Prostitution for Dummies; Eat at a Street Stall

Prostitution for Dummies

 On this page:

1) One night in Hoi An (blog entry about meeting a guy who knew about bar girls)

2) Tips for finding naughty girls in Southeast Asia

3) Links to other sites and pages with info on finding party girls around the world.

4) Original short stories about bad girls (from my novel)

5) Sign up box for my e-mail newsletter for men looking for naughtiness overseas.

6) Tips on eating at a food stall. (You will have munchies, later on)

 

1) One Night in Hoi An

On Thursday night, I found a seedy little noodle stall with a bunch of Westerners eating.

I grabbed a seat and started talking to the guy at the next table. He was French and spoke no English. We'll call him Joe. Over the next hour, we spoke in French and I learned the following:


- Joe is 49 years old and has had about five careers. He recently went back to school and got a degree in social work and now works at a home for troubled kids.
- He has two grown children but never married.
- His life philosophy: he doesn't like to read or watch TV because these are all someone else's interpretation of life. He likes to experience things first hand with his mind (points to his head), his heart (points to his heart), with his passions (points to his crotch.) He also considered himself an anarchist because he hated politics.
- He periodically gives elderly street peddlers 1 million Vietnames Dong, about $63, about a month's salary for many in Vietnam.

After eating, we hopped on his moped to check out some bars. At our first stop, we drank and the conversation turned to every guy's favorite topic in South East Asia: prostitutes. He was generous with his advice and I found it worth sharing.

2) Tip of the Day: How to Find a Prostitute in Hoi An, Vietnam

1) A lot of the hair salons offer massage. (I had noticed this and thought it was a strange combination of offerings. But I'm just a bumpkin from Boston, what do I know). Often the masseuse will rub more than your back.

2) If you are getting a massage and want more, attempt to massage the masseuse. If she starts talking money, you're in. If she slaps your face or calls the police, you're probably out of luck.

3) Don't hire several girls at a time because one of them may grab your wallet while you're occupied with another one.

Related Tip: Talking Vietnamese, Lesson #1

When approached by a friendly moped driver at 2:00 am you may hear the phrase:
"Laddie, Laddie, boom-boom?"

Translation: "Excuse me Mr. Filthy Rich Caucasion, would you like to meet a girl who makes friends easily?"

If you are not interested, here is the proper response:
"No boom-boom suc-suc."

Translation: "Thank you for your generous offer Mr. Ho' Man. I'm sure your sister is a very nice girl, but I already have venereal disease."

 

3) Info about prostitution in Asia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Phnom Penh.

- Profiles of Western Sex Tourists in Asia
- Phnom Penh Nightlife
- One Day at the Massage Parlor
- Saigon: Traffic, Hookers, War Propaganda
- Useful information on sex tourism

 

4) Naughty Short Stories/Videos about Wild Girls

- An online date in the U.S. that went a little too right.

- Preparing for a trip to Asia and the Curious Finger Body Spa.

-  A girlfriend experience with a Phnom Penh hooker.

 

 

 

5) Click to read more naughty stuff for free, including the first 10 pages of my upcoming comedy novel: "God Bless Cambodia." 

My novel, available now, offers an unflinching look at how many really feel about sex, love, marriage, and paying for a hand job. Content warnings for adult situations, adult language, and more adult situations.

 

 

6) More Night-Time Tips: How To Eat At A Seedy Street Stall

1) Ask the price before sitting down. Once you sit down, you are committed. The price should be between 10,000 and 15,000 Dong for food and about the same for a beer. (15,000 Dong = a little less than $1)

2) Remember: those squares of scrap paper impaled on a long nail in the middle of the table are not Post-It notes, they are napkins.

3) Take a napkin and wipe your chopsticks and spoon thoroughly.

4) When you're bowl of food arrives, let your utensils soak in the hot food. The heat should help disinfect them.

5) Add every ingredient on the table to your food: hot peppers, garlic in oil, etc. Squeeze in the juice of a lime section, if they served you one. Stir and eat.

Lifestyle of the Vietnamese:
The researchers at RandysTravel have conducted informal interviews with locals in Hoi An. Here's more or less how things work:

1) Average monthly salary: $80 to $500.
2) Some people work multiple jobs (It is not uncommon to have night watchmen at a hotel sleeping in a small bed. I'm guessing they also work a day job)
3) People count on their families to take care of them in old age. If an elderly person has no family, they are out of luck.
4) Women live at home until they get married. She is not allowed to sleep over at a boyfriend's house until they are married. When she marries she moves out and in with the man, who continues living under his parents' roof. Most women are married in their early twenties.
5) You don't marry one person, you marry the entire family.
6) In Hoi An, many people have never left the town because it is too expensive for them to travel.

