Chris Brogan wrote an article on “50 Ways To Use Twitter For Business“, But it got me thinking, what are best uses of Twitter for adult business and who should adult business tweeters connect with?

Twitter Basics

• Open a twitter account and use Twitter Search to see what people are saying about your name, your competitor’s names and key words that relate to your industry.
• Make sure you have a photo - no one wants to follow a faceless person, it shows LAZINESS.
• Dialog and interact, don’t just spam the crap out of your followers and with blog postings. Engage in meaningful discussions and funny comments.
• Talk about things in your industry. No, I don’t care what dildo was up Tera’s ass, talk about trends and new media outlets, etc. Also comment on industries that might be complimentary to what you are doing.
• No pushing and shoving. Again, don’t blast your content, photos and videos all the time. You will lose followers.
• Be Human and talk about YOU. People like knowing about people.

What to Tweet About

• Write about what you are currently involved in, reading or find engaging. Again, people like humanity and personality.
• If you own and adult related site, have your talent tweeting. Get them blackberries and iphones, let them tweet about their lives and things going on with them. Leverage your employees to drive traffic to your site. Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections.
• Ask questions about direction, marketing or content. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
• Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.

Tweeting Etiquette

• You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
• Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation. No one cares about your dog and cat.
• Use Tweetdeck and Twhirl to manage Twitter.
• Shorten URLS with TinyURL .
• If someone doesn’t like what you say, they can unfollow you. Let them go, they are replaced by three who love you.
• Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

Twitter Pros & Cons

• Twitter takes up time. - Please! You can engage in twitter as much, or not as much, as you like.
• Twitter takes you away from other productive work. I have made some of my best business deals because of Twitter - making money and growing is productive!
• There are other ways to do this. Yes, but PLURK sucks!
• Twitter doesn’t apply to the adult industry. Twitter’s only a few million people (only). And you know what, they buy sex toys, see videos, are interested in mainstream marketing, etc.
• Twitter doesn’t replace direct email marketing. Ummm - Twitter is real time. If you send out one adult related link to a file or video, it will be downloaded 20,000 times in ONE DAY. Put that out to millions who may have not seen it and ummm - get where I am going? But make sure it’s somewhat tasteful.
• Twitter opens you up to more criticism and griping. If you hear what is wrong, you can avoid making those mistakes! Or you can discover how wrong they are and realize what you are doing is right. If you are using Twitter to only promote prostitution and trying to drive sales to your pay site, you are going to fail. Twitter should be used to ENLIGHTEN, SHARE & ENGAGE. Not just with mainstream audiences, but with other adult personalities. The adult industry can be lonely & isolating place.
• Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).- Damn skippy. It’s a viral as viral can get.
• Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks). My twitter is a mix of adult, mainstream adult and mainstream marketers, mixed in with people I just like. I get all kinds of info and ideas from comparing opinions and trends. Twitter is instant market research.
• Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are). I have monetized Twitter for my writing and marketing services. I’ve also used it to connect with other adult business ventures. It’s been successful. But again, it’s for the right reasons, not simply to make a quick buck or as a tool in black hat SEO techniques.

Sites I Have Found On Twitter I Love

1. http://www.beautifulrebecca.com/
2. http://www.melissagira.com
3. http://wakingvixen.com
4. http://dolorem.com
5. http://omgomgomfg.com

Guest Post By AV Flox via BlogHER:

“Did you know that 71 percent of guys would rather have great sex occasionally than not-so-hot sex all the time?” Simone asked me, paging through the February issue of Cosmopolitan.

“Let me see that,” I said, reaching out and scanning the cover of the magazine. “I’m writing an article about how to improve our sex lives.”

Simone turned a page, “well, if anyone can write that, it’s you.”

“Actually…” I started, but I trailed off. The truth is that I need a guide more than anyone.

“I have a theory that the longer we’re exposed to a stimulus, the higher the tolerance, and the less able said stimulus is to engender the effect it once did,” I said, lighting a cigarette.

Simone looked at me for a moment, then smiled, “what?”

In preparation for this piece I did a little crowdsourcing on Twitter, asking over the course of several weeks what people thought was an essential component to good sex. The answer, seven times out of ten was: intimacy.

“Really?” I asked myself over and over as the direct messages and e-mails poured in. It just didn’t jive.

“When I think about dynamite sex, I don’t think about intimacy,” I told my friend Sugar during one of our late night discussions on the phone. “Am I stunted? Do you think about it?”

“Hell no,” she replied. “I just want to be thrown against a wall and devoured.”

BE DESIRED

Sugar and I are in line with Marta Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and who has been studying sexology since the 1990s. Meana also disagrees intimacy is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

In a piece on the New York Times Magazine by Daniel Bergner, author of The Other Side of Desire, Meana emphasizes the role of being desired and the inherent narcissism in women’s sexuality, which she has gleaned from her laboratory and qualitative research, as well as her clinical work. Desire, she concludes, has “little to do with building better relationships,” or with fostering communication between partners.

