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Recently Steve and I were trying to explain search engine optimization to a client. Now usually when Steve starts talking to people about search engine optimization you can see their eyes begin to glaze over even though Steve is really only talking about simple fundamentals. This time though the person we were talking to was genuinely interested; his eyes weren't glazed at all and he understood what we were talking about.

You might think that talking to someone like that about search engine optimization was rather dumb ... after all if we gave him all the secrets he could go off and do the same thing and become a competitor ... but that was never going to happen with the person we were talking to. He might understand the process of search engine optimization but he's far too busy making money working on his business to waste time working in his business.

Instead he would be quite happy to employ us to do his search engine optimization just so long as he understood where the value was for him in paying us to do the work. Once he could see what we would achieve for him and how we would achieve it he was happy to talk about timeframes and the fees we would charge.

As we talked to him about the processes involved in achieving a good position in the search engines for important terms and why those processes worked I began to wonder about a lot of people in our industry. It seems to me that there are plenty of adult webmasters out there who are trying to make money from their galleries and websites without any clear understanding of what will and what won't work.

Even when they are making money many of them don't understand why they're sales techniques are working and why those techniques are making money. Instead they see the checks rolling in and that's all that matters to them and as long as those checks keep on coming they'll keep on doing whatever it is that they're doing that results in those checks.

Often that approach has been subtly implanted in them right from the time they were newbies. When they first hit the newbie boards and asked for advice they almost certainly got the help they were looking for but it would have been unusual for them to be given an explanation for why the good advice actually worked.

Has that been your experience? Were you given good advice that has worked over the years but no one ever took the time to tell you why it worked?

Do you just go on doing what works for you without understanding why it works?

Perhaps it's time for you to start thinking about why what you do makes you money because, once you understand the process, you might find that you can make even more money. Now wouldn't that be nice?

So where to you go to learn about why rather than how? Well start with your own experiences, look at what has worked for you and compare it with what hasn't worked for you. Identify the differences and see if you can't build on what has worked.

Spend some time looking at ways that you can change what didn't work so that it now does work. There are times when you could have been on the brink of a major step forward but you just didn't go far enough and stepped back because whatever it was you were doing didn't seem to be working.

When you stop and look at what has worked and what hasn't you may find that you can identify those things that seemed to fail simply because you didn't go far enough with it. Looking back over the years that we've been involved in the adult industry Steve and I can see lots of areas where we just didn't go far enough and I'm sure that, when you stop and look at the things you've tried, you'll see similar areas too.

At the same time start reading some of the marketing blogs that are out there and read some of the marketing books that you will see others recommend. Spend time learning about the psychology of selling and what drives people to buy things. You may think that people buy things because they need them and perhaps that's so but more often than not it's up to you to tell them that they need the product you're selling.

The more you understand why what you're doing works the more money you will make.