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If you're new to this industry it's understandable that all you want to do is make enough for your first payment to arrive in the mail or appear in your bank account.

Making money is everyone's first goal here ... it's a sign that you have arrived ... that you can make it here ... and so we all concentrate on doing whatever we have to do to get that first payment and we tend to look no further than that first payment.

Of course when that first payment arrives we then start thinking about the next one and we focus on that and we go on doing that every month till it almost becomes automatic. We fly on auto thinking only of the next payment without giving much thought to anything that is any further out than that next payment.

But if you want to survive then before long you simply must begin looking further into the future.

Some time ago a new mainstream client came to us and asked us to set up a shop for him. The product he wanted to sell was fairly basic and low cost and while it had wide appeal there was plenty of competition in the market place.

He did quite well for a little over a year and two Christmases. He advertised his product ... he clearly identified himself on his online shop so that people understood that they were dealing with a real person who took a lot of interest in every order that came in ... and he busted his nuts to ensure that he gave good customer service

It all worked for him ... he began to take market share from his competitors ... customers that had been wowed by his customer service began referring their friends . Life was looking good ... but then sales began to slow and no matter what he did they didn't pick up.

The problem wasn't that he had a bad product or that people no longer trusted him ... the problem was that he was a one-trick pony. He had one product ... one very good product that could last up to seven years before it needed replacing ... and he had never bothered to look beyond that one product.

So when he had saturated the market place and sold as many of his product that he could possibly sell he was going to have to wait another six or seven years before there would be another buying cycle for that one product he sold.

Of course no one can survive that long without decent sales and the client is now desperately looking around for something else to sell and he'll never make the fundamental mistake he made again. But then there's no guarantee that he will survive until sales of his new products take off either.

And right there in that story is a clear lesson for adult webmasters. Whether you're new or experienced you need to be looking way beyond the next round of sponsors' checks ... you need to be thinking well into the future and continually bringing new products online because if you don't you'll be just as much a one-trick pony as our mainstream client was/is.

You also need to be looking into the future to plan for new ways to market your products ... new ways of getting more traffic to your sites ... new ways of generating your own traffic . You also need to be looking at ways of getting the traffic that has already bought from you to come back to buy your new products.

That's a challenge for our client ... the product he sold at the beginning was quite specialised so how does he sell very different products to the people who already trust him?

In our industry the challenge is to get people to notice us in the first place and connect the dots when they look at more of our sites and more of our marketing. If we deliver a great product the first time ... and the people we have sold to realise that the marketing they're now seeing is coming from the same person who delivered the last time they bought porn ... then we've got an easier sell.

Mainstream understands that it's easier and cheaper to sell to someone who is already a satisfied customer and there are parts of our industry that understand that too ... but a lot of adult webmasters fail to understand that at all.

So if you want to survive beyond the first couple of rounds of sponsors' checks then you not only need to be continually looking for new products to sell and new ways of selling those products but you also need to look at ways of establishing a connection with the people who have bought from you.

Do that ... become more than just a one-trick pony ... and you will survive. Fail to learn that lesson and you'll be gone in 6 to 12 months.