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So we're into a new week and a new month and here, where I live in Australia, we're into a public holiday and that suits me fine because I really don't feel much like work today. But despite how I feel we are hard at work although I did follow my own advice about getting out and enjoying some time out and we drove down the coast a bit to get some great shots of a storm coming in from the sea.

There's something about looming storm clouds that really fascinate me ... they look so dark and foreboding but around here they often just seem to fade away.

In lots of ways those clouds are just like lots of the drama that go on in the world of adult marketing. Something slowly builds up that threatens to destroy us or our business model and then it all just fades away.

Of course, just like a threatening storm, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't take precautions and make preparations but you really shouldn't panic. Well you shouldn't panic just so long as you haven't been doing anything silly or risky or cutting any corners in what you have been doing.

If you have been taking a few risks then maybe those looming storm clouds might be enough to convince you that it's time to get your business in order. But of course that's up to you.

Personally I always like to be prepared so I'm a little conservative in my approach to just about everything.

What do you know about your host?
A week or so ago I came across a few complaints on an adult webmaster's forum about the host that I've been with for years. I've always been very happy with the guys we host our server with and I've never heard anything bad about them but here were several webmasters who seemed to have genuine complaints about their hosting.

While their complaints seemed quite valid they were using shared hosting and what they were griping about didn't seem to have any impact on anyone on dedicated hosting so I'm not in any hurry to move on. But it did get me wondering about what might happen in the future and I realized that, with so many forums to cover, I may never hear of any problems that might impact my business.

Are you in a similar situation? Would you know if the host that controls your server is having any issues? It's an important question because your host is one of the major choke points in any person's online business so would you know if others were experiencing problems with your host ... problems that could begin to have an impact on your business?

Obviously with so many forums and message boards out there it's going to be very hard to keep up with any news that might appear about your host if you're not a regular on the board or forum where the complaints are made. However, there is a simple solution.

If you have a Gmail account you can set up a Google Alert that will let you know when anything about your host is said anywhere on the Net. Google Alerts are simple to set up and they make a great early-warning system for hosting problems and just about anything else that you need to be watching for.

Learning from the guys with big numbers
Have you ever wondered how much traffic some of the big mainstream sites get every month? Well comScore.com has announced that during March the two most popular mainstream website categories were cars and politics and the most popular mainstream site in those categories was the General Motors site with 7.6 million visitors.

Hyundai was next with 5.4 million visitors; PoliticsDaily.com was next with 5.3 million visitors and Toyota was in fourth place with 5.1 million visitors. Let's cut the politics site out of the equation and let's only think about those three car sites.

Those are big numbers in anyone's estimation ... 7.6 million visitors ... but what did General Motors and the others do to turn all their visitors into buyers of their product and is there anything that we can learn from their sites?

Well the one thing that I often take away from car sites is a feeling of almost despair. These guys get huge amounts of traffic to their sites but they seem almost unwilling to try and convert that traffic into people flocking to the showrooms to buy their products.

For example what sort of colors do those sites use ... what sort of marketing text do they use? I'm not sure what the Hyundai site in the United States looks like ... thanks to geo-targeting I can only see the Australian Hyundai site but if that's like the American one then the colors are dull and boring and the text is enough to put me to sleep.