“Female desire is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality as opposed to men’s,” Meana told Bergner. “Really, women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic.”

She is basically saying that women’s desire is dominated by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. That’s not to say women don’t want closeness and longevity—they do. But according to Meana, to imagine that these things are the catalysts of desire is incorrect.

“It’s wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose they’re the primary source of women’s desire,” Meana said. For women, “being desired is the orgasm.”

“How do you make yourself desired?” I asked my friends the following night over drinks at The Standard Downtown.

“Can I tell you?” my friend Tess asked, leaning in. “I like to dress up like a hooker and walk by construction sites. Instant desire.”

“Ew!” Sabrina exclaimed, laughing. “Girl, you’re a freak.”

“What? You leave your windows open when you change in case your hot neighbor is home!”

“Mmm,” Sabrina said. “He’s so hot.”

“Does he watch you?” I asked.

“Sometimes.”

“I like to dress myself in the sluttiest lingerie when no one is home,” I confessed. “There’s stuff I have that my husband has never even seen—not because he wouldn’t like it, but because it’s for me. I wear these things while I work. I love taking a client’s call in nothing but garters, a hat and stilettos.”

“Does desire require an audience?” Sabrina mused.

“You can be your own audience,” Tess said. “And if not, there’s always the internet.”

DO SOME RESEARCH

The next day, I contacted the one woman whom I knew would have something to say about sex: Viviane Tang, of Viviane’s Sex Carnival.

“Read, read, read,” she wrote me in her e-mail response. “When I was getting back into the dating game after being married, I read up. I think people assume there’s a basic level of sexual knowledge—there’s not. I was encouraged by a 60-year-old reader who told me she learned how to roll a condom by reading my site.”

Tang suggested the minds at the forefront of sex: Violet Blue, Susie Bright, Cory Silverberg, and Ducky Doolittle. As well as the blogs Sugasm, Sexoteri’sc blog news, and Pleasurists.

She’s right. Before you can get what you want, you have to understand what it is that you want. Her comment that we tend to assume there is a basic knowledge of sex is dead on—the same is true for what we desire. I didn’t know the extent of what I wanted sexually, for example, until I read The Story of O for a second time—a second time!

SEXIFY YOUR SURROUNDINGS

“Create the right environment,” a male friend told me when I asked him for sex tips. “Candles, petals, run a bath.”

“Are you serious?” I asked him. “You have no idea how many movies I’ve seen where a house catches fire from the candles during a sexy scene. I can’t think of anything less brilliant—unless you’re minding the candle, say, using it for wax play. But petals and a bath? I don’t know. To each his own, I guess.”

That’s the key thing. There is no real way of knowing what will work for you in terms of creating a sexy environment. For me, a sexy environment is a cheap motel—the seedier, the better. Extra points if it’s in a really raunchy town.

But hey, that’s just me.

“For me, there is no better place than my own bed,” my friend Lisa told me when we met for coffee that day. “With everything that I need right where I can find it. I have a four poster that doubles as a sex playground with a few ropes and a set of handcuffs.”

“Furniture,” Tang had mentioned to me, is essential. “Try the Tantra Chair.”

The Tantra Chair is a multi-purpose piece of furniture designed to fit seamlessly into any décor. Its arc is designed to enable a variety of positions while providing a support system that enables control over the depth and angle of penetration during sex. And you can use it for yoga, too!

“That is SO epically hot!” my friend Atherton told me when I showed him the Tantra Chair.

“Of course, there is something to be said, too, for the sex that happens randomly in other parts of the house not intended at all for such couplings,” I replied. “Like the kitchen counter.”

“Or even outside the house,” Atherton remarked.

AU NATUREL

“We were leaving the club when she looked at me and then toward the beach,” my friend Brad told me one afternoon on the phone. “I knew what she was thinking. The beach was deserted. They have these little swan boats you can take out around the lagoon, right, so I untied one and we got in and started making our way out.”

Before Brad and I were good friends, we were lovers. That didn’t work out at all and for a long time, we didn’t speak a word to one another. I might even describe the situation as hostile. Eventually, however, we found our way back and remembered what it was that had attracted us in the first place: how much we had in common and how easy it was to talk.

“She starts going down on me,” he went on with his story. “And next thing you know, I’ve bent her over in this swan and I’m going at it, doggy style, right there in the middle of the lagoon.”

“Oh my god,” I replied. “I’m so jealous, I could just die. That sounds positively amazing.”

“But I didn’t just call to brag,” he said after he disclosed every delectable detail. “Afterward, I’m securing the boat again and, the worst thing ever! I mean, EVER: I stepped on a goddamn sea urchin! Can you believe it?”

Moral of the story: Be adventurous in where and how you have your sex. Follow hunches and explore unchartered territory. But keep potential dangers in mind and exercise caution. Or at least keep a properly stocked first aid kit in your car.