Marketing for Writers: Blogging Best Practices

How often should you blog? How long should your posts be? How do you get more people to sign up? If blogging is taking too much of time and not delivering the traffic you want, this article can help.

Length and Frequency

Several years ago, the conventional wisdom for blogging was that frequent, shorter posts were best. Now, you're better off posting longer, more in-depth articles weekly -- or even monthly -- than daily short bits. My blog posts typically run 500 words to as many as 2,000.

 

Here's why longer posts are better:

- Google now prefers longer posts, which means more chances of your work appearing in search results.
- Longer posts of 250 words or more let you demonstrate your expertise and really get into a topic.
- Longer, meatier posts are more likely to be linked to by other sites. 
- In my experience, readers are more likely to sign up after reading a longer, more thorough post than a shortie that just skims a topic.
- Writing, fewer longer posts also prevents burn out. Some months I only post once, but I've noticed that people will still sign up for my blog if they like the article and see that I've written plenty of meaty stuff in the past.

Some anecdotal evidence in favor of long posts: Facebook now allows posts of up to 12,000 words, Google+ allows posts of up to 20,000 words, and LinkedIn now allows you to post long articles using its new publishing platform. (This doesn't mean you're going to write articles that long or post them solely on these social media sites. You always want to post your article on your own site first.)

Waste Less Time

After you publish a new blog post, you're probably promoting it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and any other sites you frequent. You should be posting links to your post on appropriate groups and using hash tags to reach people interested in the topics you write about. (If you need convincing, see these articles on social media marketing for writers.)

But how do you know if your efforts are paying off? Measure. Most blogs include the ability to measure your Web traffic and tell you where the traffic is coming from. This capability is called Web analytics. If not, you may want to consider a free tool, such as Google Analytics (overkill for most people) or Statcounter (simple to use).

Regardless of which tool you use, here are some things to be looking for:

1) How people are finding you -- which social media sites are pulling their weight. In this snapshot of my blog, most visitors are finding my blog by searching on Google (red box and arrow) or by seeing my posts in groups on Google+ or Facebook (blue arrow and box). I also post my articles on sites such as thebookdesigner.com, which is also generating some traffic. Twitter is generating the fewest clicks. I need to reevaluate my Twitter strategy and either change something or ditch the site.

Using Statcounter, I can track how visitors are finding my blog.

2) The types of articles that are generating the most clicks
Obviously, you'll want to cover that topic more often. But if you have an article that is getting lots of traffic month in and month out, consider updating parts of that article and adding fresh links to other articles on your site.  You'll want to treat that article as a minitiature home page, a portal, a way that many visitors are coming to your site. Don't change the title or anything else that would affect the url for that page. Other pages are probably linking to it.

For example, my novel includes racy scenes that take place in Southeast Asian massage parlors. In 2007, I was traveling in Vietnam and met a French sex tourist who proceeded to provide unsolicited tips on how to find a prostitute. Soon after, I wrote a politically-incorrect article called "Prostitution for Dummies." Five years later, this article is still getting a lot of traffic. Recently, I tweaked the article to include links to my naughty short stories and novel excerpts. Note: This article will be offensive to some people. Do not click, if you are offended by this kind of thing. "Prostitution for Dummies"

Hook Readers with Summary Ledes and Subheads

On the Internet, readers tend to skim articles and blog posts. Two good ways to hook a skimmer:

- Use a lede that summarizes your post. 
When you post a link to Facebook or Google+, the site often displays the first paragraph, forcing readers to click to read more. If your lede is cutesy or confusing, you may lose readers.

- Use subheads and bold text-- even for creative writing and fiction.
Highlight an interesting bit of dialog or turn of phrase to get readers to stop and read the context. In the article below, the author highlighted a snippet of dialog: "How are satellites bad for women?"

A Simple Trick for Getting More People to Sign Up

Most people visiting a Web site know to ignore that outer columns of the page, which are filled with ads and other promotional stuff. If that's where you put your sign up box, you're going to be ignored. Last year, I began adding my sign up box to the end of every new blog post. My sign ups have increased five-fold. (The sign up box is at the end of this article, under "Sign up to have my Marketing for Writers blog delivered to your inbox free each week:")

Include the Right Image at the Top of Posts

With all the free art and image editing tools available, there is no excuse for not including a decent piece of art at the top of every post.

- Free images are available at Creative Commons
- You can crop them with a simple, free tool like Irfanview
- You can create your own graphics using Powerpoint. (create a slide, save it as a .jpg and upload it to your blog. (I used Powerpoint for the image/infogrpaphic at the top of this blog.)
- Make sure your top image is a horizontal rectangle -- it will look better when you post to Facebook groups.

