What's a good balance on Tumblr

[SaphiraCourt]

I've been wanting to start up a tumblr for a while for both promo reasons and to reblog my favorite content that doesn't belong on my vanilla blog.... I finally dove in and still feel super nervous about how to set it all up! So, here's my questions for those of you that use tumblr (or even if you just follow other camgirl blogs on tumblr?)

1- what's a good ratio of promo posts/selfies to reblogging other people's content?
2- should I be using the queue for reblogging other posts? or is it alright to just post a bunch in a row when I'm randomly on tumblr?
3- is it obnoxious to go back and see a bunch of similar promo posts in a row? (for example, if I queue up my promos then reblog at random there may be times where multiple promos get posted in a row before other content gets mixed in)
4- what kind of tagging should I be putting on there to get the most reach and organization?

my main camming blog is: http://queensaphira.tumblr.com/

any advice or feedback would be much appreciated!

 

[CharlieBelle]

Hmmm, well my tumblr is miss-charlie-belle.tumblr.com if you want to see it (excuse my theme that fucks up pics D

I use the queue like my life depends on it honestly. It's great because it gives you the ability to be seen over multiple time spans. For instance if I never queued a lot of my European followers wouldn't see me on their dashboard. But its cool as well to log on, post a bunch of stuff and leave. I like to have my queue going as much as possible tho.

As for ratio of promo to other people's promo stuff it depends on what you do the most in my opinion. For instance I don't have many videos as I haven't really gotten the hang of making good ones yet. So I mostly cam. I'll post a selfie with what I'm wearing everytime I cam. And I try to reblog my ads once a day if not every other day.

I personally think its totally obnoxious for my ads to be repeating in a row on my blog. That's my own opinion tho, I'm sure there are people who don't mind. I prefer to break them up with other peoples' promos and artsy stuff and cute stuff as well as sexually suggestive stuff (no stolen porn GIFs tho I hate that).

As for tagging well only the first five tags show up in searches and such so make em count! I'd browse the tags and see what gets the most traffic. Also make sure to always post yourself in the source part so if assholes delete your captions people will still have a way to find you

Sorry if you know any of this already! Hope your blog does great!

 

[SaphiraCourt]

Thanks for all the advice Charlie! It's also been useful to check out your tumblr. If ya see anything that's buggy on my tumblr just shoot me a message and I can fix it up :3

I'm really bad at being consistent on cam so I was looking for ways to boost content sales.... kinda the opposite of your situation?

So right now I have my queue set to reblog 15 things a day, and I spread it out 5 random posts + 1 promo then another 5 then 1..... which means that each promo will come up every few days since I don't have a ton of them haha. So it sounds like that's gonna be my system still; I'll just reblog things I like at random in between if I happen to be online.

I actually wasn't sure if the 5 tag rule still applied and I didn't realize about the sourcing thing so that's super useful to know!

 

[CharlieBelle]

Thanks for all the advice Charlie! It's also been useful to check out your tumblr. If ya see anything that's buggy on my tumblr just shoot me a message and I can fix it up :3

I'm really bad at being consistent on cam so I was looking for ways to boost content sales.... kinda the opposite of your situation?

So right now I have my queue set to reblog 15 things a day, and I spread it out 5 random posts + 1 promo then another 5 then 1..... which means that each promo will come up every few days since I don't have a ton of them haha. So it sounds like that's gonna be my system still; I'll just reblog things I like at random in between if I happen to be online.

I actually wasn't sure if the 5 tag rule still applied and I didn't realize about the sourcing thing so that's super useful to know!

I'm glad I could help out!

From all the super successful content makers I follow it seems the key is to make as much good quality content as you can. It's cool cus I've seen them film a bunch in a couple days and then post new videos throughout the month. It seems a good way to generate excitement! I know I'm sick and tired of my same five ads I keep reblogging but I confess I'm too lazy to make new content, plus I much prefer interacting on live cam. Of course take my advice with that however you want as I am extremely new!

As for the five tags thing as far as I know it is still in effect? The new search function tho makes it so that you're captions to the videos/gifs are searchable so if you want to tag more stuff there you could!

