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So Black Friday has passed and now it's Cyber Monday and if you run some online stores in mainstream then you've probably got your fingers crossed and hoping for some great sales today. And if you've been working hard to get your e-commerce sites optimized for sales and search engine position you may do well ... if the buyers are out there.

Of course that's the question that we're all asking in difficult times like these ... are the buyers really out there and by the end of the day we'll know the answer. During the rest of the year we just have to presume that the buyers will be there and put in the hard work to keep on building up your e-commerce sites ... and that can be hard.

The trap for newcomers
It's hard to stay motivated when there aren't many buyers around ... it's so much easier to try something else and keep working away at something you may think won't pay dividends further down the track. But even here in adult that's exactly what you have to do.

You have to keep on getting up day after day and building out your e-commerce sites, building your free sites and galleries and submitting them to every TGP and link list that you can find. And getting that across to newcomers to the adult industry or to mainstream is just so hard.

In mainstream we often see people who have paid us to build an e-commerce site begin to lose interest in the site just a week or two after it goes live. Despite being told that sales don't happen overnight that's exactly what they do expect and after 10 days or so and they haven't scored their first sale they begin to think that they're wasting their time and money and they should go back to doing more promotion for their bricks and mortar store.

Of course once they reach that point it's quite possible that their online store will become a waste of time and money because those sites need to be promoted and if the owner isn't making an effort to promote them then they will fail.

Here in adult many newcomers begin to lose interest if they haven't made their first sale within a week or so and they drift away. Many don't even last that long and if they don't make their first sale with their very first gallery or free site they give up.

Yet it's in those early days when newcomers are learning how to make a sale ... it's during those early days that they need to stay focused and committed and the few who do are the ones who will succeed.

It's not only newcomers to e-commerce and adult marketing online who have trouble staying focused.

The trap for the more experienced
A little over 12 months ago we built an online store for a client. He had no store-front presence, everything he sold was sold online and that worked for him because his potential client base was spread right across the country.

He advertised his online store in a variety of places and his first sale did arrive within a week of the store going online and from then on the sales just kept rolling in. And they weren't small sales either ... some sales were up around the $600 mark and the average sale was well above $100. Then he opened up a store-front for there was a limited client base here in town and the store did quite well too.

He bought in more stock and as far as we knew the sales kept happening and everything seemed to be going quite well for him. Then the other day we got a call from him telling us that he had sold his business and the new owner would be contacting us shortly ... which he did.

The new owner asked us to take a look at the online store for him because he couldn't find a lot of the new stock listed on the website even though it was on display in the store. Of course he couldn't find it there because the original owner hadn't listed it there ... in fact he'd stopped listing any new products on the site.

Just why he would do that when the online store was attracting plenty of sales is a bit of a mystery but it seems that it was probably easier just to put a price sticker on the stock in the store-front than it was to enter the stock in the back-end of the e-commerce site. One took a few seconds while the other took a few minutes ... he wasn't even bothering to add new stock levels to the online store even though the listings were already in place.

Here was another guy who had lost interest in his website but, unlike the newcomers I mentioned a moment ago, this guy was definitely making money but he wasn't prepared to do the work to make it keep happening.

Sadly there are people like that here in adult online marketing too. They've done the hard yards, the money is beginning to role in and somehow they fall into the trap of thinking that it will go on rolling in so they don't have to work at making it happen any more.

Wherever you are in your online marketing career don't fall into the trap of thinking that it's so easy to make money online that you don't have to work at it. This is a business just like any other and if you want to make money and keep on making money here you have to be prepared to work hard for a very long time to come.