Today is the last day for registration, so please get your registration in! This is one Vegas trip you don’t want to miss.

Highlights from the Business Development track:

Sarah Sloane: Incorporating Kink into your Work

Al: Keeping out of Harm’s Way

William Takahashi: Disabilities and Sex Workers

Panel: Safety for Sex Workers through Personal Privacy (I’m a panelist)

Panel: Building a Safe and Sustainable Business

Allen Lichtenstein: Contracts and What to Look for

Erik Peterson: Personal Finance for Adult Industry Professionals

Sarah Sloane: Burnt and Jaded: When the Passion isn’t Passionate Anymore

Furry Girl: Solo Girl

Danielle dv8 & Vegan Vixen: Phone and Cam sex for Profit or Lights, Web Cam, Action!

Lee Harrington: On their Knees

Meeshee: Clicking with your Photographer

Cathy from Room Service 2000: The Value of Internet Advertising

Doug Bynon: A Tax Workshop for the Cash-Based Professional

Lusty Day: Working it Down Under

Kimberlee Cline: Keeping it Real: Coming Out to your Loved Ones

Panel: Screening

Megan Morgensen: The Value of Sex Work

Serpent Libertine and BeBeDoll: The Ethical Sex Worker

Jean Gray: Energetic Protection and Cleansing for Sex Workers

Roundtable: Your Girlfriend Sucks! For Money!

Baba Dez: Sex Work is Sacred Work

Lee Harrington: How Much an Hour?

Panel: Tricks, Training, and Transitions

Shawn Roop: Sessions that Heal

The rest of the conference includes:
Dr. Joycelyn Elders
Norma Jean Almodovar (personal hero of mine)
Nina Hartley
Dr. Brooke Magnanti (yes, her)
the one and only Robyn Few
Carol Leigh
plenty of other industry luminaries
moi
Vegas Vegas Vegas
the most amazing people you’ll meet having the time of their lives
lots of love, support, acceptance

Join me in Vegas in two weeks!

Due to my travels, I’ve looked into getting free advertising as much as possible. It’s very expensive to constantly pay for ads in changing locations, not to mention all the payment headaches. The number of online advertisers has exploded (especially overseas), so there are many options – even when I try to narrow my choices to what I think will be the best for me.

Because these are free ads, advertisers also want me to link back to them and the home page has become the popular spot. Advertisers have become overly aware of SEO and want huge text links with every keyword they can think of. It junks up my site, making it look somewhat spammy to Google too — which could decrease my site’s PageRank. (Advertising on an online mall is not about SEO for the escort, it’s simply about getting seen by clients.) I understand that advertisers need to be competitive by working on their PageRank and such.

But I think it’s gone to extremes. Even very minor sites think they should get 20 keyword-heavy text links leading from the front page of my site. If I’m not getting a front page spot on their site with lots of text/pictures, how is this a fair trade? If I’m lucky, I get a photo somewhere on their site. Or maybe just a text link, buried in their pages. That’s not worth junking up my homepage for.

Paid ads sometimes requires this as well, but it’s not as bad as with free ads. No one says you must use free ads (or any ads at all), but sometimes an escort has little advertising choice due to her location or budget. A number of escorts don’t even use advertisers and have a successful business (discussion of various non-advertising-mall methods throughout Book 2: Advertising and Marketing).

My Escort Site’s Advertising Policy

My advertiser policy: If you want your link here, you must have a very well-established, high-traffic site. Your link must be a badge. If you want your link here and you’re not a major site, then my ad should be on your index page just as your badge is here. Otherwise, all advertiser links go where they belong: on my Directories and Boards page.

All escorts are welcome to start using this policy (reword as needed).

Who knows how well this policy will work? I don’t think it’s any more arbitrary than the policies advertisers often have for their free ads.

Badges can still have keywords in their alt and title tags if the advertisers want. And images won’t mess up the design of your site like their heavily-coded banners often do (another new, irritating trend with advertisers). On a personal note, I think badges just look more attractive.

The Goals of Advertising Malls

Advertisers seem to forget that SEO and attracting new advertisers are two different things. To broadly summarize the cycle of attracting new advertisers — girls always use other escort sites as research tools looking for good places to advertise, photograher references and so on. Escorts will go to sites that seem good or are used by other escorts they like. More escorts advertising will draw clients. If the site charges for advertising, it will draw more revenue with more escorts. And if the escorts are successful with the site, the site grows even more. (Advertisers should realize a good banner will likely draw more escort-attention than lots of text like “London escorts”.)