And awesome glad I could key you in on the source thing! I'm so bad I always forget to source my own stuff haha.

 

[GuiltyLily]

Hello,

I love tumblr and use it all the time. The message system is so frustrating, but otherwise I have found it to be a reliable sage way to post NSFW silly sets I do for fun. I give this advice hoping it helps you feel more prepared to get ready, because no matter how you start I'm sure it will work out great for you!

1. I post 90% or more of photos of myself on my tumblr; guiltylily.tumblr.com. But I also do a lot of fun shoots I post there.

2. I use the queuing if I have multiple sets, or to space promos.

3. Reblogs can be obnoxious, so I like to sprinkle in decent cute selfie. Lately I've been using my tumblr to get feedback on a website I'm helping with.

4. 5 tags is the magic number still as far as I know. I tag myself and any other promo words someone might search

XoXo Lily

 

[kelliver]

Personally, I only use my queue for posting ads because I'm on Tumblr so often that I can supplement my follower's dashboard feed from me with plenty of non-promo content on my own. It'll take some time before you've got a decent "bank" of promos to use, but once you've got enough they'll provide enough diversity by themselves not to be repetitive or monotonous to the people seeing them on their dashboard. A couple new, cute selfies never hurts, though.

Also, XKit is your friend. It's an extremely useful plugin for Tumblr that lets you automatically tag posts and also shuffle your queue, which is super useful. It does oodles of other wonderful things but I won't ramble on about them; the original extension has unfortunately become obsolete but there's a new version of it out that works just as well, if not better than the old one.

Tags are important too for your promos; if you want to have a look at my blog as an example, I tag all of my promo posts with "kellywork" just so that they're all filed in the same place, so to speak. Makes it easier for potential clients to find them on my blog, but it also makes it easier for me to find them when I'm on mobile and I want to peruse my own work tag to queue up posts for the next day.

The thing about tags is, like Charlie said, only the first five count when you're posting them - but everything after the first five will still show up on your blog! You can use the first five for vague, frequently searched items (e.g. indie porn, cam model, alt model, etc.) and then everything after that can be for your own personal use to find later (e.g. myposts, mypromos, etc.). Also, it's important to remember that the Tumblr search feature has changed, so if you were to search "cats", any posts that mention cats will show up, not just posts tagged with cats or tagged with phrases that have "cats" in them. Basically, the caption you add can be just as important as the tags you use.

A little suggestion for anything you post to Tumblr (I really wish I'd known this sooner); you've got to be two steps ahead of the porn blogs out there. Watermark your images, place content titles and sources in photosets (you can look at a couple of mine to see what I mean), and make sure that your blog is listed as the source like Charlie said. People will delete your captions because people are arseholes, and it will suck - if you've got something to point viewers back to your blog or your Twitter, it'll help cushion the blow of potential lost income that deleting captions creates.

Sorry for the total word vomit, hopefully this is helpful for you! Tumblr can be a bit overwhelming sometimes but it can also be an extremely useful platform to advertise on.

 

[CharlieBelle]

Kelliver's advice is super good. I forgot to mention like half of that. Xkit is a godsend honestly Tumblr is hard to deal with without it. All the ads and recommended posts are so irritating.

For instance, I believe tumblr recently messed with the way tags work. Now when you track a tag, say for instance "sex work" you will randomly see stuff like that just thrown into your dash from blogs you don't follow. It can be kind of triggering cus it has the possibility of showing you people who are hateful about the things you follow. So its possible that some people may stop following tags which could limit the usefulness of tagging for visibility. So we'll have to see how it goes down.

Of course tagging to keep track in your blog is still a good idea tho! I use it just like Kelliver said for "filing" things to look up later. Especially since I mostly mobile blog.

 

[kelliver]

Oh! I forgot to add, StatCounter is your new best friend! It's free to use, you just make an account, input the code it gives you, and bam - free tracking on your blog. It's super useful because you can see where you're getting the most traffic and what sites are bringing you the most traffic.

 

[MayaEden]

Oh! I forgot to add, StatCounter is your new best friend! It's free to use, you just make an account, input the code it gives you, and bam - free tracking on your blog. It's super useful because you can see where you're getting the most traffic and what sites are bringing you the most traffic.