 More Articles on Blogging

 - Six Tips to Boost Blog Traffic
- Web Marketing for Writers: Best Sites, Resources

- Building Your Blog (recent presentations I gave on social media and blogging)

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Book Marketing: My Eight Month Progress Report

After several months of small, but steady increases, my stats for Web traffic, blog subscribers, and social media contacts have all leveled off. How to explain this lack of progress?
- Conservative viewpoint: This is the value the market places on my time and skills.
- Liberal viewpoint: I am not a big business with a staff nor am I celebrity with a drug problem (yet).

But the good news is that maybe we don't need millions of fans to make a living as writers. We only need 1,000 who really like our stuff. (Actually, 500 would do.)

Book Marketing Progress Report

I) Blog 

 

Results*

- Page views in July: 2,428      (1,779 visitors)
- Page views August: 2,977     (2,139)
- Page views Sept.: 2,774       (2,017)
- Page views in Oct.: 2,783     (1,996)


- Blog subscribers at end July: 48
- Blog subscribers at end of August: 71
- Blog subscribers at end of September: 95
- Blog subscribers at end of October: 114

*includes a small number of  visitors -- 100 to 180 each month -- that go to my resume and rarely-updated travel Web sites.

 

Latest Tactics

 

- Cut back to three blog posts per month instead of weekly

I'll use use the extra time to submit to contests, apply for grants, and pitch readings and performances to organizations, such as libraries, colleges, etc. As long as I'm getting 1,500 or so visitors a month, I'll be happy -- adding another 200 or even 500 is probably not going to make much difference.

- Added a table of contents to one of my most popular pages.
The page is called "Prostitution for Dummies," a tongue-in-cheek piece I wrote five years ago that continues to get steady traffic from guys traveling around Southeast Asia looking for naughtiness.The page now directs readers to some of my humorous erotica and to sites that offer what they're really looking for. Warning: the page has some racy, politically-incorrect content -- do not visit, if you find that kind of thing offensive.

- Created a list in Yahoo mail of people who subscribed to my blog but didn't confirm/verify their subscription. (When someone subscribes, my blog sends them a confirmation e-mail; for some reason about a dozen people didn't confirm. So, I manually forward each blog to them using a Yahoo mail group. These people are not listed in my Subscriber stats above.)

- Targeting different types of readers
In addition to book marketing, my blog covers four other topics -- erotic humor, weird travel, naughty travel for men, and life as a chronically single person. So, I am trying to target readers of these four other topics by offering monthly newsletters for each group. To get subscribers, I added sign-up boxes to blog posts frequented by these people. I created the sign up boxes using Mailchimp. If I get any subscribers for these four newsletters, I'll write them. Sign up so far: Zilch. (the new newsletters are the top four listed in the screen shot below. Two newsletters show one subscriber -- me.)

With a little fiddling, you can create e-mail sign-up forms for newsletters targeting different audiences.

II) Social Media

 

I just picked up a book called "Social Media is Bullshit." I will write a short review later this month. So far, the book is pretty disturbing but somehow reassuring for all of us who feel like we've been banging our heads against the wall with online marketing.

1) Twitter

Results: 805 followers, increase of 59 over last month.


Tactics probably worth considering:
- An interesting suggestion from a Linked In connection, Erik Deckers: retweet more of influential people's stuff.
"... find some major influencers and occasionally ask them to retweet your posts to their own followers. Make sure you do that for the influencers as well, about 5 - 8 times more than they do yours. They'll be more inclined to just do it for you out of the blue." 

- Separate crap from cream in my Twitter feed. I'm considering making a list of the top 10 folks I want to follow, using Hootsuite to monitor their tweets, and focusing on commenting and retweeting their tsuff.

- I considered and then abandoned the idea of starting a new Twitter account or cutting useless folks from my existing account. I'm too insecure to cut my number of followers -- as small as it is -- because I want to be able to demonstrate to agents, publishers, and potential employers that I'm somewhat active on Twitter.

2) Linked In

Results: 1,148 connections, increase of 21 from last month.  

- This is still the major source for my blog traffic. I belong to a slew of groups and manually post links to my blog to each group.
- Disturbing trend: I have started receiving spam from people selling book-marketing services. I'm giving them one warning to knock it off, then I will report them as spammers. A cynical part of me thinks that Linked In may not care, particularly if these spammers are folks who are paying for the Linked In premium service -- Is spamming connections included in the price?

3) Facebook

Results:

- Fans: 2,036, down one from last month.
- Reach (the number of Fans who actually see my posts) 200 to 250, about the same as last month.

I am expending less effort posting to Facebook.

4) Klout Score

Now 47, down from 48 from last month. Does anyone care?

