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How would you like to run a business where 99 per cent of your potential customers thought that you were going to rip them off?

Sure all those people might come into your store and look at what you had displayed on the shelves. They might even pick those items up and look at them from all angles but they'll always put them down and walk out of your store without buying anything because they're sure that they can't trust you.

It doesn't sound as though you're going to be making much money if the vast majority of your customers are sure that they can't trust you does it? It seems as though you're going to be doing a lot of hard work for not much return and who would want to be running a business like that?

Well the fact is that if you're selling memberships in adult sites the chances are you're experiencing exactly what I've just been talking about. People don't trust you ... you send them somewhere that asks them for their credit card information and they expect to get ripped off so sales aren't going to happen.

But you can take some comfort from the fact that it happens over in mainstream too. Over there potential buyers have the expectation that they're going to get ripped off too ... but the bad news is that they know that the chances of them getting ripped off are less in mainstream than they are here in adult.

Here in adult there have been operators who have been ripping their customers off for years. They've done it with false or misleading advertising ... they've done it with hidden cross-sales ... they've done it with more obvious cross-sales ... they've done it with recurring billing that wasn't so obvious ... they've done it in every way they possibly could and now the general perception is that if you buy a membership in a porn site then you're going to get burned.

So do we as an industry care that people think that we're nothing but crooks and thieves? I guess that there are a lot of us who do care that we're viewed in such a negative light but sadly there's not much we can do to rid the industry of the crooks and the best we can do as individuals is not support sponsors who are blatantly ripping off their customers.

But that's not all we can do because we need to look at the messages that our free sites and galleries are sending to the people who view them. Of course they're going to be seeing porn but what else are they seeing when they look at your sites? What is the subliminal message that your sites are sending to anyone who looks at them?

Are they seeing messages that tell them they can trust you or are they seeing the same old warning messages that tell them that they're about to be ripped off?

What can you do to your website to make it seem more trustworthy? For anyone building a mainstream website there's plenty of advice out there on the Web on what to do with your site design and how to speak to the people who are visiting your website.

Unfortunately most of that advice doesn't apply to adult sites ... especially if you're building a gallery but that doesn't mean you can't get some ideas from reading that advice. However, you will find some advice out there for mainstream websites that can be easily adapted to adult if you're main form of marketing is anything that's bigger than a gallery.

If you're using any form of multi-page site to market your products you have more room to speak to the people who are hitting your sites. You have more time to engage them and speak to them on a personal level. There's more time to share something of yourself with your site's visitors and that's important if you want to get them to trust your marketing message.

While speaking directly to a potential customer with the "you" word is important if you want to make a sale don't go overboard and only speak in that way. Be prepared to cut back a little on the impact of your marketing message and add in some "I" and "me" words too because they will make your marketing message a little more personal and add something to the trust factor of your website.

But that's not the only things you can do. Look for other examples of ways to increase the amount of trust people have in your websites and don't stop looking because we have a long way to go to reach the point where people will trust us enough to buy what we're selling and if we don't start now our sales figures will never get any better.