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I know that in yesterday's column that the way for newbies in this industry to make money was by working hard and basically doing the same thing day after day, week after week and month after month and I don't step back from that concept. The way to make money in this industry is by continually working hard but sometimes you need a change of pace.

When you continue working hard for long periods of time you can become stale, you can become bored and you can begin to make mistakes and even lose interest. For the last week Steve and I have been working some very repetitive projects for others here in adult. I've been writing gay stories and Steve has been writing text for a variety of paysites.

We've been stuck in that groove while a number of mainstream clients wait for the end of the financial year here in Australia to tick over before making the first payment on the new websites they want us to build for them. In some ways that works for us too because it evens out our cashflow but it also leads to some days of doing very mundane work.

Just how badly we needed a change only became evident when another client called me a little while ago to set the wheels in motion for a very simple mainstream site she wants me to build for her. Suddenly we were checking for domain names, tossing around keywords, looking at trends and the number of searches done for those keywords ... and having fun.

Now we've spent 30 minutes thinking about mainstream, we've made some decisions about the site, we've got the domain name, we know the keywords that I'll be talking to the client about this afternoon and we're back doing adult work.

Surprisingly we feel invigorated, awake, alert even; we've had to use our brains instead of running along on something close to automatic pilot. Just that short 30 minute break has woken us up and jolted us out of our almost comatose state.

If 30 minutes of thinking mainstream can do that for us then why shouldn't it work for you? Perhaps you need to get out of the rut you've drifted into and try something different. If you've been building nothing but adult sites or galleries for the last few weeks then perhaps it's time to build a mainstream site.

Take a wander over to some mainstream sponsors and see what promotional tools they offer. It's unlikely that you'll make a lot of money with any of them because their commissions are much smaller than here in adult but don't let that stop you. The aim of this exercise isn't so much to make a heap of money in mainstream but to have a productive break from adult and 'productive' is something that can be measured in more than money.

While you're at it think about the scripts that you've been using here in adult and see if they can't be used over there in mainstream. Steve has a small mainstream site he was playing with last week that needs a pic-of-the-day script ... and he's just remembered that he happens to have one left over from the days of when we ran my paysite.

I'm sure you'll find that a lot of other scripts that we use in adult can have a use on a mainstream site too. Scripts that pull in details from a .csv file are often used here in adult and that's another script that will work in mainstream.

But what do you do with the mainstream site once you've built it? How do you get traffic to it?

Well you can always buy in traffic ... just as we have them in adult mainstream also has its share of traffic brokers. You can do the rounds of the mainstream directories out there. That's the mainstream equivalent of our link lists and there's a lot more in mainstream than there is in adult.

You can even feed traffic to your mainstream site from your adult sites. The 'Leave Now' button that everyone should provide on an adult free site can point to your mainstream site. Of course the traffic you send from that won't be huge but at least there will be some.

It's quite possible that you won't make a cent from a mainstream site - some of our early ones were total bombs - but you will learn some different ways of doing things. You'll also have taken a break from adult and been forced to think outside the framework that you've become so used to and that's possibly of more value than any cash you might make from the site.

Whether you choose to build a mainstream site or just get away from your computer for a while the important thing to remember is that you do need a change occasionally. Every now and then you need something to challenge you and make you think.

Change is good and change can certainly increase your bottom line and that's something we all want to do.