161 Anne Enke, AOC Brands Media Group

Anne's Sensual Apples Are Good for Body, Soul & Women's Rights Politics

2013-01-07T15:12:34Z

Clara Alonso bites into the apple of sensuality — a green one — in this Chis Colls editorial for Elle Vietnam. Determining now that this is a Spring 2012 editorial, perhaps April, (grrrrh) we stick with it to promote the healthy eating of apples and taking a bite of sensuality regularly.

See the perfect pitch apple eating video and images ‘The Virgin Bride’ for Stone Cold Fox’s spring 2013 colelction.

In a landmark decision for AOC, I decided to put a compendium of Treats! editorials and my writing on sensuality on AOC’s front page salon. If AOC is banned in the Arab world and now in many workplaces in America because we DO filter any questionable images, instead of just throwing them out there as so many others do, we just aren’t all that reliant on Google any more.

People are shaking their head that AOC would be banned. Sensuality News we understand, of course. This is why I separated the websites in the first place when 40 images got 40,000 wiped out of Google image search for 120 days. That was my 2010 nightmare. I got cute one day and began writing about food porn. DISASTER struck!

Guilty By Association

If AOC is still guilty by association — which is frankly the story of my life — fine. We’ve built a fantastic website and large roster of devoted readers without Google’s help. It just irks me to see people not playing by the rules not quarantined. It’s a bit like not paying your taxes and laughing all the way to the bank.

Nothing will change with my new attitude re Google, because my work in philanthropy and women’s rights is exploding with our new GlamTribale jewelry collection. Discretion is required of me when dealing with international women’s rights, although most know quickly and admire my maverick status. My friends in the Arab world say “don’t let up, Anne. Let us worry about the issues on the ground here.”

You will find me writing much more aggressively about sexuality again, and taking an occasional daring plunge with a raised middle finger status as I did putting a huge number of Treats! editorials on the front page of AOC and then tying them to my in-depth writing on female sexuality.

Authenticity Is Our Top Priority

That action is asking to be burned at the stake by social conservatives — except they spend far more time on Treats! material than progressives like my readers do, given their propensity to buy more pornography while wagging their fingers at the rest of us. It takes one to know one.

Authenticity is priority #1 at AOC. We will walk our talk this year as never before, with the arrival of several new writers and expanding plans for GlamTribale. Happy New Year to ALL our friends!! As I always say, fasten your seat belts because I like driving fast. ~ Anne

Anne's GlamTribale Jewelry Now in Full Swing

2012-11-11T21:58:49Z

It’s fair to say that I’ve done a really lousy job of keeping my own bio updated. So much has happened since I last wrote in this journal. There’s not time to post a full update now either.

Simply stated, we now have a new business GlamTribale jewelry, finally launched at the end of July. Thankfully, we launched it at a food and spirits show in Lancaster, Pa. While folks were having an orgasm over the beauty of the jewelry, they had a glass in one hand and a plate of food in the other.

Only I saw everything that was wrong with the jewelry — and it was a lot. In my career, I have always been the merchant, the creative director, the head of product development. Blessed with a keen eye, good taste, and strong sense of how to build and cost merchandise, one set of skills I don’t have is a degree in design.

Truthfully, I was kicked out of art class in 7th grade and put in an advanced math class that was a pilot project in my school. “It’s great for you,” my teacher told me. “This is a fantastic exerimental class out of Princeton or some other Ivy League school. And beside, you’re not creative.”

Indeed, I was told by my 7th grade teacher that I am not creative.The things we say to our children. Her words haunted me for decades.

Truthfully, though, I haven’t excelled at making things until now. I had design staffs that made them for me — and I still do. But in August 2012 I said “how hard can this be”, and I began making jewelry like a mad woman. Jaws dropped around me, as I drove the design and quality expectations bar through the roof.

Then I hated the GlamTribale website. Surely, I’ve written here that web developers and I are like vinegar and water. Honestly, I loathe them at this point. So I redid the entire website myself, as I am constantly tinkering with Anne of Carversville.

The website is now fully loaded after reshooting the product THREE times. It wasn’t until I said: “Anne, if this jewelry website was lingerie instead, what would it look like?” Eureka! I got it.

There is so much to write about what’s happening with me — I’ll try to fill in the blanks this week. You can follow GlamTribale on its website and also in a GlamTribale blog here on AOC. This has been the toughest two years of my life, but 2013 will be different. I love our websites; readers love us; and now it’s time to monetize all our hard work. ~ Anne

AOC Readers Get Respect, Great Content No Attack Ads

2011-11-25T13:32:06Z

Many web owners and webmasters are reading The Pummeling Pages, a damnation by Brent Simmons of the current state of so much web content and typical websites.

