5… 4… 3… 2… 1… GO!

Before you consider hiring a consultant, think about spending that money on a prostitute instead. Consultants and hookers are almost indistinguishable when thought about rationally.

1. They get paid by the hour.
2. They work from home, frequently half naked.
3. Expect to hear the sound of crying children if you call them unexpectedly.
4. They only take a shower if they are going to a meeting.
5. They never stop trying to persuade you to pay for extra services.
6. Cheap ones wear too much scent.
7. You’ll believe the expensive ones actually care about you.
8. How much they get paid depends on the quality of their presentation.
9. They all secretly want to settle down when the right opportunity arrives.
10. Whatever the size of your project they’ll swear they’ve seen bigger.

So what’s the difference?

A hooker makes a happy ending their responsibility, an MBA makes it yours.

That’s why this blog exists. I’m a recovering $400 an hour professional who would rather be a prostitute than a consultant. By giving my advice away I can ensure that the only thing you could possibly waste here is a little time.

I worked in the mainstream for many years before hesitantly moving into the world of pornography in the late nineties when it represented the bleeding edge of internet technology.

Things have changed since then. The adult market is suffering from a lack of new ideas, and more people than ever are interested in the bizz we call jizz.

This blog will:

1. Provide free consulting, ideas and advice to anyone who has, or is think of setting up, an adult (or digital media based) website.
2. Attempt to give some insight into the business side of a misunderstood multi-billion dollar industry and where it’s heading.
3. Explain how the website I’m developing will make the internet easier, cheaper and more profitable for producers and consumers of adult material.

This blog will not:

• Catalogue the health of my pets (none), what I like to watch on TV (The West Wing, Family Guy and Alias) or my drunken attempts to bed Eastern European models (too infrequent and depressing to mention).
• Include pictures of me or anyone/thing I’m in an intimate relationship with (unless it’s got a plug on it).
• Contain much actual pornography.

I also promise not to forget that bad blogs are what happens when you give a monkey a megaphone, or that the internet is the result of a typewriter having sex with a TV and a CB radio.

In short this blog will be ‘Business, never personal’ to quote the great EPMD.

Please add my feed to your reader and look for the first real post tomorrow. Email me if you want to say hi.

This Latvian florist should either change their name or start charging for photos.

Talking about naming your site before I’ve had a chance to talk about other reasons for getting into, or avoiding, the business of pleasure might seem like starting in the middle. It is, but if it works with a Jacuzzi full of twins it’ll work for the endless narrative that is a blog.

Naming anything nowadays means choosing a URL. No product or company can function without a website and in the world of porn the internet is arguably the most important channel. There are magazines without movies, movies without magazines and TV channels without stores but everyone has a website.

In the age of the internet names have largely replaced logos. Logos work best in situations when a name couldn’t be read, on the side of a truck seemingly abandoned in the middle of the pavement, or on a racing car selling kids cigarettes at 200 mph.

Count how many trucks you have and how many racing cars you sponsor. If that number is less than one forget about your logo. By the time you need one you’ll be able to overpay an angry man in a black roll-neck to design something you barely understand in colors you hate.

When someone tries to find your company’s website your name does the work of a traditional company’s building and the roads that lead to it. It should be your focus.

You’re limited in your naming options:

• Every useful single English word is owned already.
• Forget using punctuation unless you want to explain what a hyphen is, over the phone, to someone who do not speak the English so good.
• You can’t change spellings. Having a name people can pronounce is pointless if you spell it with a silent ‘qx’ combination.

That leaves words of your own invention, long names containing three or more words and portmanteaus - words made by combining two or more like PowerBook, SugarBank and, of course, MuleSchool.

Inventions are fine as long as the spelling is obvious. Google wasn’t a word until the website came along (though it’s based on one).You can spell Google after hearing it once and it reminds geeks of big things. On the downside, if a man in a Mountie’s hat with pockets full of bacon told you his web-directory was called “A boot” would you type “About” into a search engine? Of course not, you’d run away.

Inventions also tend to date faster than Lindsey Lohan at a wrap party (or that reference). During the dotcom boom every celebrity fronted pet-food delivery service was called Fazoom or Whackosmako.com. There’s nothing worse than whacky that doesn’t involve a trip to the clinic. Whacky names don’t say anything about the company they represent and conjure images of Whoopi Goldberg knee deep in kibble. Don’t do it.