Escorts also use sites that come up in Google searches for particular terms. The escorts are trying to mimic what potential clients will search for. This is where the SEO efforts of advertisers pay off. But there is more to SEO than forcing every advertiser to have frontpage links using the same keywords. I’ve seen sites pop up in the top 5 of my Google searches that I don’t want to advertise on because they seemed scammy or didn’t seem to have any real advertisers on there. I much prefer a site that’s established and has lots of real, established escorts advertising there. High PageRank isn’t the be-all, end-all of advertising malls. They have to benefit clients and escorts fairly equally to be truly successful (or at least appear to benefit both parties).

Their Traffic to YOU

Of course, your most important consideration is the Web traffic and successful appointments an advertiser brings you. Even the nicest site is worthless if it brings 1 hit/month. Checking Web stats or simply asking where a client found you tells you all you need to know. And when it’s not those sites lounging on your front page, well, there’s not much reason to keep them around.

Which makes one of the most successful, (formerly free) advertising options of all – CraigsList – even a better deal for those girls who use it.

One escort I saw online described herself as a “top chef” escort. From the context of her sentence, she wasn’t referring to her culinary abilities; instead she was comparing herself to a slightly more expensive margarita: top shelf.

I imagine her mistake came about because she drank a lot of margaritas and never clearly understood what the bartender was saying when she ordered one.

Some simple guidelines to avoid this:

1. Proofread. If you never paid attention in school, find a friend who did and get them to proofread for you.
2. Don’t compare yourself to food, cars, clothes, shoes, diamonds or any other inanimate object. I’d also refrain from comparing yourself to the elements. Animals and plants are iffy — they’re living creatures and many humans have similar qualities. That doesn’t always mean it needs to be in your ad, though.
3. Drop the superlatives. Writing a straightforward ad about who you are as an escort is really the easiest way to go. It’s hard to mess it up (if you proofread).

The Hard Sell

There is a lot more discussion on writing your ads (and website content) in Book 2: Advertising and Marketing

In Book 1 I outline several methods of dealing with your period while working. I hadn’t tried them all when I wrote that section. Since then, I have. I’ve been off birth control pills for the past year and my periods have resumed their normal, very-heavy tendencies. Besides not working on my heavy days, I’ve tried some different methods. I have to. As always, being on my period guarantees lots of appointment-requests. I still haven’t figured out why that happens.

Obviously this post is for those who aren’t taking birth control that completely stops menstruation.

Instead Cups

I still love my Instead Cups. The offer the best options. For light days, they’re perfect on their own. On heavy days I still put something absorbent inside the cup before inserting them. A low-to-medium absorbency tampon can work, or a small, natural sea sponge. It’s very important to remember you’re using backup and make sure you remove it when you remove the cup. Leaving it inside will cause an infection.

If you’re having sex with someone well-endowed, they could cause the cup to leak, with or without the absorbent materials inside. Not much you can do about that. Know your body, know your clients and try to work around your period if you and/or your clients really don’t want leakage. I discuss using the cups a bit more in Book 1.

Natural Sea Sponges

The have been used as tampons for a very long time. You can buy pre-sized ones online. Or you can try to find reasonably-sized and priced sponges in a store, usually a “healthy” or “green” store or the makeup section of a many other stores. Depending on where you live, it might just be easier to purchase them online.

These are very good instructions for cleaning your sponge. After washing my hands, I rinsed the sea sponge with very warm water, cleaned with dish soap, rinsed and rinsed, soaked it overnight in pure white vinegar, rinsed some more and then microwaved it on a clean plate for 3-4 minutes. It needed to be almost bone-dry but not burning!

Advice from experience: do not microwave dry sponges. They will burn up, turn black and stink very badly. I killed my favorite sponge this way.

If you aren’t going to use your sea sponge right away, put in in a clean sealed container. A plastic baggie or glass jar works. When you’re ready to use it, wash your hands, rinse the sponge thoroughly and microwave on a clean plate again. That first cleaning to make sure you’re killing any leftover bacteria from the sea. This cleaning might seem obsessive to you, but I don’t think anything you put inside your body can be too clean.