THE OTHER PLEASURE POINTS

“Anal sex, hands down,” my friend Callie declared at a New Year’s party some weeks ago. “Pick up Tristan Taormino’s The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women and give anal sex a try.”

A rudimentary, completely unscientific survey of the women I know later showed many of them had either not experimented with anal sex or had tried it once and crossed it off.

“Did you know—my yoga instructor told me—the anus has a hundred times more sensory receptors than the vagina?”

“I had no idea,” I responded, lighting a cigarette and adding with a cheeky grin. “I’ve felt it, but didn’t realize it.”

Anal sex is a tricky beast, much like the initial taming of the g-spot. The key to learning to love it is relaxing the muscles.

“I was with a man once,” my friend Lisa told me when we had our coffee recently. “I was cockwhipped. He would message me at the weirdest hours and ask me to do the weirdest things.”

“Did you do them?” I asked her.

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “Last year, I had to go to New York and he wanted to see me. When I told him I couldn’t, he asked that…”

“What?”

She picked up her phone. “Let me find it.”

I sipped my coffee.

“Thank God for technology,” she said, pushing some buttons. “OK: ‘Upon your arrival, you have one week to hang yourself using a belt. First, you are to strip naked and insert a smooth object at least one centimeter in diameter into your ass. Use a door to hold you up, with the belt around your wrists. Hang from it thus without letting your shoulders or knees give way, for an hour, suffering the contractions of your muscles as you sway, not too much or too little, for an hour. Delight in the embodiment of my pain.’”

“Oh. My. God.” I said. “Where do you find these people?”

“Jealous?” she asked, laughing.

“I’m not sure if I’m jealous or terrified or both or just totally aroused,” I confessed. “Did you do it?”

“Are you crazy?” she asked. “Of course I did! And until then, I’d never really been into anal sex. So I bought—you’re going to laugh—blush brushes. They sell them in kits in all kinds of different sizes. So that afternoon, I started with some oil and the smallest brush and slowly worked my way up to a big one.”

“One centimeter.”

“A bit bigger,” she said with a mischievous grin. “Quite a bit.”

“Overachiever.”

FOUND OBJECTS

Lisa isn’t the only one who was using objects meant for other purposes to achieve her sexual ends. When I asked my editor at Black Heart Magazine, a web publication that pairs intellect and smut, her first piece of advice was to open my mind to the sexual possibility of everything.

“The Dollar Store is a wonderland for anyone with a dirty mind!” she told me.

“I didn’t realize the Dollar Store sold sex toys,” I commented. I’ve never been to one, I realized. What am I missing?

“Dollar Stores tend not to have sex toys, per se,” she explained, a little amazed I didn’t get it. “But dirty minds can definitely find paddles, rope, chains, nipple clamps to re-purpose.”

Interesting!

“What is the strangest non-sexual object you have turned into a toy?” I asked my friend Atherton immediately via IM.

“A 9mm Glock.”

I almost spit out my coffee. “Are you serious?”

“It was with Blaine, after a day at the range with my father and his,” he recounted. “They were down in my father’s study, drinking. Blaine disengaged the cartridge of one of our Glocks and fucked me with it.”

“I can’t think of anything that tops that,” I admitted. “Am I boring? I’ve had a variation of the Jackrabbit since I was a teenager. Maybe I’m just pampered and lazy.”

“YOU?” he asked, aghast. “YOU BORING? Dude, you’ve had your tits beat up. That’s at least on a par with fucking a Glock.”

MAP YOUR WANTS

While doing research for an article about oversharing sex, I happened upon the map of human sexuality by Franklin Veaux, a depiction of a landmass featuring a variety of human desires, from the common, to the downright freaky, as cities.

Looking over it, I wondered where I “lived” and “frequented” on that bizarre continent, so I called up Atherton and together, we spent the entire morning coloring in our maps. We tweeted so much about it, that many of our followers on Twitter asked for a blank copy for them to fill out themselves.

That whole day was spent discussing, quite openly, the things we desired in sex. It occurred to me to have my husband fill one out as well.

I sat him down that night and we went through the list. We kept going down the list. Dogging, tickling, speaking foreign languages, showering together, exercising, dancing, ass play, commercial sex, hentai, sex machines, prodommes, erotic asphyxiation, peep shows, multiple penetration, strippers, bukkake, talking dirty, anonymous hook-ups…

I looked at the finished product. We lived on different planets.

“Is it bad?” he asked.

“Kind of.” I showed him.

You can’t very well teach someone to love to beat you if that’s just not what they’re into. But as Viviane Tang told me, sex isn’t something we know all about at birth. It’s possible that some of the things we end up loving are things we never knew existed until we bumped into someone who liked them and helped us open our minds enough to give them a shot.