Portmanteus can work really well - if you can find one that fits and hasn’t been used already. Ideally both halves of your name should fit your business and neither should be hard to spell. Portmanteaus great strength is being familiar and new simultaneously, explaining your business while blessing it with favorable associations. It’s also a fancy French word you can slowly explain to people who need to be taken down a peg or two. PowerBook’s the gold-standard example - it’s perfect for what it is. If
you can find a portmanteu which uses short, positive words, UseIt (I’m so, so clever…).

Long names aren’t used as often as they should be. They’re hard to get right, but have advantages shorter names don’t. “I can’t believe it’s not butter” is perfect, advertising copy and neuro-linguistic confirmation simultaneously. Good long names stand alone and their only obvious weakness is the need for punctuation and buy URL’s separated by hyphens and underscores in case AOL users type those into their address bar.

That said you’ll probably still have trouble finding an available URL.

One shortcut to a good URL available which includes the keywords you want is an expiring domains engine. These tools show you a themed list of names other people are allowing to expire. You’d be surprised at what’s out there. Start at DomainsBot (a portmanteau obviously).

Adult websites should be wary of using explicit words in their name. Spam filters, porn filters, nosy bosses and keystroke loggers will automatically flag most words connected to sex and sexuality - in the dumbest way as AIDS and breast cancer charities have long known.

Explicit names don’t do much to drive traffic. The people who search on four letter words are the same people who look them up in the dictionary, and how many times do I have to tell you that you can’t surf the web until your homework’s finished?

The final nail in the coffin of explicit names is they’re hard to live with. When the employer listed on your work VISA is listed as ‘Mister Sister Motherfister’ customs gets interesting. As your business interests grow it’s nice to have a name that’s not mired in the past (unlike all those companies whose names start with ‘i’ and ‘cyber’ because it sounded cool after their dorm’s ‘Lawnmower Man’ marathon.)

Seth’s been talking about stories and good names tell stories (his new book, "All Marketers Are Liars" is succinct and brilliant and his ability to be both consistently is starting to get to me). The adult industry’s littered with great examples: Playboy, Wicked Pictures, Digital Playground, CamContacts all set a tone and tell a story without being obscene.

The name of your website should tell visitors the story you hope they’re going to tell other people when they’ve seen it. If you can do that, you can communicate with people who never bother to click a link.

Of course more people will be more inclined to click your links when they know something of what you do before they see your homepage. That’s a good thing. Like the time my town banned dancing but I managed to persuade them to change their mind in time for the senior prom.

Happy hunting. Email me with any questions, comments or complaints.

This is a metaphor. See what I’ve done here?

Getting into the adult industry is easy (for women). Anyone including your dead grandmother can find someone who will pay to experience their sexuality (burials are easy, cremations are a little more difficult).

There are four reasons people decided to strip, or have sex, on camera.

1. Security
2. Fame
3. Sex
4. Stupidity

They’re the same motivations which drive all human effort, except for dating Tom Cruise which is driven by a publicist’s need to ensure everyone that he’s not gay.

If you’re modeling, launching an adult website, or trying to get into skin flicks you have to make your own mind up why. I’m not going to help you.

Stop crying.

A lot of people have made the choice before you, and anyone who’s spent time in the business can tell you some reasons are better than others. Here’s a brief analysis of the biggies (as my doctor’s so fond of saying).

Security
Financial security is the reason that 99% of people get into the adult industry as talent (performers, regardless of contrary evidence, are referred to as talent).

When you’ve got nothing else to sell and you need money, the jizz bizz can pay in cash on the day you start. You can make a lot of money, and you don’t need no stinking white-man’s GED.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Other difficult jobs that require few qualifications and pay well include:

• Airbrushing Jennifer Lopez’s facial hair out of photographs
• Draining liberals of their blood for Anne Coulter to feast on at midnight
• Finding and killing George Bush’s illegitimate children

Security also comes from a sense of place. The adult industry is small. A few thousand people in Southern California represent the majority of it, and most of them know each other (often, but not always, in the biblical sense of the word.)

FACT: There are more astronauts in the US than professional male porn performers.

The porn industry also beat NASA to shooting sex in zero gravity and did it without government funding, or a rocket. The only thing that exploded was Nick Lang.

There is a camaraderie in porn built on shared common experience and outsider status. If you embrace it, the adult industry can provide a uniquely non-judgmental surrogate family who’ll only literally fuck you, leaving the mental fucking over for your blood relatives to continue.

Insecurities are easy to forget in the adult industry. Lack of self confidence is easy to put aside when fans (fans = benign stalkers) send you love letters, marriage proposals and disturbingly large bags of their collected emissions because they adore you. That strangely tacky mail makes you feel good.

