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Adult Business Ethics
Posted On 01 Aug 2002
So, you have made the decision to start out into the wild world of adult websites, have you? You are likely wondering what it is you need to know to get going in this business, as well as make a living for yourself.So, you have made the decision to start out into the wild world of adult websites, have you? You are likely wondering what it is you need to know to get going in this business, as well as make a living for yourself. You are probably thinking about what sort of site to build, how to market it, where to get traffic and signups from and how much this is all going to cost you. Well, oddly enough, those are all secondary concerns. Your number one question should be about how you are going to conduct yourself and how you are going to run our business.
How you operate has more of an effect on your success and your bottom line than anything else. You need to firmly establish your codes of conduct and get your ethics in line before you do anything. The road to success is paved with the corpses of those who had great ideas yet failed because of their bad attitude and their penchance for dishonesty. While this sort of advice goes for anyone in any business in any industry, it is all the more important in the adult world since there is nothing more valuable than your reputation.
Your name becomes everything, if you have a good name, you will have a good time in this business since people will want to work with you and help you out. Develop a bad name and you are as good as good, you will be shunned and will lose out big time. It will not matter how much money you have or how good your ideas are, if people perceive you as a liar and a cheater, they will never do any sort of business with you.
Of course, you are thinking to yourself that you are a good person and that you would never do anything wrong, but there are potential stumbling blocks that you may never have even thought of, actions that you would not think to be bad until someone points them out. I want to try to educate a bit first, before someone does it for you, so that you can enter the online adult world with the right outlook and attitude and start to build your empire from day one.
The first thing you have to realize is that cheaters never win. Never cheat anyone, anytime, in any way. It will always come back to haunt you, always. If you are running a sponsor site, make sure to never shave your member webmasters’ sales. They will find out and your program will get a bad name, you will get a bad reputation and you will never be able to run a sponsor program again.
Same with free hosts. If you are going to start and run a free hosting site, then make sure that you never, ever steal your clients’ traffic – even tough it seems to have become a somewhat accepted practice. While some may accept it, you don’t have to allow it to happen. If everyone did that, it would pretty soon put an end to the redirections wouldn’t it?
Obviously, simply being honest and upfront will go a long way to keeping yourself on the straight and narrow, but there are other instances where it may not seem as obvious and apparent. How can you accidentally cheat, you must be wondering. Well there are a few ways and one of the most obvious is by putting improper META tags and keywords into your pages.
A great example is the guy who posted on one of the BBSs a few weeks ago. He was posting to try to come clean and admit that he had loaded up his porn site with video game keywords. While yes, he may have attracted a ton of search results with those spammed terms, and thus would have likely received tons of clicks to his site, the nasty backlash he suffered from his fellow webmasters simply cannot have made his foolish decision worthwhile. This guy is going to have a lot of trouble getting back any respect from his peers for a long time, and may never have the reputation he had before.
Never mind the fact that the deception he attempted would never have worked to his advantage and would never have gotten him the results he wanted. A searcher that is looking for video games, never mind their age, is simply looking for gaming information, not porn. What would make a webmaster think that surfers are going to suddenly decide to skip the game they were looking for and yank out their wallets so that they can have a yank?
Not only did this guy cheat, but he must not have even thought about it before he cheated. And even if he did stop and think for a minute, his reasoning was obviously so flawed as to be useless. As well, he could have gotten himself into some serious trouble, in any number of ways, because of his actions. Legal action from the game companies, legal action from parents, banned from search engines for spamming, the list goes on.
Every day I see people spamming like this – all the time and on all the search engines. Since I am almost always searching for something, I seem to get these spam results almost every day. While it may have gotten a bit better, as the engines are tightening their rules and their controls, there are still some glaring problems since some people are still getting away with it.
Even worse are the geniuses that still seem to slip through the screeners’ cracks and manage to spam the paid placement search engines. These obviously intelligent people are bidding real money on terms that have absolutely nothing to do with their site. What a great idea that is – pay for clicks so that people can come to your site and leave because you are not what you advertised. Brilliant.
Now, to make this sort of search engine behaviour seem even worse, I could point out how it is actually stealing, as well. How is it stealing? Well, if you are getting traffic that is interested in something other than what you are selling, that is traffic that should have gone to another site. Since you “took” that traffic and sent it to your site, you took it away from someone more deserving, you stole their traffic in essence.
If a user gets spam results enough times on a search engine, they will either stop using that engine or stop searching for that term. If they stop using the engine, then the engine loses, since that is a user of theirs that you abused. You may cost them ad revenue by your actions. That is stealing money from them. And if the user stops searching for that term, then the sites that are selling that term are losing traffic and potentially sales. If they lose a sale because of your actions, then that is pretty much the same as you stealing money from them.
