5 Sex Work Mistakes I Made In My First Year

When you first become a sex worker, you’re bound to make some mistakes. After all, there is no authoritative guide on how to be a sex worker – though Amberly Rothfield’s book comes pretty close! So I wanted to share some of the sex work mistakes that I made in my first year, in the hope of helping other new workers avoid the same problems.

Relying on One Method of Income

When I first joined the world of sex work, I was a camgirl on Chaturbate. It took a while (five months, to be exact) before I started branching into making clips. Even then, it took me a fair few more months before clips started to be one of my main sources of income.

My logic was that focusing strongly on one thing would be better than putting less focus into several things. The problem with this was that, when I had a slow week or month on cam, I had nothing to fall back on. It was a similar story if I was ill and couldn’t get on cam. When I eventually branched out into clips too, I felt a lot more secure – especially since clips are passive income. I still sometimes make sales on the first clip I ever uploaded in September 2018! I certainly don’t still make money from my first ever cam show.

However, even after I stopped putting all of my eggs in one camming basket, I fell into another trap…

Focusing on One Clip Site

When I first started selling clips, I decided that ManyVids would be the clip site that I used. I would put all of my effort into it, and get my ranking on there to be as high as possible, to maximise my success on the platform. I decided not to split my efforts between multiple clip sites, so that all my sales would be in one place, and it wouldn’t negatively effect my ranking.

If I was driving all of my own traffic, of course it would have been best to focus on one clip site. But what I didn’t comprehend at the time, was the massive amounts of organic traffic that clip sites generate for you. I had expected that most of my clip sales would come from people who had found me through my cam room, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, a very tiny percentage of my clip sales came from my Chaturbate guests. Most of the sales came from users of the clip sites themselves. By focusing only on ManyVids, I was missing out on all of the potential interest that I might have found on Clips4Sale, IWantClips and Pornhub. Now, I highly recommend models getting their clips uploaded in as many places as possible!

Telling Clients Too Much Personal Stuff

One of my biggest sex work mistakes was becoming too close with people from my cam rooms, and telling them too much about my life, including my problems. Outside of the chatroom, some of my regulars would message me frequently, on Snapchat or other platforms. Sometimes, when big things were going on in my life, I felt that hiding these things from my regulars was as good as lying. In the end, I ended up telling a few people far too much information about myself, information that I strongly wish I had kept to myself.

Just because clients tell you things about them, doesn’t mean that you should do the same back. In fact, it’s better if you don’t, for your own privacy and safety. They probably don’t really want to know all of the ‘real’ things that go on in your life anyway – your job is to be a fantasy and an escape for them.

Allowing People To Monopolise My Time For Not Much $$$

This is somewhat covered in the point above. In the past, I got to the point where I had one of my cam site visitors messaging me constantly on Snapchat. He didn’t actually tip very much, or even come into my room much! But he sent gifts from my wishlist fairly regularly. I found the constant messages draining – I was new to camming and didn’t know how to set boundaries with him, without losing him as a regular. Whenever I tried to pull away and talk to him less, he would send more gifts to prompt me into messaging him again.

Eventually we ended up falling out over a ridiculous argument and I had to ban him from my cam room. I was relieved – the constant contact was far too much. The gifts were nice, but they weren’t worth the drain on my mental health – and they certainly didn’t pay the bills.

Falling In Love

One of my most embarrassing sex work mistakes was falling in love with a client. About 7 months into my sex work career, I met a man through sex work Twitter, and we started talking. He bought some of my clips, and it was like he knew all of the right things to say to make me (still new and insecure about my work) feel flattered and good about myself. We talked constantly, day and night. He eventually told me he was in love with me, and I told him the same back.

I got lost in the fantasy of him – I wanted to meet, but he didn’t seem keen. I made videos just for him (which actually turned out not to be a bad idea, as I ended up making videos in quite an untapped niche, that are still selling to this day). Due to certain tweets that he made, I strongly suspected that I was just one of several sex workers that he was stringing along in a similar way.

After a whirlwind 6 months, he ghosted me. It hurt for a while, especially when I could still see him manipulating other sex workers on his timeline, the way he had with me. I learned a lesson about falling in love with anyone who had met me as a sex worker. I’d had genuine, strong feelings for him, but I’m sure he only enjoyed the fantasy and thrill of having a ‘porn star’ in love with him.