If you could go back, what would you do differently?

To mimic CDawson I'd have to agree - I'd have picked a large niche and sub-niched it in hindsight.

One of my single biggest mistakes was not "fleshing" out each niche site enough. I'd get the site to earning a few hundred dollars each month and move on marking it as complete. Big mistake. And I lost focus and wound up with more niche sites than I need which means not all of them get the attention they need and therefore aren't earning me money. You shouldn't need dozens of sites to earn a full time income basically.

Oh I'd also avoid all the crap about shortcuts, tricks, techniques and other such garbage. Just listening to one piece of bad advice once cost me several thousand dollars in lost traffic, investment and had my main money earning site banned. Bad mojo!

If somebody offers you a shortcut use it for short term gain if you like but be aware that it can cost you everything you've worked to create. Shortcuts aren't a longterm IM business strategy so now when I hear the word "killer technique" I don't just walk away - I run in the opposite direction from whatever "guru" is selling it for just 3 installments of $397... for a pdf file and some mp3s. Please!

Sorry small rant there lol

Pick a niche with a proven market and work it until you're 1000% sure you've made it as profitable as possible. Then take the steps you used to get that single site to that level of profit and simply repeat them in another proven niche/market.

Just my thougts :-)

LOL. Sometimes I feel like that.

I recently wrote a long blog post about this topic.


What I wish I had known when I first started in Internet Marketing...

by Nick on December 6, 2008[edit]

What I wish I had known when I first started in Internet Marketing...

At the core of making money online is 2 things: traffic & conversions.

Without traffic to your sites you'll never make money.

And all the traffic in the world will do no good if it never converts.

Learn all you can about these 2 things. Become a jedi master at these.

Build an email list and you'll be able to dramatically increase your traffic and conversions. My email list is a great source of traffic for me. I also use it to increase conversions for things I am selling/promoting.

Partnering with others can help you build your list quickly, which leads to more traffic and conversions.
Partnering with others can help you get more traffic.
Partnering with others can help you increase your conversions, build your credibility, and build your brand.

Build a network of people who are good at things you are not.

Build a brand.

Every web page you build should have a purpose. It may be to get people to opt in to your list, sell a product or whatever. Before you build a page define its purpose and that will define how you should be build/layout the page.

Test, test, test! Think your squeeze page converts as well as it can? You'll never know until you test.

(If you're not bored out of your mind yet, you can read the rest: What I wish I had known when I first started in Internet Marketing… )

I'm not sure if I would do anything different. I think I would like to have had a solid plan a little sooner.

But over all, I don't think that I would be as successful as I am to day if I wouldn't have learned the lessons that I have learned through the mistakes that I have made.

Each campaign that failed miserably taught me something new. More than I could have ever learned from an ebook. I think we can all learn more from our mistakes than we can from our successes.

It's good to know what to do and when to do it, but it's even better to know what not to do.

If you're not failing a little, you're not trying new things and learning. For each failure, you are that much closer to success. Risk = rewards in the long run. Failures = success!

So, how could you have expedited your success by making more mistakes sooner? How many campaigns could you have turned into gold mines if you hadn't given up on them?

Doug

Nothing at all. I have learned from my "mistakes" and even though I purchased products that were sub-standard for the most part, I did walk away with at least one helpful bit of information from each.

I would have also spent a LOT more time here, learning from the people who had "been there, done that"!! ;-)