The site has good writing. But the pages do everything possible to convince people not to try. “Don’t bother,” the pages say. “It’s hopeless. Oh — and good luck not having a seizure!”

They’re filled with ads and social-media sharing buttons — and more ads. And Google plus-onesies and Facebook likeys. And also more ads. Plus tweet-this-es. Plus ads. (And, under-the-hood, a whole cruise-ship-full of analytics. The page required well-more than 100 http calls.)

While we, too, struggle to be creative in developing a revenue strategy, the fight against this invasion of our brains has always been front and center in my relationship with the ‘advisers’ who have called me crazy and lacking strategy in my web vision.

Having built a core group of 250,000 high-quality readers — and climbing quickly — 2012 will be our year for revenue. We are launching a goddess-inspired jewelry collection, to support our telling of women’s history. We have obtained a nonprofit arts sponsor with Fractured Atlas and will be expanding AOCCares.org. Several publishing projects are on the drawing board; and we are focused on finding high-quality sponsors.

We’ve been consistent around a single idea at AOC -- and it is YOU, our friends and readers. We’ve never played games with readers, never chased them around the page with ‘attack ads’, never participated in link farm games and avoided web relationships that define our own character, with their strategies.

As a result, our website growth is organic and for real. Our web stats are heavenly and readers appreciate our not trying to co-op their brains with pure clutter.

AOC & Sensuality News Compared to Vogue.com

2011-08-30T19:21:10Z

I took note today that Business Insider writes that Conde Nast’s new Vogue.com is working, with traffic exploding by 500%. Most impressive is the 30 page views per unique visitor, with unique visitors now at 1.2 million.

Folks at Vogue.com noted that much of their page view credit is coming from fashion shows and party slide shows, a factor not pertinent to AOC’s page views or Alexa.com’s ranking of our websites. (We do not use slide shows, finding that they waste viewers’ time.)

Alexa.com puts Vogue’s page views per user at about 2.5, not counting looking at slideshow images that are part of the same article. Amazon’s company Alexa.com doesn’t measure slide show page views — which are sort of misleading, as acknowledged by Conde Nast.

People constantly tell us that they come to AOC and SN as a true portal or home base for learning, but even we refuse to believe that our incredible page views some days. We know that we have people who come and spend 3-4 hours on the website each week. We’ve counted as many as 250 page views with those types. Our time on website stats and also page views have held constant as our traffic has tripled in the last year.

The Alexa.com graphs have AOC and SN generating higher total page views than Vogue.com, when we’re counting pages.

Admitting that AOC and SN combined are about 20% the uniques of Vogue.com currently and without an ounce of marketing support, we’re proud to share some stats that compare the three of us. We are the little engine that could, the one ready to soar even higher in cyberspace with funding and person power.

In these graphs Vogue.com is the blue line; Anne of Carversville.com is the brown one; and Sensuality News.com is yellow. Is this one heck of a performance up against Vogue.com or what!!! Anne

Daily Page Views Per User

Alexa Updates on AnneofCarversville.com & SensualityNews.com

2011-05-30T15:20:55Z

We share good news that May 5 was no fluke. Our momentum remains unchanged and should continue to increase-although summer always promises a slowdown with our reader. As of last week, we cycled out of our two biggest weeks of 2011, when Lea T was on Oprah and the digital world got informed about transgender topics. Those two huge weeks from Feb. were dragging our Alexa.com improvement somewhat. No more.

We will continue to go green with many new ideas in the pipeline. We also have substantial increases in directs, which are moving to 45% on AOC. Simply stated, our retention of new readers is killer.

Above is AnneofCarversville.com; below is SensualityNews.com as of May 24, 2011.

Our US Alexa Reaches 14,745 a 40% 7-Day Increase

2011-05-05T19:13:43Z

When we say that Anne o fCarversville is on fire, we’re not kidding. In one week — with no marketing or major article just Anne’s hard work, 18 hours days, good writing, a keen eye and fierce attitude — our Alexa.com rank has moved from 83,000 to 75,237.

We fully expected to be crawling our way to 50,000 after dropping below 100,000. Instead, we’re in overdrive, jumping over other websites at breakneck speed.

Our US rank has moved from 17,364 to 14,575 with page views holding at 28.5.

These stats don’t include Sensuality News, which is also in overdrive, with an Alexa.com increase of 90% in a month.

AnneofCarversville.com & SensualityNews.com April 2011 Alexa Updates

2011-04-28T12:41:41Z

Both AnneofCarversville.com and SensualityNews.com continue to grow at a blistering pace. AOC cracked the 3-month 100,000 mark on Alexa.com and SN cracked 200,000.

