your content will make it far more appealing so try and litter your articles with plenty of visual treats.

We like to use a ratio of at least one image per 300 words but your results may vary. Again, analytics is a great way to keep tabs on what’s working and what isn’t so experiment with this number and see how adding more (or less) affects your traffic.

Be Comprehensive But Be Concise

Sounds like a total contradiction but what we mean by this is that you should be aiming for each blog post to be long enough to cover everything you need it to cover but short enough so that you aren’t repeating yourself or waffling.

There really isn’t a ‘perfect’ length for an article but we’d suggest at least 1,000 words and no more than 10,000.

Optimizing for Search Engines

You’ve probably heard of SEO and if you haven’t then you are going to need to bone up on it.

Quite simply. all content on the internet is found through a search engine, right?

And in order for that search engine to find your content in the first place you need to have written it so that it is relevant for your target audience and what they are searching for.

The way this all works is through a complicated program of algorithms which changes all the times but in essence your content needs to have a few ingredients, including:

• Good (but sparing) use of relevant keywords
• Links to appropriate websites
• Include images and videos

There’s tons of advice on the web about how to hone your content for the best SEO and we’d recommend doing some research of your own and to stay up to date.

The bottom line though is that if you want your sex blog to get found online then you’ll need to make sure your content is written well.

Oh, and this doesn’t mean ‘stuffing’ your articles with keywords or writing content which only makes sense to robots.

Our key piece of advice is to be comprehensive, authoritative and relevant.

Encourage Click Throughs

If you are using affiliate marketing to make money then you’ll only get paid when visitors use the links on your blog to visit the target site.

This means you need to encourage people to click them!

How do you do that?

Ask them.

It really is that simple.

Instead of embedding links discreetly within your content, use sentences that call your readers to action.

Instead of sticking a hyperlink into the word ‘Fleshlight’ or ‘male sex toys’ in the hope that visitors click on it, try using a simple statement like ‘If you want to experience the best solo sex of your life then check out Fleshlight here’.

Add a link or button so there is no doubt about what you want people to do next. You’d be surprised by how effective being bold is.

Branding Yourself as a Sex Blogger

As well as utilizing good SEO housekeeping to help you generate traffic to your sex blog, you can also do a lot of self-promotion and marketing.

One of the best ways to do this is by branding yourself as an expert in your field as Sex Blogger Extraordinaire!

Harnessing the power of social media can really boost traffic to your site and is easy enough to do. The fact remains that influencers are the powerhouses of marketing in the modern age and if you want to boost your sex blog to the next level you should consider positioning yourself as one.

Creating separate accounts for yourself on sites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook so you can post relevant links and snippets of your latest content can create engagement and generate new traffic.

Just be warned that most social media platforms won’t allow you to post explicit content.

Just remember what we said at the outset; there are dozens of successful sex bloggers out there who now regularly contribute to mainstream public speaking. Fancy becoming a celebrity of your field? It could happen.

Promoting Your Sex Blog

Other ways to promote your sex blog include:

• Email Marketing: You can build a list using a simple newsletter sign-up widget on WordPress and you’ll have an instant database of interested people you can send out emails to.
• Guest Blogging: Harnessing the power of other people’s popularity is a great way to get your name out there and to promote your own blog. Do a little research and find suitable sites in a similar niche and offer to write a guest post for them. Most bloggers will be happy to do a little quid pro quo and if you offer to give them the same in return then you can both get some extra exposure.
• Adult Forums: There are millions of forums online and plenty of these are sex-related. They are a quick and easy way to get yourself in front of an audience and promote your blog. However, there are ways to do this and simply ‘bombing’ a group with links is not the done thing. Find some of the bigger and better ones and join up as a member. If you contribute a bit and become part of the community then your links will be taken more seriously. It definitely pays to be patient and play a long game with this option.
• Build a Community: One of the best ways to get your blog promoted is to get other people to do it for you. By building a community around your site via the use of comments, a forum or just through social media you’ll find that your regular members will be doing some of the legwork for you.

Making Money From a Sex Blog

We’ve already touched on some of the ways in which you can make money from your sex blog but now let’s get down to some of the detail.