III) Networking

 

- Personal e-mail lists: I went through my contacts in my personal Yahoo e-mail account and sorted out those who might care about my progress as a writer and who might buy a book. Then I uploaded the list --about 290 people -- to Mailchimp. I will send them a quarterly progress report.

- I continue to meet smart, nice people online. Erik Deckers (referred to one of my blogs in one of his blogs and offers good advice in Linked In forums.), Jen Zeman who retweets some of my tweets, Tzigane and Martha Moravec, two writers who comment on my posts.

IV) Minor Successes

 

- Interviewed on cable access TV show.
I did a one-hour interview for a travel show. Since it's cable access, there may be all of three viewers, but it was good practice, fun, and required minimal preparation. (I discussed a four-month solo trip around the world I took in 2007. The trip cost a lot of money and basically sucked, and I spent most of the interview kvetching and moaning about unfriendly locals, wine I drank made from pickled cobras, and Melbourne's fly problem.) Note: It wasn't hard to get on the show. If you contact your local cable access station, there's probably a show about local artists, writers, or other topics for which you might qualify as an interview subject.

- My previously published story, "Domination for Dummies," was accepted for an e-book erotica anthology (a small, independent press.) Due out later this year.

- A humor piece called "Productivity Secrets of a Successful Novelist" accepted by Calliope magazine for print and online (A small print and Web journal.)

- "Domination for Dummies" was also accepted by Bizzarocast, a podcast that I'm guessing reaches a younger audience. (I should have asked about the audience. Regardless, I need all the publishing credits I can get). Supposed to appear Valentine's Day. I'll get paid $5.


Attribution for image at top of blog: By aTarom [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Can't Get Enough Book Marketing?

 

- Five Month Progress Report: SEO works!

- Six Month Progress Report: A newbie gets cocky.

- Seven Month Progress Report: Reality knocks at the door.

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Book Marketing: 3 Ways to Boost Your Blog Traffic

Your blog or Web site probably includes a tool called Web analytics. If not, it's free and relatively easy to add this capability using Google Analytics or an indie favorite called Statcounter.*

Before your eyes glaze over please note: Web analytics provide a quick way to boost your traffic -- just hear me out!

Three Way to Analyze and Boost Your Traffic

1) Most Popular Pages: Add Links to Other Articles on Your Site and Around the Web.

Web analytics tools typically include a Popular Pages feature. It's not uncommon to have an old page generating steady traffic for some oddball reason.

Five years ago, I traveled around Vietnam and met a French sex tourist who offered me unsolicited tips on how to find a prostitute. I took his tips and wrote a tongue-and-cheek piece called "Prostitution for Dummies."

Now, sex tourists, johns, punters, and pervs traveling through Vietnam visits my page. I also write humorous erotica, which means these visitors are all potential readers. So, at the end of the "Dummies" page, I added links to related content on my site.

Note: The page below includes naughty language and other politically incorrect stuff. Don't click it if you're offended by that kind of thing.

Adding basic navigation and links to related content on your site can boost your traffic.

2) Make Friends with Sites that Link to You

The Came From feature in Statcounter (or Traffic Sources in Google Analytics) shows your major sources of Web traffic. This is useful for a couple of reasons:

a) If a site you weren't aware of is sending you lots of traffic, you may want to:
- thank them with an e-mail.
- reciprocate by offering to add a link on your site to their site.
- post additional links in forums on their site.
- offer to write a guest blog post for them.

b) If like me, you post links to recent articles in numerous forums and social media sites, you can see which are producing and which are a waste of time.

I have a travel site called Rosstravels.com. Two sites have been generating regular traffic and are worth me contacting, thanking, and courting.

3) Keyword Search Terms: What Words do Visitors Use to Find You?

You may be surprised. You may also want to use the those words more frequently on your site so it appears on the first or second page when people search Google.

According to Google Analytics, a decent number of people are finding my site by searching for "Erotic Humor."

I have no pride and added a menu button for "erotic humor" to my blog.

I also added "erotic humor" to my article labels...

And I added the phrase to some of the articles posted on my site. (Did I mention that I have no pride?)

Note: You don't want add keyword search terms willy-nilly around your site for two reasons:
- You can piss off Google by packing your pages with keywords.
- You can piss off your readers -- we're supposed to be showing visitors that we're good writers, right?


*If your site or blog doesn't include Web analytics, the feature is relatively easy to add with either Google Analytics or Statcounter.
The process involves:
- Registering on the analytics site.
- Adding to your blog some code generated by the analytics site. For blogs, you can often add the code to your page design once and be done with it. For Web sites, you may have to add the code to individual pages, which can be a pain.
- Statcounter is an indie, non-Google favorite. The site has been around for years and the tech support is polite, fast, and helpful.

For More of My Book Marketing Tips, See:

- Keyword Phrases for Newbies

- Search Engine Optimization for Newbies

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