Graphing out what you and your partner want can be a bonding experience, as well as an interesting way of learning their inner workings, and maybe sparking some interest in terms of trying out new things neither of you had previously considered.

DON’T HAVE SEX

Lisa still can’t get enough of Mr. Smith, a guy she hooked up with randomly and with whom she spent a night talking dirty and making out.

“We didn’t have sex,” she recounted for the 18,000th time. “We just kissed. Like in high school. Remember that? Just kissing? I used to think women who talked about the perfect kiss were so boring. But no, there is a power in kissing. Something impossible to quantify. It can be one of the most erotic things.”

Victoria Zdrok, the resident love and sex columnist at Penthouse Magazine agrees.

“Kissing has numerous benefits,” she writes in 40 Steps to Great Sex, a recent piece at Penthouse. “From increasing saliva production, which improves your oral health, to turning on you and your partner.”

“I would never imagine that your contribution to my sex tips article would be to not have sex,” I said to Lisa.

“It’s like that game—did you ever play it? Where you held your hand over a lover’s naked body and see how long you could stand it without touching them?”

“Oh, yes!” I exclaimed. “God, I love that.”

“There is something in the denial of immediate satisfaction. They’re there and they want you, but you’re not going to indulge, not yet. It’s a part of the dance.”

“God, I wish we had time for that kind of stuff nowadays,” I said sadly.

PRIORITIZE

“Make sex a priority,” Zdrok writes in her 40 Steps to Great Sex. “Set a sex date, if necessary, because in our crazy-busy schedules, sex often gets put on a back burner.”

She’s right.

“Often we get so consumed with life, we leave sex out,” Tess told me over drinks the night we spent talking at the Standard. “We think we can just make that call at 3AM and get our fill, but it doesn’t work that way. Most of the time we have had a grueling workday and we know we’re going right back into the office the next morning. What kind of sex can you have like that?”

“My husband calls it ‘the lazy fuck,’” Sabrina said.

“Like in the Ars Amatoria?” I asked. “On the side, barely moving?”

“That’s in Ars Amatoria?” she laughed. “Damn you Ovid! I can’t stand the lazy fuck. I think it’s an assault on everything that is sensuality. It has to be the most boring, soul-crushing type of encounter.”

“It has its place,” I said, smiling to myself.

“Maybe if you’re at your in-laws for a family reunion, sharing a room with your sister-in-law and her husband and don’t want anyone to notice!” Sabrina yelled. “No! I hate the lazy fuck. I hate hate hate it! My husband wants to do nothing else. ‘I’m tired,’ he says. I’m like, ‘what? Do I need to schedule sex now?’ It’s annoying!”

“Maybe we do,” I said. “Maybe we need to schedule sex.”

“Ugh,” Tess sighed. “Who wants to schedule sex? Shouldn’t it just happen?”

“Yes,” I said. “But until we learn to give it the importance it deserves in the busy schedule of our lives, maybe we do need get in the habit of penciling it in and keeping our appointment.”

Sabrina took out a lip liner from her purse and pulled out her planner.

“SEX,” she wrote in giant letters across the lunch slot of the next day.

“There, see?” Sabrina asked. “I just made a commitment to have a nooner tomorrow.”

“The timeless question,” Tess said, laighing. “Food or sex?”

“Honey, this is the United States of America,” Sabrina said, her English accent stronger than usual. “We get to have both food and sex!”

LIVE IT, DON’T LIVE THROUGH IT

“Think of the last time food transported you,” Anthony Bourdain writes in his 2001 novel A Cook’s Tour. “Your first taste of champagne on a woman’s lips… steak frites when you were in Paris as a teenager with a Eurorail pass, you’d blown almost all your dough on hash in Amsterdam, and this slightly chewy slab of rumsteck (rump steak) was the first substantial meal in days… a single wild strawberry, so flavorful that it nearly took your head off… your grandmother’s lasagne… a first sip of stolen ice cold beer on a hot summer night, hands smelling of crushed fireflies… left over pork fried rice, because your girlfriend at the time always seemed to have some in the fridge… steamer clams, dripping with drawn butter from your first family vacation at the Jersey shore… rice pudding from the Fort Dee Diner… bad Cantonese when you were a kid and Chinese was still exotic and wonderful and you still thought fortune cookies were fun… dirty water hot dogs… a few beads of caviar licked off a nipple…”

A few beads of caviar licked off a nipple. What a simple, gorgeous celebration of touch and taste. The idea stopped me cold the first time I read it.

We stand at the edge of our senses, waiting for the sets of data to come in: hot or cold? Pleasure or pain? Nice or mean? Red or green? Too spicy? Too loud? Too big? Too slow! Hungry! Tired! When was the last time we stopped and touched something and focused on the brush against our fingertips? When was the last time we turned off the constant background noise of our iPods and pressed down on a piano key to hear the clarity of a single note? When was the last time we paused briefly before putting that snack in our mouths and committed ourselves to savoring the marriage of flavors in a bite?

