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If you have been reading my columns here for any length of time you will have come across some of my thoughts on ways to make your marketing message more targeted and more effective.

From my point of view the most obvious way to make that message more targeted is to actually engage your surfer in a conversation ... in much the same way as any sales person in the real world would do. You talk to them ... ask them questions and lead them further along the sales path till you reach the point where you can make a sale.

Obviously there is an art to achieving good sales results out there in the real world and it's even more of an art here online because you don't have the advantage of being able to see the person you're talking to. But that doesn't mean that it can't be done ... it just means that you have to work harder to achieve good results.

Now if your main selling platform is a gallery or a free site the amount of “talking” you can do is limited and you're going to have to work very hard to engage your visitors with as few words as possible. However if you're one of the small group of adult marketers who use blogs to sell your product then you have a much better chance to engage your visitors ... but are you actually using that opportunity or wasting it?

When you do a post and toss in some images do you actually set out to engage your readers? Do you weave those images into your sales pitch? Does your marketing message look like a sales pitch or do you make some effort to draw your readers into a marketing message that looks more like a story than a sales pitch?

If you're doing nothing but hitting your site visitors with a sales pitch then basically you're no different to the guy in sideshow alley at the county fair who yells his message at the people passing by. He just repeats his message over and over again and sprays it out there in the hope that someone will hear it and spend some money on what he is offering.

He's playing a numbers game and that's what you're doing if you're just repeating the same message over and over again and hoping that the images will engage your site visitors. The only difference is that the sideshow alley guy is almost certainly spraying his message to more people than you are so he will draw more people in than you wil.

If you do already write a story around the images that you're posting is it a story that actually engages the reader and lets them get right into the fantasy that you're weaving or is it more a story about you or some other person that leaves your reader feeling that they're just observing something from a long distance?

Sometimes writing a story and leaving the reader as just an observer can be quite effective but at some point you have to draw them into the story to encourage them to buy what you're selling and that can be hard if you've kept them out of the story till the very end.

So if you are using stories on your adult blog to engage people maybe you need to think about increasing that engagement. Perhaps it's time to start engaging your readers right from the start and write those stories in a way that puts them in the center of the action from the very first sentence.

Try writing the story in the first person so that your readers are seeing words like 'I', 'me' and 'my' because all of those words help focus the reader on where they are in the fantasy that you're weaving. Stories that use that approach can also be a lot of fun to write because it's putting you in the center of the action too.

But if you are using blogs and erotic stories as a marketing tool don't get carried away. The trick is to bring the reader to the point where he just has to see some more and of course the place he or she can do that is on your sponsor's site.

You also want to use as few words as possible and you should try limiting yourself to somewhere between 500 and 750 words. That can be hard but you just have to remember that you're writing a sales pitch disguised as a short story.

Longer stories may be fun to write but they won't do any better job of selling your product and writing them will eat up your time too. And whether you're building a gallery or writing a short erotic story you have to keep in mind that time is money.