Even if you plan on using it with an Instead Cup, it’s a good idea to sew a thread or piece of plastic dental tape (a type of floss) through the middle of it while it’s still dry. Make sure your needle is sterilized with alcohol and just make a simple loop. It’s good if it’s a big loop. Knot the end well and cut any excess. Now you have something your fingers can grab if it goes a bit beyond your reach.

To use, first rinse it under warm/body temperature tap water until it swells and is completely soft again. Squeeze out the excess water. It should still be soft and fluffy. Fold it up so it resembles a tampon, maybe put some KY Jelly on the end to make it easier, and gently push it in. It’s like putting in a tampon with your fingers, but I find sea sponges to be much softer and gentler.

The sea sponge is rather absorbent, but if you have sex with just a sea sponge, expect it to get shoved quite far back in your vaginal canal. This makes retrieving it hard to do by yourself because your hand will be bent at a bad angle. If you can find your loop of string and get it wrapped around your finger, you can push down on it and pull out. More effort than a tampon requires but the same concept. Or do what a friend of mine does — “squat and grunt.” It really does work.

I find that sea sponges can get very slippery with blood and are often hard to grasp with your fingers canted at that angle. A trusted friend/partner who doesn’t mind fishing it out for you can make life easier.

Once removed, cut your thread out and throw the thread away because it will harbor bacteria. Rinse the sponge well under cold, cold water until it’s clean. Vinegar-soak, then microwave again, putting it back in its container until next time. If you need to reuse immediately, I highly recommend going through the whole microwave/threading process again. Cold water alone will not kill any germs, nor do you want to give yourself Toxic Shock Syndrome.

Soft Tampons

I’ve been wanting to try these for years. Europe has a couple of brands. I’m not sure why the US doesn’t carry any. Soft tampons are basically an artificial sponge, a lot like the contraceptive sponge from several years ago. Some of these sponges have a built-in loop to grab, others have a built-in finger-hole.

They’re simliar to sea sponges, minus all the maintenance. I recently bought and used my first soft tampons and love them.

The Beppy Wet tampon comes pre-moistened with sterile saline solution (the liquid that contact lens wearers store their lenses in). If you buy dry sponges you have to get them wet with water. I think it’s easier to just buy the wet ones. They’re a little rough and not as soft as a sea sponge but they still glide in easier than a tampon. They’re quite large – you fold them up, add a dab of KY Jelly to the end and push in. Done.

Because of their slightly rough surface, they’re easier for your fingers to grab when you’re ready to remove. The finger-hole helps a lot too. They don’t become as slippery as sea sponges either. Because of their size and springiness, it’s hard for them to get stuck so far in you that you can’t feel them and wiggle them down with your fingers. The only downside to their texture is that squatting and grunting doesn’t work very well because they’re not as slippery as sea sponges – they grip your vaginal walls better.

They don’t absorb blood so much as block your cervix and prevent blood from coming out. Flat, round, latex makeup sponges have the same effect. So when you remove a soft tampon, expect some amount of mess. Not as much as an Instead Cup, but more than an absorbent sea sponge.

Toss in the garbage and do whatever else you need to do.

FYI, they aren’t “green.”

Decisions

It’s your body and you know how it works best. I can’t make any choices for you, nor do I want to. Please experiment safely. During your period your cervix is open and bacteria can easily enter your uterus (which is a sterile environment), potentially causing a life-threatening infection. Don’t be casual about what you do to your body.

If you discover a new method that works well, tell me! Post it on your blog and I’ll add a link here. Women always want to know how to have sex on their periods, not just escorts.

Just in time, SWOP-Chicago has released two videos for all sex workers who face the possibility of arrest on prostitution charges. It’s an excellent resource for all. I highly encourage anyone reading this blog to view the videos and learn.

Know Your Rights Part I covers arrest — what to do and what not to do. Basically, you stand a much better chance of events turning in your favor if you stay silent.

Know Your Rights Part II covers what happens after an arrest and spends significant time on walking you through your Emergency Response Worksheet step-by-step.

These videos are valuable resources compiled not only by the actual collective experience of SWOP-Chicago, but anchored by their legal consultations as well. No rumors or urban legend allowed. Straight up, practical lessons on handling the event in the best possible way. Repeat viewings are encouraged.