When was the last time you had sex for the sake of your senses? No, think about this. I am not talking about orgasm. I am not even talking about pleasure in and of itself. I am talking about using every given sense receptor, focusing your energy on it and really, truly experiencing what that sense tells you, not just whether it feels good or not, harder, baby, harder, deeper, deeper, faster, faster, oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

No.

I mean: when was the time you lived your sensory data?

You don’t need to awaken your senses. They were never sleeping. You just have to pay attention. The next time you eat, let your taste buds overwhelm you, let your mouth feel the texture of what’s inside it. The next time you hear a song, let the notes carry you. The next time you kiss, let your mouth become your hands. The next time you have sex, let yourself become the skin throbbing inside you or wrapping around you.

Open up. Living through things isn’t the same as living those things.

Getting back into writing and getting caught up on what I’ve missed/not read, I jumped over to Melissa Gira’s website. She been busy writing and producing the wonderful things she so amazingly good at discussing. I was actually surprised to find an article of hers on The Frisky. I really like the Frisky, the content is interesting and I love the design and functionality. I’ve viewed it as conservative when it comes to sex - you know, the vanilla/mainstream side. And for the most point it is. But they have the wonderful Gira blogging. For give me Melissa for being so Web 1.0 on this.

It’s funny, I ended my blog posts in October talking about a post that Gira wrote, and I start with one.

Melissa: You made me smile at this, as I read, I had flashes of the ex-boyfriends I’ve had (damn the trail is long) who stalk my twitter and my Facebook for updates - to the point you ban them off Facebook.

Lesson: Twitterstalking and using social media to follow your ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, clients, ex-pornstar you were involved with is not healthy. It’s time to move on. Here is a great article on HOW.

The Frisky: When Blogs Cry - How To Break Up Online

Cancel, unsubscribe, unfollow. Sort out how you want to react to the breakup only after you’ve canceled the relationship, unsubscribed from her Tumblr, or blocked him from Twitter. To undo a relationship that made it online in any form—whether you’ve got photos together all over MySpace or earned your own tag on Gawker—requires investing as much shared exposure as you put in. Make a cold calculation: in my case, that meant reframing a year-and-a-half long affair, across half a dozen online networks, and doing it in just a few days.  This condenses everything: how much it hurts, how fast you have to react.  You had weeks or months to attach to one another’s blogs, profiles, and endearingly staged snapshots.  Now you have to delete or address it all, all at once.

We live in public. Those of us who document even a small part of our lives online hit that moment when we realize our audience isn’t just our friends: they’re more like fans. Any girl whose kept a LiveJournal or posted photos of her shoes to it has felt this. In talking about your breakup, you’re addressing those “friends,” not your ex—and if your ex has an online footprint equal to or greater than yours?  Take charge of your own reputation by telling your story—even if that’s to say you’re going to keep it discreet.

Focus, and cause no collateral damage. The heart’s built-in amnesia – time healing all wounds – is not going to guide your sense of judgment in an online breakup. What will give you resilience later is to tell only your own side now, even if that self-imposed silence aches. The one thing I’d take back from my breakup-blogging is a reference to the sex life of someone close to my ex. But addressing the woman who named me in her own screeds against my ex, after those became the subject of comment for our mutual friends? That not only felt fair, but necessary.  In the case of involving those outside the breakup: only expose what you absolutely need to, and only about those equally desperate for the attention.

A pre-emptive makeup? The strange thing is, it really wasn’t hard to read what strangers—who had no interest in my relationship when it was going well—had to say when I was torching it in their RSS reader. It was easy, and easy to obsess on having the crowd vet “what it all meant.” By the time my ex and I reconciled – and screwed, and cried – the worst things we could’ve said to one another had already been said, in front of an audience. Their reblogged attention was gratifying just long enough for us to figure out how little we needed them to make sense of our relationship ourselves.

Wow - I’ve logged into my facebook, twitter(s) -  side note: yeap, I got two, I am telling you, you gotta squat on the name properties. They will be valuable in the next year - MySpace and finally my blog. I’ve been quiet for a few month now. I’ve noticed that my page rank went up and my Alexa when up too. Guess you lose the link love when you stop updating.

Where have I been? That is the question I’ve been answering all day. Well, I have been busy. I take my own advice. I take breaks when I get burnt out or just get busy. So my humblest apologies to those that are upset or feel put off - but I am sure you understand that “space” you need when you just need to breathe.

So what you up to? What am I up to. Well, I am going to start writing again. I have some interesting things to say and will do my best to write weekly or at least every 10 days. If anyone is floating around AVN, you MIGHT see me.

So give me a few, and I get back to the lucious blogging, and only blogging. But know now, it’s gonna change. I’ve been writing for the great In My Bed Magazine and a few others and that content is coming. You will get the marketing morsels, but in limited quantity. But I promise what you get will be good.