Our current week Alexa.com rank at AOC is 52,710 and SN should be 100,000. We will not do a thorough comparative review right now, but today’s Alexa.com updates confirm that our page views, time on site and bounce rates are holding, making us the leader amongst our competitors on every measure.

AOC loves our global audience but we’re particularly happy to report our current US ranks of 17,364 for AOC and a surprising 29,032 for SN.

Anneofcarversville.com is ranked #83,626 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings, and it has a bounce rate of roughly 36% (i.e., 36% of visits consist of only one pageview). The fraction of visits to the site referred by search engines is about 19%. We estimate that 61% of the site’s visitors are in the US, where it has attained a traffic rank of 17,364. Anneofcarversville.com’s visitors view 28.3 unique pages each day on average. Alexa.com 4/28/11

Sensualitynews.com is ranked #182,804 in the world according to the three-month Alexa traffic rankings. The site has attained a traffic rank of 29,032 among users in the US, where we estimate that 79% of its audience is located. This site’s visitors view 13.4 unique pages each day on average. The fraction of visits to the site referred by search engines is approximately 8%. Sensualitynews.com has a bounce rate of roughly 27% (i.e., 27% of visits consist of only one pageview). Alexa.com 4/28/11

Anne of Carversville | Sensuality News | Jan. 15 2011 Alexa.com

2011-01-15T16:00:00Z

Sat., January 15, 2011

The Anne of Carversville story remains in full bloom.

Rather than romance you with marketing jargon about who we want our audience to be, I continue our truth serum seduction, based on an independent third-party, Alexa.com analysis of Anne of Carversville, Sensuality News and 13 other websites.

Since our November 2010 report, we’ve made significant changes to streamline Sensuality News. This action has created a better understanding of the Anne of Carversville audience, compared to Sensuality News.

Traffic is up 30% on our websites, and we have shifted some AOC traffic over to SN. The demographics tell the story and also confirm that our underlying branding assumptions about the two websites are correct. If these statistics hold, we will explain the differentiation in our next report.

We may be small, but we are bursting with financial and high-integrity journalism possibility. You are looking at an Internet jewel with an amazing set of measurements.

I met recently with an acclaimed expert on Internet marketing, and she agrees that Anne of Carversville and Sensuality News are ready for prime time.

This report compares Anne of Carversville and Sensuality News to well-known websites in four categories. All are much bigger than we are, although with January uniques trending at 150,000, we are coming up the curve quickly.

These Alexa.com statistics dovetail well with what we know about AOC from our own excellent Squarespace analytics system.

13 Websites | Four Categories

I’ve compared AOC and SN to competitive websites in four categories (note that SN is not compared in a news category, only AOC). Some websites are repeats from our November 2010 report (o) and others are new (n).

Fashion | Style: Fashion Gone Rogue (o); Fashionising (o); and Style.com (o)

Women’s Lifestyle: iVillage (o); Oprah.com (n); MarthaStewart.com (n)

News | Finance: New York Times (o); Huffington Post (o); Wall Street Journal (o); and Forbes (o)

Timely Features: Jezebel (n); The Daily Beast (o); Salon (o)

Anne of Carversville again turns in a spectacular performance, one that would enhance any global luxury brand’s reputation. And that is what we are seeking: global sponsors who will work with us to build Anne of Carversville, while we sprinkle our considerable fairy dust and Anne’s reputation over your brand.

Compared to these 13 top-tier websites, Anne of Carversville and Sensuality News occupy first and second place in the following:

1) Lowest Bounce Rates of 10-15% (an improvement from November’s report)

2) Most Daily Page Views per User of 18 on SN and a return to 30 on AOC

3) Longest Time on Site of 60 Minutes Average on AOC and about 30 Minutes on SN. (an improvement from November’s report.)

These are historic numbers which were declining as we drove new uniques to the website. I will explain in greater detail in the section report.

Digging into our audience statistics, we believe the following to be true:

4) Most Global Audience

5) Unparalleled Penetration (for our size) of women 35-54, yet we also have more than our fair share of 18-24 women at AOC

6) Unusually High Penetration of High-income ($100,000 plus) Women

I love these graphs because the quality of Anne of Carversville and Sensuality News is so obvious against the sites we hold as leaders in their category. Take a look at how we stand up against the competition.

Sensually yours, Anne

You can read or download the pdf file here: AnneofCarversville and Sensuality News Alexa.com stats Jan. 15, 2011.

Anne of Carversville | Sensuality News | Bounce Rate | Jan. 15, 2011

2011-01-15T15:00:00Z

Audience Comparisons as of Jan. 15, 2011

Fashion | Style

Women’s Lifestyle

News | Finance

Timely Features

Considerations:

Anne of Carversville | Sensuality News | Time Per Visit | Jan. 15, 2011