“Anything is hard to find, when you will not open your eyes…”“Anything is hard to find, when you will not open your eyes…”
One of the most common questions I’m asked is: how does someone really make money in the online adult business?
“No, I mean really,” the questioning party will ask. “I know that everyone says focus on traffic, network, and stuff like that.” The next question will usually be associated by a little twinkling gleam in his or her eye: “What’s the trick? What’s the real trick?”
Okay, I give in. Yeah, there’s a trick. It’s not commonly talked about. This “real trick” is less glamorous than you may think. It’s not sneaky or misleading. It doesn’t require conniving or B.S. skills… and it includes a healthy dose of common sense, planning, and persistence.
Indulge me; hear me out. There are many webmasters who fit the following profile: some guy wakes up one day and decides to try to make some money in this online adult thing he’s heard about. “Gosh,” he thinks, “it’d be great to make a lot of money and hardly have to work at all!” So he builds a number of free sites focusing on various niches; does daily submissions to TGPs and top lists; works link trades; and that eventually, his daily routine consists of that never-ending search for “just a bit more traffic today.” Hey, who’s that? That’s Johnny!
Let’s take a closer look at him… Mr. Johnny-average webmaster. Let’s give him good or even above-average website design and management skills. Let’s say he understands the importance of networking and working traffic trades and deals. He even has a domain name or two and pays his monthly bandwidth bills. He’s looking for a big hit! But after a few months, he’s hit a rut. Can’t seem to get more traffic. Can’t seem to cross that “couple-hundred-bucks-a-month” mark. Almost seems like someone placed an invisible wall there — one that can’t be broken through! So what gives?
Well, the fact is that this barrier was constructed by Johnny himself. He unwittingly started working on it back when he first decided to get into the business. He steadily built it up even as traffic to his site started to grow. By the time his site actually started to make a little money the barrier was sturdily constructed and nearly impregnable. How’d this happen? Johnny failed to create a PLAN in which his INVESTMENT had a calculated RETURN ON INVESTMENT. This calculated RETURN ON INVESTMENT would have required a judgment call from Johnny: would his INVESTMENT (including his time and money) be a reasonable sacrifice to achieve his goal?
As Johnny started work on his site, the MAXIMUM VALUE he could have hoped to achieve by building an adult website without a PLAN was restricted from the start. To achieve a better RETURN ON INVESTMENT, Johnny would have been required to create a better PLAN. And a better PLAN would have most assuredly called for a bigger INVESTMENT. Unless Johnny’s goal really was only to make a couple of hundred bucks a month from his endeavors, he fell short of his dreams. Note that I didn’t say he fell short of achieving his GOAL… his GOAL was never clearly defined in the first place. It didn’t even exist. He fell short of achieving his dreams. And dreams, my friends, are called “dreams” for a reason.
My long-winded explanation can be summarized thusly: Johnny could have easily avoided his fuck-up if he’d done a little planning and objective analysis of the marketplace. In short, Johnny needed to start with a business perspective, not a vague supposition of what being a successful adult webmaster must be like.
