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When I first jumped into being an affiliate marketer for adult related paysites the mantra was always build and submit ... build and submit ... build and submit.

Forget about stats and analytics ... just build and submit. That was it ... keep on building and keep on submitting and everything will turn out for the best. Of course somewhere along the way newbies would run into a similar mantra that went along the lines of ... find what works and then rinse and repeat.

Somehow though not many people paid much attention to that second mantra ... I guess they were just too busy building and submitting to stop and actually think about what was working for them.

Yesterday though I came across the perfect example of why it's important that you know what works for you and what doesn't. At a meeting in another town I was introduced to the owner of a large and very specialised business. He was making a lot of money from a relatively small pool of potential clients.

Even though he was making money he was sure he could make even more if only he could reach out to more potential clients so he was spending lots of money advertising everywhere he could find that he thought would work for him. But for some reason his pool of potential clients wasn't increasing.

The first question I just had to ask him was what form of advertising was working best for him ... and he couldn't tell me. When any potential client rang his office this staff never bothered to ask where the caller had seen mention of the business. They just never asked the obvious question so he had no real idea of where his clients were coming from.

Oh he had plenty of ideas of where his customers might be coming from ... he was sure that many were coming from his website even though it wasn't ranking anywhere in the search engines for the terms that were important for his business. And there were several other places he advertised that he was sure were working for him ... but they were just hunches. Despite the fact that he had no data he just kept throwing money at what he thought was working for him.

A little later I was introduced to a tradesman who ran a very successful one-man business. Like the first guy, the tradesman advertises in quite a few different places but unlike the first guy the tradesman knew what was working for him. He knew where his customers were finding him and he had a laser-sharp focus on advertising in those places.

He had a website and he knew that people were seeing his website and calling him but he also knew that many more customers were coming from a local newsletter produced by a local publishing business that was dropped into the letterboxes in town once a month.

This guy wasn't bedazzled by all the hype that still surrounds advertising on the Net and he wasn't put off advertising in something as old-fashioned as a newsletter either. He knew what was working for him because he asked every single person who called his business.

One guy was prepared to splash a lot of money around in the hope that some would stick and turn into new customers for his business. The other guy was prepared to take the time to find out what was working and direct his advertising dollars to those areas that he knew would send customers to him.

One was getting true value for his advertising dollar while the other one looked as though he was getting a return on his investment but probably wasn't getting anywhere near the return that he thought he was.

So how are things working for you?

Here in adult we tend not to spend a lot of money on marketing ... especially if we're just starting out ... but we do tend to spend a lot of time on marketing and, as we all know, time is money.

So what forms of marketing are sending the most traffic to your websites? What forms of marketing are sending the traffic that converts into the most money in your pocket? What forms of marketing are actually costing you money by sending lots of tyre kickers but very few buyers?

If you don't know the answers to those questions then it's time you started looking for the answers because if you don't you could be working really hard and doing not much more than just wasting your time.