Fame
Fame is normally hard earned. It can come from achievement, luck or notoriety.

That’s a problem:

• Achievement requires years of work
• Luck can’t be depended on
• Notoriety too often involves confronting a SWAT team on the six o’clock news

In reality, most people don’t want to be famous. Being famous means not being able to go shopping without being hassled, and having the minute details of your life on public display.

Most of us want to live like the heir to a fortune; doing no real work while living a glamorous lifestyle, going to cool parties and having a name certain people will be impressed by. It’s about being Paris Hilton - minus the blue-contacts, plastic surgery and root-vegetable IQ.

She’s also the exception to the rule of course, a billionaire heiress who chose to make a porn film and then exploit her notoriety (a word she can’t spell or say) and the public’s stunning lack of taste in blondes.

Being in the adult business means instant underground cool, limited fame and sincere adulation. It’s also a chance to find out who’s pretending to be a bohemian and is going to make out with some golfing cretin while you’re on vacation because it’s New Year and I find your job really threatening Sam. What a crock of shit Madeline.

Unlike Angelina Jolie, the most famous woman in porn can dress down, slip back into the crowd and go to the mall when she wants to. Fame on demand is the best kind to have. You can silence anyone hassling you by saying that you’ve only made one movie - an all-transsexual musical set on a riverboat, called ‘The Cleveland Steamer‘.

Sex
The production of gentlemen’s entertainment allows some performers to fulfill certain sexual desires that would be impossible to realize in any other environment.

Those one hundred and twenty men who had dreamed of having sex with Houston, only after she’d had sex five hundred times previously that day, reached for that star on the set of ‘The Houston 620′.

Cum-drunk girls from small towns had a chance to make an instructional DVD about their condition when the director of ‘Teenage Spermaholic’, came calling.

The only unique sexual benefit offered by the adult industry is the chance for wide-scale exhibitionism. Even if you crave being on display, there are downsides to sex on camera.

Everything you see in movies you can do at a swingers club, or after-hours at that Jiffy-Lube on Jefferson (ask for Manny). There’s an increased risk of STD’s and you’re never going to get elected to public office as long as Fox News is still on the air. Worst of all, the mechanical sex performers have on set, stopping to move lights and legs, eventually gets boring for almost everybody.

The softcore end of the adult industry offers no sex at all (but involvement in it means you’ll never be short of offers.)

Sex is a really bad reason for getting into the sex business.

Stupidity
Stupid reasons for making material over which viewers make yoghurt Pollack’s are as common as zits in the McDonalds break room.

A few favorites are:

• “No one will ever find out and I really need the cash.”
• Being pressured by somone else
• To satisfy your self-loathing
• To fund a drug habit
• Because you were drunk
• “Hey Mr! You missed my exit. You said you were driving me to Chicago.”

Getting involved in porn is a decision you can’t undo.

I’ve seen every documentary on porn ever made and been in more than half of them. They’re always about junkies, idiots, abuse, junkie-idiots and abused junkie-idiots. It’s not true. You can be healthy, wealthy and wise and work in the sex trade. You just have to know what you’re getting into, set your own limits and never pay for your boyfriend’s demo. That band’s not going anywhere.

Nick Denton’s feelings about sex are complex.

Heather Green at BusinessWeek has written a great post on blogging. In a nutshell blog posts work best, when, like bowel movements and elections, when they’re easy, brief and regular.

In the article she references Tristan Louis at TNL.net, who got my attention when he wrote:

“…the top three blogs in the Gawker empire (beyond the porn-oriented Fleshbot) are Gizmodo, Gawker, and Defamer.”

Why were they ignoring the porn blog? The wannabe private dick (who’s a sex machine to all the chicks) in me, knew I had to investigate:

"I pulled a cigarette from my hatband, promising myself to never date another dame who wasn’t alive when they bottled my whiskey. Kicking my browser into life I saw that the pageview figures for Fleshbot, unlike those for all the other Gawker sites, aren’t public.

Something smelled fishy, as I had ham for lunch I knew it wasn’t me. The uniforms at the precinct were schmos and the gumshows liked to ask questions I couldn’t answer. I knew I’d have to handle the case of the lost log reports alone. I threw the rest of the whiskey away, enjoyed the burning for a moment, and hit the wires…"

I found the source of Tristan’s information, an interview with Lockheart Steele, the managing editor of Gawker media. Lockheart Steele is the kind of porn name you’d remove from a script for being too obvious, but that’s beside the point. In the interview Steele has  the following exchange:

"Q: Which Gawker Media blog gets the most traffic?

