I’ve just put up a survey for SilkSoles.com members (and ex-members, if you are reading this!) here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JVPN8C8
If you have a few minutes to fill it in, it would be very much appreciated. This blog post explains why.
Art And Business
I’m lucky enough to be making a living doing what I love- photographic art featuring beautiful women, barefoot (for SilkSoles.com) or barefoot and in bondage (for RestrainedElegance.com). Most of the time, the business and artistic sides bump along quite happily.
I’m just about a good enough artist to make stuff which people want to buy. I suck at promotion and sales and I’m no good at chasing the market- I only shoot stuff that means something to me, stuff that I want to see, stuff that I’d be buying and collecting if someone else was shooting it.
If enough people like it and buy it, I can keep doing it.
Restrained Elegance is down from its pre-banking-crash highs, but is generating enough profit for me to pay my share of the mortgage, eat and have a bit of cash to invest in new projects.
Silk Soles is breaking even. That’s not too bad considering that I launched it at about the worst time for erotic websites since there was such a thing as a website at all. The membership fees you are kind enough to pay are covering the cost of models to shoot for the site and a bit towards the web hosting costs.
I love shooting for Silk Soles. But with the threat of censorship hitting RE, I’ve got to look at ways to spread my risk a bit in case the hammer falls and I suddenly have to find other ways to pay the bills. It takes me about 40 hours a month, roughly, to run Silk Soles. The question is whether I can afford to keep doing that on a project which is not paying me a penny. It’s quite a lot of work for a part-time job generating zero income, if I’m honest. Maybe I should be looking at putting that time into landscape photography or commercial film making or something.
It’s annoying, because if we do get censored, Silk Soles is pretty safe. It’s so cheery and upbeat that there’s nothing for the censor to object to. But right now it isn’t actually a business, just an unpaid hobby.
One of the people who has already kindly responded to the survey asked why Ariel is in 50% of the sets for Silk Soles. Two reasons:
- She’s my wife and my creative partner. She has lots of ideas and we run the site together and we love shooting together. So naturally enough we like shooting Silk Soles ideas together.
- Money I pay her for modelling and editing videos for Silk Soles still goes to pay our mortgage, whereas money paid to external contractors (other models) is gone from our household.
SilkSoles can’t afford to hire external models for a higher percentage of the sets right now.
What Can We Do About This
If I was a contestant on The Apprentice, I’d already have been fired for persevering with something that’s not making any profit. Maybe I just have to accept that the market for the sort of elegant barefoot photos and videos I like to see isn’t big enough for me to make a profit. (I’m sure other people- better salespeople- certainly can. I just need to know my limits.)
So one possibility is to stop pretending Silk Soles is a business. The dividing line for me is a regular update schedule. If I no longer deliver regular updates, stop selling recurring subscriptions, keep the site up as an archive and add new sets when the whim to shoot happened it would be significantly less pressure, and the sets we shoot would probably end up smaller in number but higher in inspiration. That’s quite appealing.
But I’d like to explore other options first.
The most obvious is to find more members. If we could find an extra 30 people a month, it would pay me minimum wage- not great, but clearly more sustainable. I’m going to have a go, but I know I’m not very good at the promotion parts especially.
The purpose of the questionnaire was to see if there were other possibilities.
On the basis of the replies so far (thank you!) I can draw a few tentative conclusions.
- Most people who replied think the site meets their needs extremely well or very well. That’s nice- at least people aren’t joining and thinking “what is this shit?” and leaving disappointed.
- Nearly everyone likes stills and videos both. Only one person so far prefers stills. This is very interesting, but shuts off one possibility I was thinking of. Videos are MUCH more time and labour intensive to shoot, edit and produce and are therefore more expensive too. If most people had preferred the stills, I could have backed down the number of video updates. It doesn’t look like that’s going to fly.
- A couple of people would like more explicit nudity, but it’s not the majority, and some people prefer clothed stuff. That’s good- I’m not particularly good at shooting more hardcore material.
- The level of foot closeups is at least approximately OK. (One person wanted more, one person wanted less). Not a major complaint, by the looks of it.
- Everyone thinks Silk Soles is good value for money. Bizarrely, that means I should put the prices up. I’m underselling. It won’t affect current members- so now is a good time to sign up for a recurring subscription! We’ll see what it does to sales but it looks like especially the one-month non-recurring prices need to go up.
- The site usability seems to be OK, with most people finding what they want easily. Ditto they are happy with the visual appeal.
What To Do?
So what to do? Price rise, publicity push, bit more variety of models and storylines (which was in the plan for the next couple of months’ shoots anyway). Get back up to say six months of material of the site ready to go. See if we can get more people through the door, and see if higher prices on the non-recurring membership especially can edge us into a decent profit. Review at the end of the year. Sorted.
Many thanks to people for their kind comments and for filling in the survey!
And just to reassure you- whatever happens to Silk Soles I will keep you informed, and you WILL get the updates we’ve promised for the duration of your subscription. They’re already shot and edited at least one month in advance, always.
A couple of odd thoughts from an odd guy who really likes Restrained Elegance but who isn’t ever going to buy a membership in SilkSoles.com:
I wonder how many people you lose because they’re barefoot fans who see “Silk Soles” and think “Oh, another stocking-foot fetish site” and pass on, without even reading the ‘Elegant Barefoot Erotica’ subheading.
I suspect that the lack of variety is an even bigger problem than it might first look. I know I’m constantly beating the drum for more variety on RE, in terms of different types and materials of restraints, different methods and positions, and different models. (But without changing the “elegant barefoot bondage” formula, please…) With the SilkSoles site, I suspect that “different models” bit is critical because the nature of the thing makes it difficult to produce other kinds of variety.
Hi Sablesword,
I guess… mainstream glamour sites and other foot fetish sites seem to get by with even less variety to my eyes than SilkSoles has. They seem to be doing OK. The problem I had when I first ran Silk Soles (over a decade ago- it didn’t really reach escape velocity then either) was too much variety- the foot fetish market was already too segmented, and anything I put up once a month someone else was putting up every update. For the relaunch I decided to concentrate on just two things. 1) Soles of feet and 2) striptease. The formula’s not unvarying, but girls starting off clothed and ending up naked was always what I liked best about photostories in magazines like Mayfair, and seems to be a staple.
But you are right, that does mean the variety of models issue may be critical, and one respondent to the survey flagged it as a concern. (And two others said more of Ariel!)
The name… well, I already had it. Maybe it is putting people off, but there’s another barefoot site called Soles of Silk so I’m not the only one who thought it could have a different connotation. It’s probably too late to do a rebrand and relaunch with a different name now- what brand identity it has, it has as SilkSoles.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts, much appreciated!
Cheers, Hywel.