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Just recently Steve and I were talking to another small business person here in the town where we live. Their business really wasn't doing so well and it hadn't done well right from the time that they had launched it.

At first this person couldn't understand why the business was not attracting customers for he and his partner had done a lot of market research and were sure that they were stocking the very best products. Then one day the reason for their failure dawned on him ... the people in this town were the reason the business was doing so badly. Local people were tight with their money ... they only ever wanted a bargain ... they were only prepared to buy the cheaper versions of the products the business stocked.

And so the litany went on, it was all about the client and not about the business. Yet the people in this town had not forced the business to locate in a corner of a shopping complex where few people actually saw the business. No one in town had forced the business to only stock high-end products and try to sell them in a complex that catered mostly for budget-conscious people. They were all important decisions made by the business and of course they affected the business.

Now, when you think about it that small business person sounded a lot like many adult webmasters who are struggling. The surfers only ever want free porn, they never want to buy anything and yada yada yada. We don't stop to look at what we're doing and think that perhaps the cause of our poor sales actually rests with us rather than with our potential customers.

Of course accepting the blame for your own failures is not easy ... it's far less threatening to blame everyone else but yourself. But when you do accept the blame for your own failures you're far more likely to be able to recover and become a success than is likely if you go on blaming everyone but the person who made the mistakes.

Trust
About the same time as we talking to that business person we were also pitching a proposal to another small business person who wanted to take their business online. He wanted to sell his products out there in the big wide world and we knew that we could produce a site that would be a great marketing tool for him.

Unfortunately he wanted a guarantee from us that he would succeed once his shopping site went live and that was something that we simply could not give him. While we could guarantee him that the site we would build for him would be the very best that he could buy for the money he had to spend we could not guarantee that his online shop would be a success.

When you think about it you'll understand why we couldn't do that. Once we built the online shop and handed it over to him the success or failure of the site would be out of our hands and its success would depend on things that he did and decisions he made, not on anything that we might have done.

Needless to say we didn't get the job because we were unable to give him that guarantee and without that guarantee he simply didn't trust us to be able to deliver what he wanted.

Trust is an important factor in closing any sale. Even in adult online marketing there is an element of trust in every sale you make and if you can't get the surfer to trust you then he's not going to pay to buy whatever the product is that you're selling. Once you work out ways of encouraging your surfers to trust you then you're well on your way to making long-term money in this business.

Understanding
I read an interesting piece of research the other day. A university here in Australia surveyed a slice of the population to find out if they understood what people were saying to them and the findings were rather surprising.

It seems that around 50% of people here in Australia bluff their way through conversations because they don't understand the meanings of some of the words that people are using. So do people who you talk to actually understand what you're saying?

More importantly, do the people you're trying to sell to understand the words that you are using?

Now there are three things that I hope you'll think about today. Every one of them is important if you want to succeed in this business so do you accept the blame for people not buying from you, do people actually trust you and can they understand you?