I was working on my Tumblr a few weeks and came across this post from Melissa Gira. I chuckled a bit, I have been thinking about public perception <of me> as a writer/blogger/character and I read this:

This is not a compliment.

On that same thread: I’m tangling hard with this notion of public persona. That for whatever reason, writing about sex gives some people the idea that you are available sexually to them (this is not new, this is something I’ve noticed a long time ago). But this being commonly understood as a consumable girl is hitting a breaking point for me. Does it mean I can’t flirt-for-real in public spaces without being perceived as buying into a role, without agreeing with that being pegged as The Sex Girl?

I was never that girl. I never played against my own intelligence to make men comfortable around me. I come on strong by being open, not teasing. I don’t look for strength in men’s eyes that way. As temporarily delightful as cocktail conversation may be — until our cabs come — I get my real and lasting courage from my own vulnerability. I can only trust my sense of worth to be safe with those unafraid to love me, not someone who finds me amusing five minutes at a time.

This is the year of being smart about being seen.

Thank you Melissa. You said what I was looking for.

I don’t know why men (yes, it is men only - never women) think because we write about sex, marketing sex, sex & society et al., that we are available. I was astonished to find how many mainstream, social media/SEO men would contact me via Twitter or Facebook to see if we could have “drinks”. I was excited at first, “Wow - mainstream people take note of my work and wanting to meet!”

Uh, I realized that “coffee” was not their intention, it was can I get a free piece of ass and someone to support me. This progressed into another interesting phenomena: When I would attend webinar  as “Callie” that I would receive emails from employees of the companies that hosted the webinar. Again, I thought it was about the company itself, but it wasn’t. The only thing it was about was their employee’s side adult businesses, or should I say - wanna be businesses. It prompted the series I wrote on being an ethical marketer. I’ve learned some valuable lessons.

So now I can say - No, you will not fuck me and no, I am not gonna teach you to be an adult marketer for free. You will PAY ME - for marketing consulting, not for sex that is.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks rethinking our business model and direction based Melissa’s comment about being smart about being seen. So you will see me again, just in different directions and areas. Looking forward to engaging conversations again.

Callie

New Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/AdultMarketing

I was reading Marketing Prof’s Daily Fix (what can’t you find on twitter?) and was surprised on how much his posting on Dirty Leaders are Good, Sometimes corresponded to the book I am currently reading (see below).

Steve Woodruff states, “There’s a price to pay for rising above the crowd and seeking to lead. You become a target. Dirt bombs and mudballs find their way into your orbit, because if you win, someone else loses. And that happens in business as well. If you are a thought leader, or a dominant player in the marketplace, or an innovative competitor creating disruption, one of the spoils of success is that you’ll be attacked. Perhaps you’ve actually earned the opprobrium of your detractors by wrong or ruthless business practices (that kind of dirty leader isn’t good!), but perhaps your character is being publicly assassinated simply because of jealousy or hatred. It’s hard to break new ground or expand into new fields without stirring up some soil. One way or another, few leaders escape getting dirtied. It comes with the territory - the territory of success!”

All I can say is, AMEN! It’s the truth! If you are trying something new or taking a different approach, don’t be afraid to do it and don’t be afraid of the mud that is going to be slung your way. What Steve is talking about are the Laws of Attraction, Forgiveness and Karma. And how positive action and non-resistance will help any individual achieve our wildest dreams and goals (read Florence Shinn if you need more).

Being ethical is what I founded my business upon. Providing my clients with solutions that people couldn’t/wouldn’t give them was my driving force. I am thankful for those I work with every day and I will continually do well by them.

I know, you wish. There are major things going on the past few weeks. I was contacted by my favorite editor-in chief, Rosanna Ciulla, about my writings and In My Bed Magazine; to my surprise and honor, she was reading the adult business blog at CallieSimms.net and emailed to ask permission to syndicate my escort business writings in the magazine, we are in the beginning phases of what content will be used; but I am excited.

In My Bed is one of the most innovative online magazines I have seen in many years. It’s not an adult related publication but it does talk about sex, sexuality and relationships. eSubscribe and be blown away!

Be Ethical, Be Legitimate. Anyone can work in adult marketing; there are many “designers, developers and marketers”. But I use those terms loosely because many “adult marketing companies” aren’t ethical. They under deliver, over charge and build websites on platforms that their client can’t understand, thereby making them slaves to the webmaster. When did the term adult become synonymous with the term idiot? Just because a client’s business is adult related, it doesn’t give their marketing team the right charge astronomical prices for third-rate service. Sooner or later, a client will speak up, vocalize their discontent and you will lose all your business.

Did you know? An individual adult entertainer usually makes $200,000 to $350,000 per year. A heavily marketed, niche adult website with creative, unique content can make up to $1 million per year. The average investment in marketing & publicity is about 15-20% of the gross income.

