You can’t major in “porn economics” at Harvard or study “adult website marketing” at Oxford. Even local state colleges don’t offer anything that can directly prepare you for this unique industry. The people who try their hand at making money in this business arrive here by all sorts of different avenues, but few are well trained and capable when they get started. That’s just the simple truth of it.

While we’re being honest, the brightest minds in internet marketing typically end up working for mainstream firms, not adult entertainment companies. The truly brilliant people don’t want to deal with the stigma that’s still attached to working in porn, especially not at a time when the industry is no longer shitting money. If you have bankable skills and you’re willing to play by the rules, you’ll probably make more money in mainstream over the long haul. Again, if you’re really brilliant.

Why, then, do some of us stick around anyway? Some of us like the less formal working environment offered by the adult industry, while others just don’t fit in well with stuffy 9 to 5 corporate jobs. Some guys are attracted to the idea of working in an industry full of beautiful women, and some women just want to be independent operators who call their own shots. Plus, for so many of us who didn’t necessarily stand out in college, or maybe didn’t even go to college at all, the adult business offers a chance at a better payday than we might get otherwise trying to compete with those aforementioned really brilliant people.

We have some great people in our industry, don’t get me wrong. But again, being truthful, there are probably more people working in porn who think they are really clever marketers than people who actually are really clever marketers. Sorry.

We all make mistakes in business, but the one mistake that gets repeated more than any other is failure to keep it up. And no, nobody is talking about your dick. We’re talking about marketing here, you sick fuck.

This problem happens usually in one of two forms:

Scenario 1. An entrepreneur with no money but solid technical skills comes up with an idea for the next great website. He or she spends a lot of time and sweat equity on building this wonderful new service, but when it comes time to launch it, has no idea what to do next. The owner tries making some posts on industry boards where nobody cares. He or she makes some feeble attempts to recruit others to promote the new service, but has no marketing budget and poor people skills, so the whole project dies an early death. Maybe it would have worked with the right team and some money behind it, but we’ll never know.

Scenario 2. An entrepreneur who has a bit of money to spend wants to get into adult entertainment, so he hires a technical team to build a website. Once built, he enlists the help of an industry veteran to get the word out, but the Einstein budgets for about one to three months’ worth of marketing. When he doesn’t get rich instantly, he starts suspecting a cheat, pulls all his marketing efforts, and all the money he spent to date on development and marketing is thrown right out the door. This is really, really common, and it’s also really, really stupid. These people probably should be shot.

If you’re into marketing you can always spot a future loser when they start using words like “ROI” like they think they understand it or offer to pay based on “performance.” When you hear this, you’ve got on your hands one of the guys who thinks he’s really clever and wants to pass all the risks of his business on to you. Just say “fuck no” to this insanity. It usually means the company owner is broke and/or thinks you’re dumb enough to volunteer your time to make him money. Always insist on some kind of base pay for your work.

For those of you who are trying to get a new project off the ground, don’t be a jamook. If you skimp on a marketing budget, you’ll get nowhere. If you think your charm and clever wit will land you a free marketing team, your project is going to fail. Expect to spend at least six months of consistent marketing before you see any significant results, and that’s at an absolute minimum. And know this: If the day ever comes when you have nothing to spend on marketing, it’s all over—so move on and spare the rest of us from having to listen to you and pretend like we’re interested in your website.

We may not have an industry full of Yale grads with advanced degrees (Imagine what we could accomplish if we did!), but that doesn’t mean those of us who are working here can’t make an effort to get just a little smarter about marketing. If it’s too difficult to pick up a few books on the topic, then at the least take a look at the most successful companies in our business and how they behave. Compare them with all those other companies that came out guns blazing and disappeared just as fast, and you just might buy yourself a couple of clues.