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Hmmm I've just been looking at yet another thread on another webmaster board where the guy who started the thread was complaining about poor sales for the last couple of days. It's a recurring theme that just never seems to go away.

People see their sales tank for a couple of days ... they complain about it and say it must be the company that's processing the sales and some people agree while others say they're having a wonderful time with sales.

But today's thread was different ... sure it was started by a guy who was suffering from almost no sales and others did join in with the same old responses but so did another guy who looked at things differently. Yes, his sales had tanked too but instead of looking at his sales figures and giving up in despair, or hitting the boards to complain, he looked a bit further.

He went back to his stats and looked at the amount of traffic that was coming to his websites and he noticed that his sales had tanked because the traffic hitting his biggest earning site had dropped right off too. According to him there had been no change in the search engine results pages that fed his site but his traffic had died.

I wonder how many of us ever bother to look at our traffic stats when our sales take a dive. It's quite likely that many webmasters would never even think to do that because it's been drummed into them that the only figure that matters in this business is the figure that appears to the right of the dollar sign on our affiliate checks.

Of course we need to pay some attention to that figure but we also need to look at our traffic figures and at search engine placement and our placement on link lists and TGPs as well when we want to get a much clearer picture of how we're doing with our sales.

We also need to be considering the fact that maybe people are starting to get their porn in other ways. It could be that more and more people aren't waiting to get back to their PCs at home or in the office to jump onto a porn site because now they can get all the hardcore porn they want on their cell phones.

In that same thread one guy who runs some mobile porn sites suggested that he hadn't actually seen any fluctuation in traffic or sales. Sometimes you have to be a little skeptical of claims like that but these days it certainly is possible.

If you have a cell phone that's capable of browsing the web you can grab your dose of porn no matter where you are. I've even heard of people accessing porn while they're riding the bus and that's not as improbable as it may sound. People have got used to zoning out and ignoring all those around them when they've got the tracks going on the iPod so how hard is it to zone out while you're surfing the Net on your cell phone?

I wonder if the ability to surf porn on your cell phone no matter where you are will have an impact on another regular type of post we see on webmaster boards. How many people complain that spring break and summer vacations are times when traffic numbers ... and sales ... fall through the floor?

That's a traffic trend that's been around since people surfed the web on the most basic of modems but that may all be about to change. If you've got a web-enabled cell phone you can surf the Net from anywhere just so long as your cell phone is getting a signal and that means that people who go on vacation, go on spring break or just head outdoors during summer can still get all the porn they want.

So where does that take us? Well for me there's a clear indication that I need to start building in some cell phone friendliness for some of my websites because a site that's designed for a PC is not going to work on a cell phone.

And that's what it should be indicating to you too. We're fast approaching the time where, if you don't have sites that can be easily viewed on the small screen of a cell phone then you are going to be seriously missing out.

So what are you waiting for? Go on ... start doing some research into mobile sites ... start looking for sponsors who can accept mobile traffic ... and start covering all your bases when it comes to traffic and sales.