Being ethical and being legitimate is the first step in being successful.

Be More Than A Designer: Be A Developer, A Marketing Strategist, An Advisor and A Visionary. Anyone designing adult websites should be able to build just about anything. PHP, CSS, HTML, Java – I don’t care, you better know it and be able to do it well. I am not a designer, I am a marketing strategist; but my design team – Ope/Zig (the best) – can do anything a client needs them to do. They make it a point to test and demo all the adult related content management systems out there. By doing so, they know the best platform for any client site. If a client comes to us and loves what they have, we can work with it, but we work to improve it. If they don’t like it, they identify what isn’t working and develop several alternatives for them. If we have to, we will build what they want from scratch.

I strive to be more than designer, I strive to be a visionary. I not only create a site, I develop a strategy and a vision for the client. Now some clients aren’t ready for it, whether it’s a financial limitation or a mental step they aren’t to make yet, I make sure concept is there from day one. I visualize their BRAND and what it could be, even if they themselves don’t see it yet.

You have to ask yourself, “What is this company or individual’s five-year plan?” Next, work backwards from there. You are still building their brand, even if it’s an individual person and a name. You have to consider what would hurt that brand, what would dilute it and what would make it stronger. Throw in the average shelf life of adult name/product popularity and it’s some work!

If you have an idea that could be “The Next Step” and blow/transform their image into another lucrative income stream, you must present it to them, even if it’s risky. If you don’t present it, you are a bad marketer and don’t deserve their business. You need to be a visionary and an adviser because things in the adult market become tired quickly. It’s your duty to continually maximize their ROI; that’s what you are being paid for.

Have Standards and Integrity. This is where humanity comes in and I gotta get gritty. Our clients are people; treat them like people.

1. If you can’t get over nudity and provocative content, then this line work isn’t for you.
2. If you think you can use your status as an adult webmaster/marketer to try and meet adult professionals for your “personal” gain, then this line of work isn’t for you.
3. If you can’t imagine doing an online video series focused on selling couture sex toys and leveraging social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook to promote it and drive online sales – then EXIT STAGE LEFT.

What I Am Saying: Treat your adult clients like your corporate clients. Put all you know into practice and give them tangible results based on clear, ethical marketing practices. Make sure they have the proper tools to manage their content can do all the things they want to themselves. It allows you fill in the services that they fall short on and make you a more effective resource.

Play Nice With Others. There are great adult marketers out there. Play nice and make friends, you never know when you are going to need them. I keep in contact with the people I know have ethical standards and we trade and refer work whenever we need to. In fact, make sure you follow @PBVixen and @MasterRobyn on Twitter, these people have mad skills and I would work with them and for them anytime.

Breaking into The Adult Marketing & Web Development Business

Recently, I’ve received a lot of questions about delving into the adult marketing via Twitter and Facebook; the questions I am asked most are:

1. Is there good money in it?
2. Is it hard to do?
3. What do you do?
4. How do you develop a clientele?

The simple answers are:

1. Yes, there is money in it. Just like any business.
2. Yes, it is hard to do. Just like any business
3. I do the same thing you do for mainstream clients.
4. You develop clientele just like you do any business.

These questions are just the icing on the cake, what “inquiring marketing minds” actually pondering and asking is how to penetrate the adult industry and creating a successful business. They want to know if it can it worth the time and effort. Well, guess what? Any smart, determined marketer or developer can create a successful adult business, but they have to have a strategic plan to do so.

Here are my tips for deciding if you should start an adult marketing company:

Tip #1: Don’t approach the adult industry like it’s some secret Illuminati society that must be infiltrated. There are multiple ways to enter it: networking, emailing, trade shows, etc. It’s the same as any industry; it takes time and a targeted, strategic approach. Pick on that is most comfortable for you and go from there. For you online types, my next suggestion in perfect!

Tip #2: Set up an alternate Twitter, go raid my Twit-O-Dex (@CallieSimms) and start following adult entertainers, designers and other professionals that look interesting (@AudaciaRay, @VictoriaLane, @DarkGracie, @MasterRobyn, @Mindchaotica, @KimberleeCline and @PBVixen are a must). Start reading blogs, looking at web sites, check links and slowly start to comment. Just like it takes a website about six months to fully integrate into the Google sandbox and be allowed to play, it is the same for any new person in the adult scene. When you find something that tickles your fancy, proceed to Tip #3!

Insider Tip #3: Find something interesting? Go Google the crap out the thing that made you go – “OH!” and start studying it. Need inspiration? Check my side links, I put the stuff I really like there. Find a niche that works for you and start there, then grow.

One of my favorite reads in LifeHack.org, the blog is fantastic, just about every entry discusses something that is related to professional and personal success. It it goes a step further to discuss the opposites of success; it addresses failure and fear, but then tells you how these things contribute to long-term success and how they shape who you become. Who you are directly effects the way your business runs and who you are effects weather or not your business is successful. If you aren’t positive, willing to take risks and adapt to the ever changing internet environment, how can your business flourish and grow? Well actually, it can’t and it will die.