Steele: Would you believe our porn site, Fleshbot? Actually, Gizmodo, our gadget site, is a close No. 2.

Q: Is porn is still the top draw on the Net?

Steele: The guy who does Fleshbot is a genius writer. The whole point of the site is to link to porn in a kind of erudite way. So it’s not as unseemly as it sounds.

Q: Are you saying that people visit Fleshbot for the articles?

Steele: Yeah, exactly. [laughter]"

In the same interview Steele admits the most popular story they’ve ever run anywhere was on Paris Hilton’s Sidekick being hacked - another porn story.

So the guys and girls at Gawker are happy to profit from porn but feel a bit embarrassed to be public about it being the core of their business? Depressingly typical.

I’d guess that the page views for Fleshbot utterly destroy the figures for the other Gawker blogs. People (and you might want to sit down when you read this) are more interested in hot people doing each other than gossip and gadgets.

What’s the moral of this story?

1. Porn looks set to dominate blogging for profit the same way it has the web
2. Never underestimate the appeal of breasts
3. Nick ‘Gawker’ Denton - stop trying to skirt the truth that your biggest profit center is a sex site

Paedophiles love Coca-Cola. Thanks for the warning.

Gapingvoid.com, is not pornographic but sounds as if it should be, and has some pithy thoughts on blogvertising.

Despite being a made up word, and most of them taste like a mouthful of menthols, vinegar and cork to me, blogvertising has some value. Traditional advertising is dead (Email, Web and I did it. We were drunk, things got out of hand) and advertising is going through a process of valmorification.

Most adult websites are stuck in the seventies, hiding content behind tours that look like discos designed by men in floppy shirts for couples on roller-skates.

Tours are ads, and anyone born after 1950 doesn’t believe anything said by ads, the government or people born before 1950.

Samples are cool but they don’t make a tour into something else. What impresses customers is a story - a puffed-up testimonial, built on a story that sounds true told by someone you trust.

Tours don’t provide stories or dialogue. They ask you for money. LIKE THIS!!!! They’re a scary porn cliche. Does anything say “Thanks for the creditcard info, now I’m going to rob you” like a flash-laden tour?

There is a better way. Kill the ads/tours, highlight the samples and LEAVE THE SHOUTING TO OWEN MEANY. Blogs are personal and conversational which is why even corporate blogs have more character than traditional websites.

You don’t need a blog in order to learn from them. People visit blogs because they like what they see. Tours are ads you try to force viewers to read against their better judgment. People like porn and seek it out. Advertising is exactly what’s not needed.

Entertain, amuse and talk to your visitors and forget about selling to them. No one needs to be told to ‘click here’ more than once if your site’s well designed, or ‘buy now’ if they want what you have to sell. Dialogue is foreplay and ads are getting felt up by someone shouting “Where’s your money?”

Like the punchline says - be the bull that walks down the hill and fucks all the cows. (Amazingly - my uncle was actually teaching me something when he told that joke.)

If the people you’re talking to like you they’ll trust you, and might believe you and when you tell them something’s worth doing, buying or checking out.

Prison. Where you don’t want to wind up.

The adult industry is dealing with the recent announcement of revised 2257 regulations. ‘2257′ is shorthand used for a set of rules instituted in the late eighties, as a direct result of the Traci Lords scandal and the Meese Commission. The current regulations were drafted without thought for the internet and announced changes are supposed to make them current.

They rules were drafted to make doing what Traci Lords did, faking an ID and making 107 porn movies between the ages of 15 and 18, almost impossible.

They worked. Any casual reading of the news since the Lords story broke will show that the use of underage performers in professional porn production in the US has been consistently kept at zero. A success that’s been the result of the industry policing itself.

Only adult companies need to keep records of course. If you want child pornography look for Traci Lords at eBay, you’ll find plenty of magazines, tapes and photos for sale featuring pornographic images of Lords made when she was a teenager.

The 2257 regulations need revision, but the changes which will become law on July 3rd don’t help make the porn industry, which has an almost perfect track record for protecting minors, any better. They’re a transparent attempt to make producing explicit sexual material harder.

Children are exploited, abused and raped in America every day - most often by their parents. The new regulations are an attempt to punish what some people in power see as immoral behavior by exploiting an imagined connection between porn and child abuse.

The new regulations carry a ten year prison sentence per violation, and the record-keeping requirements need to be met for any material produced since 1995.

