When it comes to selling content, the question I get most often is if they should include a preview of the video they are trying to sell. The answer is yes. 100% yes.

While having a great caption is important, the preview is one of the most important parts of your sales strategy. According to YDP (a data and analytics service for digital products), a preview increases the likelihood that a product will sell by 13%, while other research has shown that 62% of buyers say a preview has the most significant impact on their decision to purchase.

Previews are important because you have just a small window of creativity that could just make or break the success of your content. It’s the first thing the viewer sees and represents over 80% of the semantic decision to engage with your content. In other words, if they don’t like that preview, they might not even read your caption. But don’t just take my word for it; let’s trust Netflix. A company that makes more than $33 billion a year selling content. Netflix has said that previews have the most significant impact on a person’s decision to watch a video.

Netflix uses a proprietary algorithm to source, create, and deploy thousands of personalized previews of each program on Netflix to each Netflix viewer. They even employ a testing system to figure out which preview a viewer is more likely to engage with based on the type of content it is.

So, what kind of preview do you need to create? Well, that’s a great question. The experts will tell you that you need to create a preview that speaks to your audience. You want to tell the potential viewer (buyer) what they are likely to get if they click on your video. Is a single photo preview enough, or do you need text or a video clip preview?

That’s where testing comes in. There are several different methods you could use, but your buyers aren’t the same as my buyers. What might work for me might not work for you, so this is where you need to test out different previews and see what works best for you.

The Trailer

There are a few different types of previews you can do. First, there is the traditional “trailer,” which is something the adult industry has used for years to sell their movies.

This is something we know works because it’s been done for decades by big studios. But creating this kind of elaborate trailer isn’t always easy, and it isn’t necessarily the best way to sell a movie on platforms like OnlyFans. Does it work? For sure. But can you do it better? Probably. Let’s look at some other options.

Since most content creators aren’t out there creating full-blown movies, another option is to create a short click of the scene itself.

This can be tricky because you want to give away just enough to make them want to see it’s great without giving away so much that they can just watch the preview, get off and move on without buying.

A Short Preview Clip

I have tested a zillion different video preview methods of all sizes, with intros, without them, with text, without them. What I have found works best for me is a 10 to 20-second clip. Anything longer has never proved to perform any better for me.

Slow-motion previews

Something new I’ve begun to try out is a shorter clip that slowed down (slow motion). So it’s really about 10 seconds but slowed down to draw it out to 20 seconds, hyper-focusing on just one aspect of the video like a blowjob.

Photos Only or Photo Thumbnail

For a while, the only type of preview I would do was a photo or photos. I have never found anything that works all that great for me, but others have said it’s perfect for them.  I’ve tried some YouTube-like thumbnails with text on them, but it also didn’t go well for me. I know one girl for whom this works really well.

Another option I love is to take a single photo like Tushy has done and use animated text over it like they have done here with this video from Tushy.

The faded-out preview

This is one of my favorite preview methods, but it’s been hit or miss for me on Onlyfans. It works great for generating traffic from Twitter. In this case, you offer a short clip, but you blur it out, so they don’t really get to see exactly what it is, and to see it, they have to buy the full video. Vixen does this all the time, as seen here, as they posted on Twitter. This is called the tease method.

In the end, you’ll just need to try out a few of these and see what works best for you.