Now, that is a strong stretch, I agree, but stealing is about as major a no-no as you get. It applies throughout the entire industry. Don’t steal content that belongs to other people to use for yourself. Even if you think the image is in the public domain, there really isn’t a public domain since that picture came from somewhere. Someone made and bought or sold it, and you have no right to use it. Use only that which is either given to you for free with express directions as to use, or that which you purchase with your own money.
Don’t steal anything else, either. Don’t take someone else’s idea, for instance and go with it. If you hear someone say that they have a great new site idea, let them have the first go at it, before you try to do something similar. Don’t steal articles or writings or other people’s words, especially if you try to pass it off as your own. If you want to use something, make sure to ask first. If you are going to link to it or otherwise, always give the proper credit.
Speaking of money, but not stealing, there are other things you are going to want to add to your personal code of business ethics. One of the biggest has got to be paying on time. If you buy and ad, make sure you pay for it, and quickly. The more advertisers that have to chase you down for payment, the more it will get out and the worse you are going to look. Do it enough and no will want to work with you, they will not help, because they do not want to get screwed like that have heard you have done to others.
This is even more important if you are going to run (or currently run) a sponsor site. The biggest thing that you have to do as a sponsor is pay your webmasters. If you have 10,000 webmasters working for you and you are late with one payment to one webmaster, there will be such a fuss, you will not believe it. And that one webmaster will go to every webmaster board there is an complain about you. Enough webmasters read that and no one is ever going to sign up for your program again. Pay when you promise to pay, period.
Now, if you are going to the boards to talk to other webmasters, or just to find out what people are up to and what the state of the industry is, then make sure to be on your best behaviour. Be as nice and helpful as possible, make a good name for yourself. If people start to like you personally, they are going to be much more likely to want to work with you. And if they think you are a good and nice person, they will have positive thoughts about you, which is always good. The better your are perceived, the better people think of you. The better they think of you, the more they will want to work with you. Amazing how being a nice person comes back to benefit you in the end, isn’t it?
Because people have a positive image of you, they will think you are honest and that you do everything above board. Don’t do anything to make them think otherwise. Be as honest as you can, admit when you screw up and don’t make promises you cannot keep. If you make offers on your site, stick to them, no matter what. Keep your business ethical and clean, pay your taxes and treat it like you would nay business. Partners don’t like bailing you out of jail, nor losing your partnership because the IRS closed you down for back taxes. There are a lot of things you do away from your peers’ eyes that can still have a major effect on your business and bottom line.
And if you are going to take a lot of what I am saying to heart and create yourself your own little personal code of conduct, then make sure you stick to what you come up with. Don’t pick and choose what rules you are going to follow on what days. Don’t change your behaviour for one person over another. If you come up with a set of rules that you are going to operate under, never deviate from them, ever. You have to not only be good, but you have to be consistent. Nobody likes having to play by different rules everyday and that is a sure way to not only piss people off, but simply confuse yourself.
The thing is, when you piss people off, they badmouth you and it can be hard to counter people’s personal attacks. For the same reason, try not to do it yourself, try not to flame other people publicly, no matter what they do. Nobody likes an argument and sometimes it does not matter who is right or wrong, both participants look stupid, especially when it is done in public. You want to keep your image clean, avoid getting into wars of words or mud slinging contests, it never benefits anyone. If you have problems, take it up with the applicable person, try to work it out between yourselves.
Part of the problem with badmouthing is that it can backfire on you in a very major way. If you accuse someone of something and then proceed to flame them unmercifully about it and then turn out to be wrong… then what? Then you have made the biggest ass of yourself you can imagine. Who is going to want to work with someone who flies off the handle at the slightest provocation, and without checking the facts first? That is your first step when dealing what might appear to be a bad situation. Always check the facts, do some research and make sure that what your are thinking is true before telling someone else that it is true.
This also holds true for what may appear to be too good to be true. Always check offers, always make sure that the people you are dealing with have the same moral code that you do, that they are not going to lie or cheat or steal. Make sure the offer is true, make sure it is possible. Look up the company, talk to others that have worked with them, patrol the webmaster boards and look for other people’s comments. This is only to protect your own butt. You can suffer sever backlash from just getting your name attached to a company or person that turns out to be corrupt. Stay away from anything that can harm you, your business, your bottom line and most important, your reputation.
Because in the end, your reputation is everything, it is the most important part of your business and you have to do everything you can to protect it. So, be an honest and upstanding business person and make sure that everyone you deal with is as well.
