Quote Originally Posted by Foxxy
You would have to keep changing the teaser content on a regular basis to give it the look of a live site... and you would have to manually activate and deactivate accounts as people joined/lapsed.
I'm not sure I agree with this, because surfers are used to pay sites having static tour pages. You just make it clear in your sales hyperbole that what you're looking at is your "tour" which they can log in and try out. You're not trying to sell your front end as a live site - and in fact, if you make it too live as I mentioned it might work against you. You might even want to set the "free" membership to a 24/48/72 hour limit, just to make sure the site doesn't get too utilized by the same people.

You're not trying to "fool" people into joining your free site. You set up half a dozen fake members, upload your videos to their accounts, and then just forget about them. It's enough. People WILL watch the videos, doesn't really matter when the last login time of the user was, because you're just using this as your model to show surfers what the experience (Sexperience :)) is like.

So your hyperbole would say "Log in and check out our tour site.... but our REAL site currently has XXX number of videos, users, etc." And I'd even, on many of the "sample videos" descriptions, put a link to your "JOIN NOW" page - not just on your advertisement header.

And as well, you can experiment with forcing the free surfer to give up his email address in order to see Britney Spears give K-fed a hummer (or whatever) and then you have an opt-in mailing list to market your pay site to. Just make sure you say in your terms "By continuing on this site, you agree to receive our monthly/quarterly/whatever mailings." And have a way for them to opt-out.

The final benefit of this is, with a front end like this you have more pages going into the search engines, whereas if your entire site were behind a member's area, the search engines aren't going to index them.