I thought it would be helpful to provide a little career advice for the budding PSOs among my readers. Does the thought of getting paid to talk dirty warm your pervy little heart (and possibly your pervy genitals)? Here are five things you need to know about working as a phone sex operator.

1. Taxes: You’re an independent contractor, which means you set your own hours, but your employer (the phone sex company) does not take taxes out of your paycheck. You are responsible for setting aside the appropriate amount of state and federal taxes and reporting your income to the IRS at tax time. You’ll also be on the hook for a 15% self-employment tax. The good news is that you can write off a lot of your expenses, such as internet, phone bill, and equipment (like a landline phone and headset).

2. Types of PSO companies: Most companies fall into one of two categories: trolling companies and dispatch companies. A dispatch company, as the name implies, sends you calls when clients call in. Customers call a central line and the call is routed to either whoever is free or whoever matches the client’s interests. Most companies will have already taken care of the billing process before you get the client on the phone. Because the company plays a more active role, your pay per minute is usually less. Conversely, a trolling company plays a much smaller role in your business. They host your profile and may have goals and suggestions for bringing in clients, but the bulk of the responsibility lies with you. It’s your duty to post ads, chat online, tweet, blog, and do anything else you can think of to bring in prospective clients and entice them to call you. The client calls you directly and you take down their credit card information and bill it through a third party system that your PSO company designates. I work for a trolling company, and I make $1 per minute of talk time.

3. Marketing and Advertising: Most of my 35 hours per week on-call is spent placing ads and writing blogs. When you work for a trolling company like I do, the most important part of your job is getting clients to actually call you. There are thousands of phone sex sites out there, and somehow you have to get that lonely client to choose you out of the lineup. I have to place paid ads on sites like Backpages.com and free ads on a variety of other sites. I maintain a separate Twitter, Tumblr, and personal blog for my phone sex persona.

Read the rest at The Naked Truth!

What not to do: (Also, thanks Nickelodeon for putting this into a cartoon!)