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Well this certainly seems to be the day that a lot of people are heading back to some normal work time after the Christmas/New Year break. That's the way it is with us too and there won't be anymore sneaking away from the office before closing time or slow starts the day with long breakfasts down by the beach.

Holiday time is very definitely over for another year and we're getting down to some serious work. Well we would be if only we could get motivated to do it. I know Steve and I started off this morning with plenty of good intentions but ... well ... after a couple of weeks of working at something like half-pace it's kind of hard to get back into the real full-on work rate that we usually maintain.

But we're going to do it and if you want to succeed in this business then you're going to have to step up your work rate too.

I know that Steve would like nothing better than to be able to wander out onto the back deck with a beer and a great pile of reading that he has to catch up with. The changes that Google and the other search engines are going to implement this year have had Steve and a few of his contacts diving back into some fairly esoteric patents and papers going back to 2004 that deal with what's coming.

While I'm glad that it's him and not me that has to read about things like 'Personalized Page Rank' and “Automated Evaluation of Search Engine Performance via Implicit User Feedback' the changes that are coming certainly do get me excited and coping with those changes will probably mean that we'll have to learn some new skill sets. I guess that I'm geeky enough to see learning new things as fun.

One thing that is becoming obvious as Steve wades through all that reading is that words are still going to be very important to anyone who wants to rank well in the search engines. I know that there are a lot of people in the adult online industry who don't believe it's all about words at all.

To them it's all about the pictures and the video but if you ignore the words then you're going to find that you're going to miss out on some valuable search engine traffic. Of course Google and the other engines are moving towards being able to index flash and video but words ... text ... are still going to be vital when it comes to good search engine rankings.

At the same time good words ... good text ... is also going to be important when it comes to engaging the people you're trying to sell your sponsor too. Sure you can show them hardcore images and video but you can warm them up and get them interested in looking at what you're selling with words/text.

Weave a story around the images or video and you will give some meaning to what the surfers are seeing in your galleries and on your sites. That's what will really engage them and get them interested in seeing more.

A few years ago now, when every affiliate marketer and their dog was trying to make a buck pushing Adult Friend Finder with traditional galleries and free sites one of their top affiliates was doing something quite different to what most other affiliates were trying and his sales were huge in comparison to every one else.

He built galleries that were nothing like what you would expect. Down the left-hand side of the gallery were some fairly softcore images that were way bigger than thumbnails but much smaller than the big images that affiliates were using at the time. On the right-hand side of the gallery was a short story that focused on what was appearing in the images and brought the sponsor into the story as well.

While the rest of us were doing the standard 20 images and a little bit of text and getting ok sales figures this guy was using images and text and making some serious coin.

Even today words and text can be important ... even if all you're showing your surfers is video. Think about it for a moment, they get a bunch of short clips that might show some great sex but don't really get the viewer engaged because the people he's watching are complete strangers with no connection to him at all. Once he's seen one clip it's so easy to skip on to some other porn site.

But add in some text that tells a simple story about what he's going to see in the video ... give a little background ... and suddenly the surfer is taken beyond the fucking and he's looking at people who are going to be interesting. That's where the engagement kicks in and the surfer wants to see more ... and of course the best place to see more is over at the sponsor.

So don't think that words and text are a thing of the past. They're just as important as they ever were and if you're not using them to make money then you are definitely missing out.