Online adult entertainment is a strange business. Insofar as you can get to know anyone primarily via message boards and ICQ, you get to know your competitors quite well and your customers not at all. A lot of webmasters visit boards just to take a break from work, but there are always plenty of requests for help and suggestions. But then you see one of the other strange things about this business: such advice is very rarely acted upon.

For a few years it was incredibly easy to make money, so maybe it is inevitable that adult online attracts many people who are running away from failure than people who are striding purposefully towards success. Such people are lazy, disorganized, undisciplined: many even managed to fail when it was almost impossible not to make money from porn. I guess they are the people most likely to ask for ideas, but what they are really hoping for are neat solutions they can apply with no thought or effort, yet will drop a pot of gold into their laps. Preferably overnight. Small surprise that legions of would-be webmasters are gone and forgotten.

What makes people approach work, often life in general, in ways which guarantee failure or at best modest success? What makes people shy away from trying anything outside their experience and instead, put up a near impenetrable barrier to their own progress? Ego must bear a lot of the blame. That fragile part of our minds which is terrified of failure. Ego isn’t an energetic force which drives successful people, it is the inertia which produces failures. Successful people handle failure, they have to because it’s inevitable. Ego is also a liar because it tells us that not trying isn’t failure, when it is the biggest failure of all.

If you are sitting down every day, plugging away as usual and getting by on a trickle of checks, maybe even doing better than that, but still far from doing as well as you would like, stop and ask yourself why. Chances are that you are not dumb and even if you are lazy, that’s only a defense mechanism to prevent you from testing yourself. Figure out how to get past the block in your head which is stopping you from being successful.

Make change part of your routine

Some of the once biggest names in online porn have already disappeared or become largely irrelevant. In the past couple of years, several operations have closed or been swallowed by others and during the next few years we shall see a lot more high-profile casualties. We put this process down to the growing pains of a maturing industry and we don’t often think about why these specific operations failed to make it.

Some will not have failed in the usual sense. They may have fulfilled their owners’ ambitions or the owners might have had offers which were too good to refuse. But many more simply fall victim to a failure to change with the times. This is a very fast-changing business and if you do not change with it, you will be left behind.

This applies to everyone, big or small. Although in many respects it can be better to be primarily focused on one area, depending entirely on one aspect of the industry is dangerous. Spare part of your time to develop something in an area you think may be on the rise. And at least once a month and preferably more often, ask yourself what new wrinkles you have introduced to your main activity. If the answer is none, the reality - whether it is immediately obvious or not - is that your business has slipped backwards while some of your competitors have been moving forwards. Let that go on for too long and there is only one possible consequence.

Develop your skills

The more competitive an industry becomes, the harder it is to be successful in it. Standards rise. A design which would have worked 5 years ago, today will interest no-one. In 2000, Joe Blow could build a 100K TGP from scratch inside 6 months, but now even experienced traffic traders have to work. It isn’t enough to keep doing the same things day after day and rely solely on increasing experience to get you through.

In particular, make an effort to study topics such as general business principles, marketing and site usability. These are not just abstract principles and unless you have truly remarkable instincts, you will get a host of ideas for practical improvements to your sites and the way you work. You may be intimidated by these subjects or convinced they will be boring, but such knowledge is increasingly important and a vital part of becoming the professional you need to be to compete.

Take a close look at what you do. Are you so thinly spread that you are unable to do much more than scratch the surface of the areas you work in and the tools with which you work. That may not be a major issue if you can (and want to) hire people to do things for you, but otherwise it likely means that all your sites are increasingly showing their age. Maybe it is time to rationalize your operation, focus on its most productive areas, thus freeing up the time to be able to learn the skills needed to develop those areas further.

The main thing is to think! Don’t just climb back on the treadmill every morning and hope for the best. Failure isn’t the worst that can happen. If you don’t grab your life and your work by the throat and become successful, you could be looking at upwards of 30 years of tedious labor. I seriously doubt that is all you wish for yourself.