Raids will come and people will go to jail; not for exploiting children, but for failing to keep records that weren’t the law when they made the material they own. The government’s telling the adult industry to destroy vast quantities of legal material or go to prison.

The same people are trying to undo two hundred years of scientific progress, and are telling parents that they can’t teach their children non-Christian religious beliefs within their own home.

Freedom of expression, and the freedom not to be indoctrinated, is a right. Some people in our government don’t seem to think so.

I was raised on radio. Then I built this city… on Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Podcasting is not a revolutionary technology, though Neil Dixon and Om Malik disagree with me, and they’re both smart guys. Is it a coincidence that podcasting’s main advocate used to be on MTV, and is now using his online fame to re-launch a radio career? Is Tom Cruise gay?

It’s pretty easy to write a words that are sounding like the good English.

Making a radio show (which is what a podcast is) is hard, even if you have the tools:

• You have to know how to edit
• You have to find original music (or steal it and risk getting caught)
• You have to sound good (unless you present bookworm on NPR, then you can sound as nasal as you like. Michael Silverblatt should lay off the coke.)

If your podcast’s production values are low, people raised on MTV and action movies aren’t going to stick around. Good production values are why I’d rather see Brad Pitt kick someone’s head off, while Angelina Jolie slowly licks her lips in close-up (excuse me - I need a masturbation break) than watch, you know, intelligent movies and shit.

Podnography could be huge.

Sexy letters in porn magazines are great, and women love ‘erotica’ even more than men. There’s got to be a market for downloadable, sexy MP3’s I can listen to on my iPod.

Even with a video capable cell-phone, it’s too embarrassing to be caught watching ‘Eat Me in St. Louis’ on the train to be fun. You’ll be able to discretely listen to Podnography anywhere you want.

It’ll be easy to produce too.

No music is necessary for porn (maybe some solo bass guitar with a wah-wah effect), and anyone with a good voice and a creative streak can write it. Penthouse letters page, for all its other virtues, never got far past ‘I just gave a serious deep-dicking to the twins next door’. What about women? Just throw in a soldier on a horse and talk about what everyone in the castle is wearing before you get to the sex.

So where is it? Where’s my podnography?

It’s a killer promotional tool.

• Edit down the sound from your latest movie and give it away as a ‘Podnographic Preview’ on BitTorrent.
• Record a sexy message and let it circulate promoting you and your website.
• Take requests and sell exclusive mp3’s to ‘collectors’ and other sinners.

Seriously - go make some podnography. This idea’s so good, and came so easy, I kind of think all that "Einstein was a genius" stuff was exaggerated now.

Email me any you make and I’ll review it here immediately (just don’t write to tell me there’s a sex category on ipodder.org - it’s empty).

Seconds after this was taken you couldn’t see the grass for man-fat.

Beautiful Agony, like Slashdot, is a niche fetish site concerned primarily with masturbation.

Two things make it remarkable.

• It eschews nudity for video of people’s faces.
• It features men - uploading DNA, and women - texting themselves to heaven, side by side.

The adult industry has historically believed that women don’t watch porn. The few that do were catered to with attempts to make ‘couples friendly’ material, which has always looked like a collaboration between Stevie Wonder (Director of Photography) and Kenny G (Score).

Porn for straight women was seen as too gay to show men. It’s been assumed that any who accidentally saw it would reach for the off switch faster than a teenage boy caught watching MPEG’s of his grandfather masturbate. By the Pope.

But Beautiful Agony appears to be doing well. Have customers got more open-minded? Smarter? Gayer?

Who cares?

If a site like Beautiful Agony can create adult material which appeals to people of both sexes, without turning most people off, they can sell to women as well as men and therefore sell twice as much.

A smart way to put dollars on the bottom line without doing any additional marketing at all.

Kiss my ass. He wants to kiss you too.

“During a brief orbit of planet smut today, I noticed that, despite being well stocked with ass, the adult world hasn’t caught on to RSS yet.”

(Rimshot. The crowd claps politely)

“Thanks folks but seriously…”

RSS allows you to provide updates of what’s going on at your website, without having to ask for an email address. No one feels good about giving their email to an adult site. RSS makes collecting email addresses redundant.

A year ago RSS was the future, now it’s here and tomorrow you’ll look a little silly for not offering an RSS feed. The more often you update, the more sense RSS makes, and RSS works for any content which changes frequently.

