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Of eggs and baskets
One thing that most newcomers to the adult industry fail to realize is that when they start in this industry they're starting a small business. Of course, building free sites and galleries may not seem to have much, if anything, to do with being in business. And at first you just won't believe me when I tell you that the fundamentals of running a small adult related business on line are just the same as running any small business in the real world.

However, if you survive long enough, you will begin to realize that being an adult webmaster involves running a small business and that you too are governed by the same economic forces that govern every other small business. That means that being an adult webmaster is no more of a guarantee of making a lot of money than being an electrician or plumber is.

Of course when we start we all like to think that we're in a business where we just can't fail but the truth is that our business is every bit as fragile as any other small business. The small business of any adult webmaster is just as likely to fail as is the small business of anyone else who's listed in the yellow pages for your town or city.

That's why it's important to be aware of what is important to your survival. Of course, understanding basic business principles is very important. You need to learn about cash flow, you need to understand the taxation laws as they apply to you and you need to understand that it will take a while before your business can support you.

Those are all factors that affect mainstream businesses too and another important fundamental that both bricks and mortar businesses and online businesses have to deal with is exposure. If you're running a bricks and mortar business that involves selling products then you need to set up in a location where people will see your business and you also need to advertise to get people coming through the door.

Here in the online adult business you still need people coming through your door but we tend not to think of them as individuals ... or even real people. Instead we refer to them as traffic and we understand that we need traffic to make sales. But we don't have a bricks and mortar business that can be seen by people passing by; instead we need to take our online business to places where the people hang out.

The obvious place for us is to get our business - our free sites and galleries - listed on the major link lists and TGPs and when we do that we begin to get the people coming through the doors to look at what we're selling. But in this industry there are a lot of tire kickers around - people who want to look but don't necessarily want to buy - so we also have to take our business to those places where people are more likely to buy.

For some bricks and mortar businesses that may mean setting up shop in a more affluent neighborhood while for us it may mean getting our sites listed in the search engines.

A good position in Google can mean the difference between a great level of income and an income level of some third-world refugee. So adult webmasters should be working hard to get good rankings in the search engines and, interestingly enough, mainstream webmasters fight for those good search engine positions too.

In some ways adult webmasters are a little more fortunate than mainstream webmasters who are trying to sell products. At least we have our link lists and TGPs to send us traffic while over in mainstream many of those guys are completely at the mercy of the search engines.

A slight change in the algorithm and their top ranking and income producing sites disappear and so does their income. When that happens many of those small businesses never recover.

That's why, whether we're selling adult products or mainstream products, we should never put all our eggs in the one basket. Here in adult you should not rely totally on link lists and TGPs for your traffic. In mainstream you should not rely totally on the search engines for your traffic - and that's a warning for those who come into adult with the intention of relying totally on search engines for their traffic too.

Instead you should be searching for, and using, every possible source of traffic you can find. Even think seriously about print advertising. Yes, I know that may sound old-fashioned and not something that could possibly succeed for adult products, but there are adult webmasters out there who are making a steady income from traffic they obtained through print advertising. And if you want to sell mainstream products on line you would be crazy to ignore print advertising.

Steve and I are in the final stages of setting up a small mainstream online shop. We have a short, catchy URL that will work well in print. It will also work on the side of a bus, on a billboard, on a flyer, on websites and just about anywhere else we care to put it.
v Of course, we'll be pushing hard for a good search engine placement and we'll be pushing the business online in other ways too but we're not going to be putting all our eggs in the one basket.

If we did that our business would almost certainly fail and we didn't start in this business to fail.