"The Internet has matured, the old ways of selling porn are not as effective as they used to be. Internet gods are finding it harder to make a buck."

If there is one thing that you can guarantee about this crazy business, it is that the industry is in a constant state of change. As outside events and trends in both the political and social arenas change, the industry responds and moves to meet those trends.

The vast majority of these changes are reactionary; the industry changes in response to some exterior influence but occasionally the industry can be pro-active. In the last year or so, pro-active change has been rare because the outside influences have really been moving in on us at a fast rate.

Sometimes seeing those changes can be difficult for an outsider but they can be seen on most webmaster boards, including the newbie boards. The webmaster boards are places where those in the industry often wrestle with these changes.

Once again, for an outsider, it may be difficult to understand what is being talked about, but newbie boards are the places where changes are often discussed in terms that are easily understood by outsiders.

Of course, if an outsider is looking at an adult webmaster board it is usually because they want to move into the industry. Sometimes those newbie boards can give a newcomer the wrong impression when it comes to understanding what is required to make money in this industry.

Newcomers are often told to read the archives and work their way forward. Most of the newbie boards have been around for quite a long time and there are many things in those archives that may not be as relevant as they once were.

Back when I was just a lad in this industry the major thing for a new webmaster to learn was HTML. In fact, it wasn't just important, it was imperative that you learned how to write good clean code.

Sure there was Front Page but no-one who wanted to make real money in the industry ever used Front Page. Instead you labored over your website building it in Notepad and learning all there was to know about tables and tags, links and lists, line breaks and font sizes.

Once you had a grasp of the basics of HTML, you could start throwing together sites that included some banners along with 20 pics and you were on your way to making a fortune.

Today you can still see that approach in the sites that many newcomers build. They have obviously read the archives and the sites they produce are quite effective for the marketplace as it was four years ago but things have changed and those changes are not covered back there in the archives. In fact they aren't, at times, covered in the current threads on many boards.

Why aren't they covered?

They aren't covered because many of us are still living back there in what we remember as the golden past.

Back then and even now we thought of ourselves as webmasters. We were somehow a cut above everyone else because we could write HTML and we knew how to optimize images to reduce bandwidth and we knew all there was to know about sponsors and banner placement. We knew all those things that seemed to make us look important in the eyes of the rest of the population.

Even if we knew it deep in our soul, we didn't want to admit that we weren't some sort of Internet God. We didn't want to face the fact that all we really were – and still are – is just common salesmen and saleswomen. Let's face it – being a god is far sexier that being a salesman.

Sure we might have been able to write HTML but that didn't change the fact that we are really just sales people. A guy who sells cars is not that much different to a guy who sells widgets and they are not that much different to people who sell porn.

In today's marketplace though, looking at the world through a narrow mind is a recipe for failure. The Internet has matured, the old ways of selling porn are not as effective as they used to be. Internet gods are finding it harder to make a buck. These days, it's the people who know how to make a sale that are the ones who are making the money.

That means that it is now vitally important to move away from the Internet god mindset and accept the fact that we really are just the same as the guy who hustles to sell insurance or the person who wants to sell you some worn out gas guzzling clunker at the same price as a new car.

Why is that so important?

Because it will change the way you look at the next site you build. It will change the way you do things. It might also change your level of income.