Since I started using an RSS reader, the number of sites I visit regularly that don’t offer RSS has dropped almost to zero. I know I’m not alone and adult websites update all the time. Why isn’t RSS everywhere? It’s free.

Now back to the show.

“FLY ME!… to the moon… Thanks you’re wonderful… Shoot me to the stars…”

If you want people to look you in the eyse without laughing, consider your porn name carefully.

We’ve all heard about making up a porn name by combining our pet’s name with the street we grew up on but since 1986 that’s been illegal. Seriously, try it and porn commandos will bury up to the neck in sand and bukkake on you until you apologize.

A professional name is a serious thing. You have to live with it, it’s your calling card and it has to grow as you do. It’s also the first major decision you make on entering the industry, and shouldn’t be made when confronted with a release form in a photographers studio. If you leave it until then you’ll end up with a name the photographer came up with. You don’t want that, get any jizz bizz professional drunk enough and they’ll rattle off a list of ridiculous porn names they’d love to saddle someone with.

A number of European performers use their real names, though it’s rare in the US (a dissertation on guilt and morality is waiting to be written on that). The problems with using your real name are:

1. It may not be memorable.
2. You probably won’t be able to buy it as a URL for your website.
3. You won’t be able to check into a hotel without getting calls from horny fans who know you’re in town.
4. If you have children they’re going to have to justify your lifestyle every day in school. Of course, if you home school your kids and work in the adult industry, your kids are social outcasts already. Go back to worrying about Arab homosexuals with AIDS being paid, with your tax dollars, to take our guns away and force us all to be Buddhists.

Like everyone else in the public eye, including William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton (so named because he’ll drop trou’ for a dollar), you also want a porn name to create an impression.

Newcomers frequently try to choose names that sound similar to other performers they admire. That’s a mistake.

The more successful you become, the shorter your name will become. We naturally shorten names because we like the people we’re referring to. It feels friendly and the public’s reliable ability to sniff out killers and pederasts before they’ve done anything obviously wrong is why Michael Jackson, even at the height of his fame, was never just Michael, why O.J Simpson never lost the Simpson, and why Jack the Ripper was never simply Rip.

If I say Jennifer, Brad or Angelina you’ll think of specific individuals (naked, a messy pile of limbs, oil everywhere - or is that just me?). If your chosen name is shared with someone more famous than you it’s a certainty that you’ll be mistaken for them in print. In the porn industry any names which include: Ron, Jenna, Danni, Tera, Nina, Seka, Aria, Veronika (and many, many more) are going to be an uphill battle.

Some amateur website owners try to solve the problem of having a non-unique name, and a decent URL, by tying a description of what they like to do the name they want. It’s where we got ExtremeHolly.com (she’s extreme) and NaughtyAlysha.com (a very naughty lady) from.

NB: If you’re going to visit either of those URLs remember there are some things you can’t un-see.

The problem with descriptive names is that they can be restrictive and give the impression you’re a one trick pony. Flexible names are as desirable as flexible dates.

Unless you’re looking for legal bills don’t choose anything that includes a trademarked phrase. That means you Dr. Whopper (catchphrase - Extra mayo? UARRRGH!)

Most importantly, choose your name before your first professional engagement and choose carefully. Some directors refuse to put ‘cheesy’ names on their boxes and I know models who are called different things according to where they appear because of that. Name changes are a marketing nightmare.

Don’t tell anyone your professional name until you’ve bought a URL, and perhaps started a trademark application. Otherwise when you try to buy that domain you might discover someone else is pretending to be you. Unfortunately it still happens a lot.

Personally, I love names with a touch of retro humor. Beverly Center, Dana Point, Jerry Curl and Bill O’Goods are all high on my list of too-good-not-to-be-used porn names. Which is why I’ll never venture in front of the camera (besides, until wide angle lens technology catches up with my size I’m doomed to appearing blurry.)

The key to picking a great professional name for the adult industry is to forget you’re in the adult industry at all. The best-known nude models and performers have names that would work just as well if they were fronting a rock band or acting in mainstream movies. Your name shouldn’t be something you might ever be ashamed of - you’ll have enough prejudice to counter if you become successful.

Even if you leave the adult world, think how much easier it’ll be to discuss your ‘lost’ past and religious conversion if you don’t have to refer to your former self as ‘Goldie Cumfish’.

Pick something that sounds cool and is non-porn specific. By the time people see your website they’ll be aware of what you’re involved in. If your name sounds ‘porny’ it’ll only make you seem cheesy and out of date.

Rule #1 - Porn and cheese don’t mix.