TastyTrixie.com

Over the weekend (on May Day) the members area of my site (TastyTrixie.com/members) turned eight years old!

Here are some pictures from this year’s and last year’s May Day galleries:

Wearing a white corset outside: May Day 2010

I *loved* these pictures last year; they made me fall in love with myself (an important state of mind to be in for a webwhore):

It's like magic! And cleavage! And whirling!

My freckled shoulders, curly hair and big natural boobies!

This year’s set wasn’t so good, but it was all worth it to get charming shots like this favorite of mine:

Spreading May Day cheer!

So after eight years you might wonder how the indie porn site business is holding up, and the answer is NOT SO GREAT! I’m still optimistic though because there are so many things I know I could do (or do better or do more often) to boost business.

The only “problem” is I’m becoming more realistic after all these years and recognize I can’t do it all and maybe it’s not really possible for us to do more! better! and more often! It even got to the point where I seriously considered focusing solely on promoting and shooting for DeliaTS.com and putting updates and promotion for all of our other sites, including TastyTrixie.com, on hiatus. We are trying to do the jobs of too many people.

The past few weeks I’ve shifted my approach to work a little bit by

1) using to-do list software (both Swift To-Do List and Daily To-Do List). It’s helping me prioritize and sort my ideas and tasks.

2) making a 40 hour work week a goal / forcing ourselves to take days off like normal people expect to do with good jobs.

I use a timer with a stopwatch to keep track of when I’m working. In the notes section of Daily To-Do List I keep track of the hours I’ve worked and what I’ve accomplished. Yes, it’s very wage-slavey, but it’s more manageable (and more rewarding) than feeling like WORK IS NEVER EVER DONE! BITCH, KEEP WORKING KEEP WORKING TEN TWELVE FOURTEEN HOURS A DAY YOU KNOW YOU CAN’T REST BECAUSE THERE’S JUST SO MUCH!!!

I am beginning to accept that if we can’t succeed by working a humane number of hours and allowing ourselves time OFF that IT ISN’T WORTH IT.

And that’s where the fear/knowledge comes in that I am going to have to give up doing some things I’m very attached to because it isn’t realistic to think I can do them all. Spiritually (? or emotionally or psychologically or whatever word you’re comfortable with) this is an important confrontation to have with myself and reality. I suspect there might be a life of bliss (with lots of time spent checking out books at the library and reading in the grass) awaiting me on the other side of this confrontation but I’m still balking at it and refusing to let go.

I wonder if it’s normal to take a decade to resolve this conflict between what you WANT to do and what you CAN do and still be healthy. Ten years sounds like a long time, but I think it might be about right. I figure I still have two or three years before life finally batters me into submission so for now my site is not on hiatus. Who knows? Maybe my timer-and-to-do-list-software scheme will actually make me more productive because I’m not so psyched out and overwhelmed trying to do everything all the time.

One thing I did let go of is driving myself crazy trying to be RELIABLE at posting a new picture gallery or porno video every week in my members-only area. Instead I’m focusing on posting more frequently (multiple times a week) in my new members-only blog with more uniquely personal and candid stuff like vlogs, webcam snaps, behind the scenes stuff, fantasies and other intimate thoughts I don’t want to post in the open here in my free blog, etc. Things got interrupted a bit with the dog dying and some other stuff we have going on (that I may or may not blog about here, but you can hear all about in my vlogs) but after a couple of months of doing things this way I believe it will take off and be more addictive/unique for members.

Obviously I will still do the regular porn stuff of high res photo galleries and videos but I am releasing myself from the pressure of thinking “reliable” is more important than “personal”. Because in the long run I’ve NEVER read a testimonial like, “I’m very aroused by the way Trixie is so RELIABLE.” I have, however, been told a number of times that people would maintain their membership even if all they got was the blog (and/or the spycams).

I pretty much think my “porn” is virtually worthless without the personality, especially with so much competition online, so that is what I’m going to make top priority on my site and the feeling of it being alive with more frequency and easily-digested candid content (albeit with *possibly* a *little* less standard porn site fare POSSIBLY . . . we’ll see how it plays out — I think it will wind up being the same quantity in that department once I get on a roll). The people who love me and my site tend to gravitate towards the bloggier, vloggier, twittier, webcammier, embarrassing confessions, taboo weirdness and daily details stuff (along with panties panties UPSKIRTS and panties!).

Over the years it’s started to feel like I had to make porn to meet porn industry standards — to be digestible in a standardized (though less consistently hardcore) way — so that porn site reviewers and other people promoting our sites would be able to sell my site. It has gotten to the point where we shoot HUGE galleries of a zillion photos less because we think that’s what our members want or because it’s more valuable that way, but because we need to have more promo material and because that’s how people assess the value of porn sites: how many pics are in your galleries? How HUGE are the pictures? How many formats do your videos come in? How often do you add another HUGE photo gallery? It’s pretty fucking boring and totally ignores the CONTENT of the content. And what is the point anyway when all of those things are the easiest to steal? I want to focus on the stuff people can’t steal or is less desirable to the people who steal content. I’m sick of feeling like we’re shooting things to make webmasters happy instead of ourselves and our members who really dig us (fortunately there are some webmasters who dig me/get me as is).

Sometimes I look at the stuff I did back in 2001 when I didn’t have a clue what a porn website was “supposed” to look like or offer, and I miss it/love it/want to do it that way again (but better and less stupid in some aspects). I can’t find the earlier version of this that talked about wanting my site to be like the magazines you’d stuff under your mattress, but I want to get back to that. Here’s one old version though (which of course I would change in some ways, but want to revive the spirit of in other ways):

One of my first attempts at a members-only area

I do not, however, want to repeat some of my earlier horrifying uber-cheesy design mistakes like this one from 2001:

I was *so* proud of my red licorice design!

What can I say? It was the turn of the century! And they didn’t even let our screen names be long enough for me to spell my name correctly! Aahh, those were the days . . . and all these years later the porn industry STILL doesn’t “get” camgirls which is how they’ve managed to destroy that platform for us as a way of making really good money and connections. Yeah, I’m getting off track and onto that bitter old webwhore lament . . .

Anyway, the point is that I want to pull some of the purity of my old personality porn into 2010 and approach working in a realistic way that’s personally rewarding. I’m not sure if it’s possible, though, considering how much time I have to sink into promotion and the technical aspects of maintaining our sites and cams, etc. Just as one three example(s): there is nothing pornographically fun or personally rewarding about spending hours dealing with Blogger pulling the rug out from under those of us who FTP our blogs or with searching high and low for my router password so I can modify all of the settings because our cable company decided to fuck with my IP address AGAIN or with getting set up with additional payment processors because one of them is scrubbing so hard you think they’re trying to erase you from their roster of clients. There’s precious little time left over after those kinds of bullshit that I am TOTALLY FUCKING SICK OF. It’s not all sex and games and horny-girl-diary-entries here, it’s a lot of technical minutiae.

I think I blew all of my really-hard-working years (nonstop, no personal time except for ramen and sleep) working for other people and on not knowing what I was doing. I’m almost forty and I’m done with that.

Note: I have a feeling this post might be stupid, but part of being realistic is hitting “publish” without trying to make every fucking thing perfect. Thanks for understanding and putting up with years of me wrestling with these same challenges of self-employment as an internet sex worker and webmaster.

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