Ditto
Plus you can check their IP and ban them if you want, there was a time where I was banning every viewer from a certain country until the script got so big my tumblr wasn't loading anymore haha. Might be useful if you want to ban specific people or harassers. You can google for a "tumblr ip blocking script" or something like that, basically it redirects them to somewhere else (you can choose where, I sent them to tumblr's main page).

Having links to your selfies/content/camsite/clipsite in your description is also helpful. Later on, an FAQ might be useful to put down some info about your camming schedule and to stop all the repetitive questions. I thought no one read the FAQ but I consistently have just a little bit more views on my FAQ page than on my main tumblr page. I've also seen a drastic drop in certain questions after I put them in the FAQ.

Don't worry too much about how much you post. Some people follow a lot of blogs and their dashboard has new posts every second, it's all very subjective. I for one am following almost 1000 now (I don't know how I did this). Also, I've seen camgirls who have 90% personal content on their tumblr and others with 20% personal content. Just do your thang.

Submission blogs are also a good idea to give you some exposure, as is interacting with other camgirls.

 

[kelliver]

IP blocking is so useful, I use it to block some abusive people who have a tendency to stalk my personal blog, and I just don't want them on my work blog if I can help it. This is the script I use, works pretty well and it's easy to install.

 

[eclipse76]

4. 5 tags is the magic number still as far as I know. I tag myself and any other promo words someone might search

XoXo Lily

5 was/is the magic number when the only way to search was by using http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/YOURTAG (the max tags for a post are 20, and the 15 others were only usable from within the blog).

Now Tumblr has implemented another search, years ago now, http://www.tumblr.com/search/YOURTAG , which is doing a full text search with the content of the entire post and tags.

 

[eclipse76]

Oh! I forgot to add, StatCounter is your new best friend! It's free to use, you just make an account, input the code it gives you, and bam - free tracking on your blog. It's super useful because you can see where you're getting the most traffic and what sites are bringing you the most traffic.

Ditto
Plus you can check their IP and ban them if you want, there was a time where I was banning every viewer from a certain country until the script got so big my tumblr wasn't loading anymore haha. Might be useful if you want to ban specific people or harassers. You can google for a "tumblr ip blocking script" or something like that, basically it redirects them to somewhere else (you can choose where, I sent them to tumblr's main page).

Having links to your selfies/content/camsite/clipsite in your description is also helpful. Later on, an FAQ might be useful to put down some info about your camming schedule and to stop all the repetitive questions. I thought no one read the FAQ but I consistently have just a little bit more views on my FAQ page than on my main tumblr page. I've also seen a drastic drop in certain questions after I put them in the FAQ.

Don't worry too much about how much you post. Some people follow a lot of blogs and their dashboard has new posts every second, it's all very subjective. I for one am following almost 1000 now (I don't know how I did this). Also, I've seen camgirls who have 90% personal content on their tumblr and others with 20% personal content. Just do your thang.

Submission blogs are also a good idea to give you some exposure, as is interacting with other camgirls.

IP blocking is so useful, I use it to block some abusive people who have a tendency to stalk my personal blog, and I just don't want them on my work blog if I can help it. This is the script I use, works pretty well and it's easy to install.

I'd be extremely cautious about using Statcounter in this manner.
Statcounter script are only activated when:

1. people view your blog on their desktop browser
2. don't have any adblocker/script blocker

If people send you ask from their Dash or from the Mobile app, you wouldn't see it on your Statcounter at all. This can lead to unintended consequence: years ago I was accused by a Tumblr to have sent them a very insulting message because they had seen my IP on their Statcounter, I happened to be on their Ask page without having sent anything at the same time an asshole did. If you block someone that way, be sure it's not a single occurrence, but a pattern where a specific IP always appears with abusive message.

Regarding the IP blocking script, I wrote a similar one for some friend years ago, but the same limitation applies: the person must visit your blog on their Desktop computer and not having any script blocking extension. Otherwise they'll see your content.

 

[kelliver]

If people send you ask from their Dash or from the Mobile app, you wouldn't see it on your Statcounter at all.

While this is true, it's much better to have something rather than nothing.