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As I mentioned earlier in the week, on Mother's Day morning Steve and I woke up to find that every one of the desktop computers in our home office had either died or was obviously on the verge of gasping for their last breath. It would be nice to be able to claim that we didn't panic ... but we did ... just a little.

We could see days of lost productivity ahead of us while the computers were being repaired and reloaded ... and if you've been in this business for any length of time you'll understand just how bad reloading a computer can be. You'll have lots of very useful little programs and plugins and you just know that you're never going to find them all if your hard drive gets wiped.

So, yes we panicked ... but not for very long ... because we've been in business long enough to know that the very worst you can do when something that's really important goes drastically wrong is to panic. Of course, panic is a natural human reaction but the more you panic when you're in business the less chance you have of surviving that drastic problem that's just occurred.

So, in our situation, instead of running around in ever decreasing circles until we disappeared up our own fundamental orifices, we got down to the tedious business of backing everything up before the two struggling machines died and we also set about tracking down all those elusive programs and plugins that we needed but hadn't saved when we first downloaded them.

Now we're four days on from that rather alarming morning and we're definitely back in business. In fact we were back in business a whole lot faster than we expected to be simply because we had been able to back up our important files and track down the sources of those plugins etc. that we use all the time. Sure there was some downtime but only two of the computers had to be reloaded and that didn't take as much time as we had expected ... although any lost time can be frustrating.

So when things go wrong, don't panic ... at least not for more than a few minutes. Instead, take a deep breath, look at what you will have to do to overcome the problem and think through the steps that you'll have to take to survive ... and then get on and do whatever needs to be done.

If you do that then you'll be like us and be able to look back and think that whatever the problem might have been wasn't as bad as it first looked. If you remain stuck in panic mode then the problem will grow into be the major disaster you thought it would be and it really can destroy your business.

Don't hide
One of the biggest mistakes people who come into this industry make is to only mix with other adult webmasters. It's certainly something that Steve and I did when we first arrived in adult because it seemed to be the best place to get the advice we needed. After a while it seemed like the place we really belonged and so we never ventured outside of adult webmaster boards and forums.

Now that I look back on that time I regret that we didn't start hanging out in mainstream sooner because those guys really do have a lot to teach us. Don't get me wrong, mainstream webmaster forums are just as full of worthless information as adult is, but there are some guys out there doing some cutting-edge stuff and it's very interesting to watch them in action.

Over there in mainstream the action isn't just confined to forums and webmaster boards. There are blogs being written by some very knowledgeable people that are definitely worth following and there's information about some great new apps being passed around on places like Twitter.

Two apps that Steve and I have picked up on from some of our Twitter contacts are Evernote - evernote.com - and a very interesting image search engine called Tineye - tineye.com. If you have your own images out there on the mainstream side of the Net, and you want to make sure that no one is stealing them and using them as their own, then TinEye is definitely something you need to be looking at.

So don't hide yourself away in adult ... get out there and mix with the people in mainstream because they have plenty of things to teach us and you'll miss out if you stay hidden away here in mainstream. And I'll let you in on a little secret ... some of the most knowledgeable people here in adult have been out there in mainstream for years so come and join us.