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This is one of those weird weeks where the column you're reading now was actually written on Wednesday my time and Tuesday your time. Now if that doesn't confuse then I guess nothing really will and being able to avoid confusion is a great gift for anyone who wants to survive for long in this industry.

I'm writing it on Tuesday ... or is that really Wednesday ... because on Thursday ... or that could be Wednesday (depending on where you live) we're driving down to Brisbane to pick up Steve's daughter at the airport ... as long as we're not a day early ... or is that a day late.

Well I hope you get the picture ... she's flying in for a holiday, we haven't seen her in ages and we're undoubtedly going to spend a lot of time talking and catching up. Steve and I are also going to spend a lot of time talking on the way down in the car because we've just been invited to launch a web site on behalf of a client.

Now you might think that launching a website is not such a big thing. All you have to do is put it up on a server, throw up a few links to it, maybe buy a little traffic and everything just flows from there.

And sometimes it does ... at least it does for us. We redesigned a large website for a client recently and the redesign went live just two weeks ago. When the old site was online Google couldn't get beyond the index page because the person who had built it had relied on Flash for the navigation and even the index page didn't appear anywhere in the top five or six pages for anything.

Now though, in just those two weeks Google has crawled the new site to a depth of several levels and the site is now appearing on page one of the search engine results pages for four important terms.

That's all well and good but it's not going to be like that for the new site that we've been asked to launch. Even if it was going to be like that there's more to launching this site than just waiting for Google to find it. Our client wants people right across the country to see his URL and he wants to get that URL in front of as many eyes as possible and in a relatively short time too.

When he mentioned that to us I knew that Steve was thinking Google and maybe even some pay-per-click advertising but that's not exactly what the client was thinking of. He was thinking newspapers, buses, cabs, television advertising and that kind of took our breath away.

To his list we've added billboards, affiliate marketing, getting the website mentioned on television programs and at sporting functions too. Now you might think we're being just a little delusional here but this is a guy who builds businesses. While you and I build websites he builds businesses and he does it very well.

So Steve and I are going to have a lot to talk about on that trip ... whichever day it is that we're going. And of course, while we're discussing the future marketing plans for his website we're also going to be discussing our future and that means we're going to take a careful look at where we suggest he goes with his marketing plans because our future success hinges on his success.

Perhaps you're wondering why that it so, surely one client couldn't have such an impact on a small business but in many ways one client can definitely have such an impact. It's all tied up in word of mouth marketing and it really is one of the most powerful forms of marketing there is. It's just a shame that word of mouth marketing isn't going to help you much here in adult.

Or is it?

I don't know that there is a way to make word of mouth marketing work for affiliates in adult but don't dismiss it totally until you've thought about it. While I may not be able to see the way to make it work you may be able to turn it into a very effective form of marketing and really make money from it.

And while you're thinking about that here is something else to think about. Aaron Wall pointed out the other day that Sao Paulo in Brazil has just banned all outdoor advertising and people are beginning to notice more advertising in that city is beginning to appear online than it did before the ban.

But what would you do if online advertising was banned? I doubt that's ever likely to happen but it could become regulated and that would make life interesting.