As we mentioned already, the main way for you to earn money from your sex blog is through ad networks or affiliate marketing. The latter is the most common and this could be through advertising banners or using direct links within your content.

There is also a third way which is through sponsored posts which we’ll cover below.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a program you have to sign up for with a specific company who will pay you for sending traffic to their site; often, only if they make a sale from that customer.

The terms of agreements are all different depending on the company with some programs offering a single fixed commission for that first sale whilst others might give you a percentage of the revenue which that customer generates for life.

Some programs also just pay for traffic itself and don’t rely on any sales being generated. These are pretty rare these days but you can still find a couple on occasion.

Finding an affiliate program to sign up to is down to you and your own research and you may well find that you end up signing with dozens, even hundreds, or different companies. It depends very much on the blog you are writing and just how many products you can realistically be recommending or promoting.

We’ve found that there is some benefit in playing a long game with affiliate marketing.

Let’s take that sex toy review site as an example again.

So, let’s say you review two new products a week. That’s more than a hundred different sex toys a year and getting paid for traffic on all of these might mean signing up with thirty different programs!

If you wait until your posts are starting to generate traffic then you’ll see pretty quickly which ones are proving to be more popular and those that aren’t.

This gives you some idea of how appealing a product actually is before committing to becoming an affiliate for them. You might find that, of your 100+ reviews, just a dozen of them account for 80% of your traffic. In which case, it makes obvious sense to be signing up with those affiliate programs.

Ad Networks

Ad networks offer a range of different companies to promote but work in a similar way to affiliate marketing. You get paid when you send them some business.

There are some adult friendly adult networks out there which will let you use custom banners to put on your site.

Once you sign up to their program you can pick and choose which ads you want to use and add these to WordPress using simple widgets.

Each banner is embedded with your unique referral code which means that when a person clicks through to the target site you will get paid for any purchase they make.

Sponsored Posts

This last option is only possible once you have established your sex blog with plenty of traffic.

Popular bloggers who have a good amount of visitors can command some pretty nice sums from companies by publishing a promotional piece for them.

You can tout for this kind of business directly or you might be lucky enough to be approached directly. Whichever it is, you just need to ‘fess up to your audience that you are being paid to do so.

You could get in trouble if you don’t plus (more importantly) you can lose that all important trust.

Top Tips for Running a Successful Sex Blog

And finally, we wanted to give you some extra tips on how make your sex blog a success:

• Be Patient: Rome wasn’t built in a day and it can take several months before you start to see the fruits of your labor. For a start, Google takes 4-6 weeks to even find your new website so don’t expect to start ranking the moment you press ‘Publish’.
• Try New Things: There isn’t a cookie cutter way to blog and what works well for some people and in some markets just doesn’t work for others. In this game, you need to be able to Adapt and Adjust so be prepared to tweak your content and monitor what happens.
• Keep Learning: Blogging, SEO and affiliate marketing are all specialist areas with ever-changing trends that you need to keep up to speed with. Join some online groups for each of these areas and try to set aside sometime to learn more about all three fields.
• Be Professional: We don’t mean you need to use a business-like tone in your blogging but if you want to make good money doing this then you’ll need to treat what you do with some professionalism. Keep records or your income and expenses and remember to register for taxes.
• Be Consistent: If you’ve ever followed a blog before then you’ll know how annoying it can be when the content just dries up for months at a time. When you spend so much effort and time to build an audience you need to maintain this momentum by posting regularly. It’s easier to stick to this if you set achievable goals from the off. So, instead of rushing in with a post a day, spread this out to one a week. This way you have some back-up posts to publish if you want to take some time off.

Decision Time: A Quick Re-Cap

So, there you have it, a full and detailed guide on setting up a sex blog and how to make money from it.

We’ve given you plenty of information so let’s have a quick re-cap of what to do next:

• Get some research done.
• Register a suitable, catchy and memorable domain name.
• Sign up for web hosting with an adult-friendly company who offer WordPress as a CMS.
• Set up your Google Analytics account.
• Pick a pen name for yourself and start writing.
• Start promoting your blog.
• Partner up with suitable affiliates.
• Register with some blogging, SEO and affiliate marketing groups.

And that’s all there is to it.

We look forward to seeing you out there; good luck!