YNOT – The Houston Texans has taken an early lead against the undefeated Indianapolis Colts last weekend, and I found myself being foolish enough to think it could actually hold for two more quarters. The kickoff signaled the start to the second half, and I was just taking the first bite of a hot dog, fresh off the grill, when my nine year-old son turned to me and said, “Dad, what’s erectile dysfunction?”I silently cursed that damn TV battle between Cialis and Viagra that plays out every night on cable news channels and during sporting events. At times like these I generally resort to big, boring words to throw my son off; kids don’t like to admit they had no idea what you just said, and if you talk long enough they’ll be sorry they ever asked in the first place. You don’t have to lie, just deliver the truth in really scientific clinical terms and your kid will be reaching for the Nintendo DSi in no time.

That’s because today’s kids have no attention span, a sharp drop from the minimal attention span that my generation had – and probably still has, I’m not sure we’ve gotten much better now that we’re in our thirties. I don’t know about our brothers across the pond, but most Americans want what they want right now, and if they can’t get it right now, damnit (Janet), they’ll just have to give up and stop trying – and want something else. Right now. So hand it over.

In short, too many Americans can’t keep it up.

This problem with staying power isn’t only evident in the Houston Texans, who promptly started the second half by blowing what had once been a large lead on route to a pretty thorough thrashing from the Colts. No, this problem with staying power can also be seen in our own industry, and it’s one of the reasons why so many companies are falling off the tracks during this tough economic recession that hasn’t been kind to online adult entertainment.

Let’s look at two cases in particular: the affiliate program owners, and the affiliates themselves. We’ll start with the latter.

In the earliest years of the online adult industry, it was pretty simple to make that first sale – no matter now rudimentary your webmastering skills might have been. If you could slap a couple of pictures on a web page, add some text and link that page to an affiliate program’s paysite, you probably could make some beer money at least. Get that most basic of sites listed in an engine like Infoseek, Excite or Alta Vista and you were looking at checks in the mail; get it listed on Yahoo, and you might just pay rent. Need more money? Make more sites.

The bottom line is, the affiliate who signed up for an affiliate program saw immediate results from the most basic of labors. The situation was so good for so long that too many affiliates started to believe that money really was that easy to obtain, and that they possessed some magical business skills that allowed them to rise ahead of the suckers they knew who held down those boring 9 to 5 jobs.

I hate to say it, but really it was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Making money with adult websites didn’t take skill a decade ago, and it certainly didn’t take staying power.

Today’s affiliate faces a much different playing field. Sadly, the skilled affiliate who can design attractive and interesting websites might still go a long time before seeing even the minimal first check. It’s not enough to know how to make a nice looking website; lots of people can do that now, and the amount of competition is staggering. On the other side, it’s also not enough to know how to market online if you can’t build anything interesting to market in the first place. In other words, today’s independent webmaster affiliate needs to be highly skilled in building websites and in driving traffic; skill in just one of those areas might land you a specialty job with a company somewhere, but it won’t be enough to make you a successful affiliate.

What today’s affiliates need is a strong shot of business Viagra. It takes four years to complete the average bachelor’s degree; why do new affiliates feel like they should have mastered their craft in just a couple of months? What worked five years ago simply won’t work going forward, at least not for most people – that means if you’re serious about being an affiliate you need to devote a certain amount of time each and every day to making yourself a better affiliate. You need to be persistent, relentless, and ready to adapt as needed to get the job done, and you can never stop looking for ways to add to your knowledge of your craft.

And that brings us to affiliate programs. Many program owners have grown disillusioned with affiliates, largely because the affiliates they recruit and pamper don’t have any staying power; and sadly, many of the affiliate program owners share that same quality. When the first round of affiliates don’t bring results, too many program owners are folding up shop and moving on to other pursuits. The speed at which this happens sometimes is staggering.

I can think of a handful of examples of affiliate programs jumping ship miles before the iceberg, when there’s still plenty of time to simply steer away from it. One company in particular comes to mind – a program that launched this year with high expectations, and it was plain that a considerable amount of money had been put into the development process. Yet when the program failed to makes its investors rich inside three or four months, staff was fired and the program closed – and I’m not kidding, it was that quick.

If you’re going to operate an affiliate program, you have to find a bit of staying power somewhere in there and plan to stick it out over the long haul with intelligent and persistent marketing and a thoughtful approach to helping your affiliates succeed. Sometimes the companies that are successful over the long haul are simply the companies who outlasted the competition.

So build your company and your affiliate program for a marathon, not a sprint; set marketing budgets that can be sustained month after month, and hire only the number of employees that you can afford to keep around. You still have to recognize when a strategy isn’t working, so you can try something that might work, but if you’re looking for big results in a few months then do everyone a favor and go play blackjack in Vegas instead – you’ll have better odds.

If you want to impress the smart people in this business you’ll need more than attitude and pictures of yourself posed with some models that you paid for with your last dollars; if the magazine cover you bought is printed after your company has gone belly up, nobody will be impressed.

So remember the Houston Texans, good people, remember the Texans. It’s fun to come charging out of the gate and score some early points, the cheerleaders might even look on you and smile for a short while, but the name of the game is staying power. If you want that cheerleader to still be smiling tomorrow, you need to learn is how to keep it up.