So here is my favorite article this month “10 Skills You Need To Success At Almost Anything”, a great little ditty about professional success.  It’s for the webmasters and business owners proactive and ready to take action in getting themselves noticed.

- Callie Simms

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What does it take to succeed? A positive attitude? Well, sure, but that’s hardly enough. The Law of Attraction? The Secret? These ideas might act as spurs to action, but without the action itself, they don’t do much.

Success, however it’s defined, takes action, and taking good and appropriate action takes skills. Some of these skills (not enough, though) are taught in school (not well enough, either), others are taught on the job, and still others we learn from general life experience.

Below is a list of general skills that will help anyone get ahead in practically any field, from running a company to running a gardening club. Of course, there are skills specific to each field as well – but my concern here is with the skills that translate across disciplines, the ones that can be learned by anyone in any position.

1. Public Speaking

The ability to speak clearly, persuasively, and forcefully in front of an audience – whether an audience of 1 or of thousands – is one of the most important skills anyone can develop. People who are effective speakers come across as more comfortable with themselves, more confident, and more attractive to be around. Being able to speak effectively means you can sell anything – products, of course, but also ideas, ideologies, worldviews. And yourself – which means more opportunities for career advancement, bigger clients, or business funding.

2. Writing

Writing well offers many of the same advantages that speaking well offers: good writers are better at selling products, ideas, and themselves than poor writers. Learning to write well involves not just mastery of grammar but the development of the ability to organize one’s thoughts into a coherent form and target it to an audience in the most effective way possible. Given the huge amount of text generated by almost every transaction – from court briefs and legislation running into the thousands of pages to those foot-long receipts you get when you buy gum these days – a person who is a master of the written word can expect doors to open in just about every field.

3. Self-Management

If success depends of effective action, effective action depends on the ability to focus your attention where it is needed most, when it is needed most. Strong organizational skills, effective productivity habits, and a strong sense of discipline are needed to keep yourself on track.

4. Networking

Networking is not only for finding jobs or clients. In an economy dominated by ideas and innovation, networking creates the channel through which ideas flow and in which new ideas are created. A large network, carefully cultivated, ties one into not just a body of people but a body of relationships, and those relationships are more than just the sum of their parts. The interactions those relationships make possible give rise to innovation and creativity – and provide the support to nurture new ideas until they can be realized.

5. Critical Thinking

We are exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, of times more information on a daily basis than our great-grandparents were. Being able to evaluate that information, sort the potentially valuable from the trivial, analyze its relevance and meaning, and relate it to other information is crucial – and woefully under-taught. Good critical thinking skills immediately distinguish you from the mass of people these days.

6. Decision-Making

The bridge that leads from analysis to action is effective decision-making – knowing what to do based on the information available. While not being critical can be dangerous, so too can over-analyzing, or waiting for more information before making a decision. Being able to take in the scene and respond quickly and effectively is what separates the doers from the wannabes.

7. Math

You don’t have to be able to integrate polynomials to be successful. However, the ability to quickly work with figures in your head, to make rough but fairly accurate estimates, and to understand things like compound interest and basic statistics gives you a big lead on most people. All of these skills will help you to analyze data more effectively – and more quickly – and to make better decisions based on it.

8. Research

Nobody can be expected to know everything, or even a tiny fraction of everything. Even within your field, chances are there’s far more that you don’t know than you do know. You don’t have to know everything – but you should be able to quickly and painlessly find out what you need to know. That means learning to use the Internet effectively, learning to use a library, learning to read productively, and learning how to leverage your network of contacts – and what kinds of research are going to work best in any given situation.

9. Relaxation

Stress will not only kill you, it leads to poor decision-making, poor thinking, and poor socialization. So be failing to relax, you knock out at least three of the skills in this list – and really more. Plus, working yourself to death in order to keep up, and not having any time to enjoy the fruits of your work, isn’t really “success”. It’s obsession. Being able to face even the most pressing crises with your wits about you and in the most productive way is possibly the most important thing on this list.

10. Basic Accounting

It is a simple fact in our society that money is necessary. Even the simple pleasures in life, like hugging your child, ultimately need money – or you’re not going to survive to hug for very long. Knowing how to track and record your expenses and income is important just to survive, let alone to thrive. But more than that, the principles of accounting apply more widely to things like tracking the time you spend on a project or determining whether the value of an action outweighs the costs in money, time, and effort. It’s a shame that basic accounting isn’t a required part of the core K-12 curriculum.

What Else?

Surely there are more important skills I’m not thinking of (which is probably why I’m not telling Bill Gates what to do!) – what are they? What have I missed? What lessons have you learned that were key to your successes – and what have you ignored to your peril?