What's your #1 Mistake as a Internet Marketer

My 1 mistake was not capture the name and email adress of the visitors for a long time...

If I had started building my lists before I would have so many more subscribers...that I could contact them whenever I want to do some money...

but better late than never...

BIGGEST mistake without a doubt: not realizing that i have everything in front of me to make this work.

Seriously, what else do you need but a keyboard and mouse?

On that note - spending too much time and money chasing every dream they sold to me.

No question - waiting too long to start building a list. I've got a permanent bruise on my forehead and a dent in my wall from banging my head against it once I realized what a fool I was to wait so long.

John

The biggest mistake I believe you can make
is actually giving a damn what most people
say that sways you from making your own
decisions. (this forum being one of them)

In fact, you'll find that almost every failure
here, and those around you, are people who
follow the herd THINKING they're being bold,
when in fact they change their minds every
time someone tells them "No, that don't work"

Only leaders in life get what they want,
because they take it. More Dates, More Money,
More Adventures, More Life, More Friends.

More everything.

If your going to listen to anybodies opinions,
learn to have a mind of your own first before
you JUMP at the next WSO, and make sure
the person your buying from know's what
they're talking about.

This sounds harsh, but this is the BIGGEST
lesson I've learned.

Learn how to be a leader, and opportunities
fall in your lap

Trying PPC as my first method..

Well, my #1 mistake was not taking ACTION crazily enough, not believing entirely that internet marketing can make to the riches.

If I had believed it enough, I would achieve the success I have today much sooner. The thing is now when I look at successful websites, I know what works and what don't work - which can help to grow faster. In the past, even though I've come across successful websites, I have no idea what works and what don't.

It's only when you take action, learn and believe it, then you are able to grow fast in your internet marketing business.

1. Laziness. Especially in link building and article writing
2. Buying an ebook that turns out to be related to ewhoring. One thing to learn from this, don't buy any ebook > $7. Most of the quality ebooks that I bought were all < $7

My #1 mistake was not outsourcing for most of my
14 years online... thinking it was too expensive.
Since, I tried to do everything myself I bogged
down on many projects, and never finished many
of them.

Now, I'm moving towards outsourcing 90%+ of
the work on many of my projects, and acting more
like a CEO. That's providing tremendous leverage.

It's much more expensive when you try to do it all
yourself!

Willie

Buying into the dream too hard a number of years ago. Assuming that I needed to spend money on software and reports and that success would come within a month or two or hard work.

Regretfully, I spent a lot of money trying to get into this industry and also gave up on some of my first ever projects far too quickly.

I see those projects making money for other people now, while the ones that I kept and put far less time and money into are actually doing well. Simply because I FINALLY learned to be patient.

Not taking action!

Not having patience!

Set it and Forget it - Doesn't work!

Not sticking to single plan soon enough. If I could have back the years I spent flip-flopping between different strategies, I'd be a heck of a lot richer by now!

Taking on too many projects.

Every time I lose focus on something that's working, I pay for it.

Lesson: Stay Focused!

Procrastination. Period

A lot of things come to mind (ha, ha).

But seriously, not leveraging the resources of others to my own benefit.

Whatever you are trying to do online, there are others who are further along the line than you. They were where you are now, but now they are far beyond that. Find their assets. It may be their reputation. You could interview them, build a relationship with them, and leverage that relationship down the road.

It may be list building. There are people out there in your niche with huge lists. If you are growing your list by a dozen people a day, you need for find people in your niche and convince them to let you leverage their list to your benefit.

A simple example would be to offer a player in your niche a free, high quality report and give them the exclusive right to distribute it to their list as a bonus freebie in a mailing. On the last page include a very short blurb about yourself and a link to your site or blog. I have done this with some fairly big name people and it works. But it doesn't work if you just think about it, you must operationalize the thing.

Find big guys who have something you want and give them a compelling reason to let you access it in exchange for something of great value you give them.

In my opinion, the who thing is about leverage. With a big enough lever you can move the world. With the proper marketing leverage you can move the Internet marketing world! --Mike

Paralysis by over analysis.

Focus on "new" stuff while older opportunities have been forgotten and dont get the attention they deserve.


PRIME EXAMPLE:

Right now i own about 100ish sites of all kinds. Still constantly looking for new keywords and niches and wanting to make new sites...but i have quite a bunch older sites which are already established with potential, but i simply let them sit and didn't do anything with them.

Definitely not sticking to 1 thing long enough...that's seems to be pretty common. Oh the pain we could all save the new folks huh?

Choosing the wrong keywords!

I hear people mentioning leveraged efforts, is there a person or group of people in mind when making those statements?

My mistake was not building my list from day one. I have wasted enough time before I realised its potential. My second mistake was doing not doing enough article marketing to promote affiliate products. My third mistake was answering yahoo answers for three months.

Not sticking with 1 thing that was making me some money but not the amount I hoped for and thinking it was a failure and quitting and looking for the next idea.

I would have to say my biggest mistake has been giving up to early... I do something for a while and see little to no results and get frustrated and start screaming that this online thing is a joke and doesn't work... After I have deleted accounts here and there and tear down all my websites ect... Once I calm down and come to my senses I find myself saying what have I done. To late, by this time the damage is done and I have to start all over again. You must stick to your guns and be patient... Let's face the fact that we were born to be internet marketer's and we will not give up... We will find a way to make this work!!! -NEVER QUIT-

Trying to do too many things.

I have lots of different ideas for projects, but often fail to follow through on them.

Simply not outsourcing soon enough and really just focusing on developing strengths and outsourcing everything else, literally!

Willie said it best...you simply should not do everything, talk about leaving money on the table - lol!

Trying to make money without a plan.

No plan means disaster. Because I had no plan I was an easy prey for all dream sellers.
Now with a plan is easy. Every time a new product is presented to me, I just ask myself: does it fit in my plan? It will help me achieving my goals quickly? Turns out 99% of the products just don't fit

Cheers

Jorge

Think I'll add another HUGE mistake:

Trying to learn *everything* about *everything* to do with internet marketing and online business.

Almost religiously studying it as if I had to get my qualification before I could take action. I so wish I took action WHILE I was learning.

I delayed investing in information and outsourcing too long.

so many mistakes:

trying to start with ppc
not listening to the right reople
listening to the wrong people

trying to much at the same time

Owing TAXES To The Government!


I know, I know, no body likes to read about the "T" word,
but please read this as it may save you from some headaches later.

Even though I could fill this reply with many other mistakes in the past,
the one that had the biggest impact on me when I started out,
was not putting a percentage of tax money aside
for when it became time at the end of the tax year to pay taxes.

You see, it's not a huge deal when you just start out
dabbling with internet marketing,
and you make a few dollars here and there.

Because if in the end of the year, you only made lets say, $1000
and lets say you didn't save up any of it,
and the government then says you owe them around $100,
most of you would still be able to sleep at night.

(note that these figures are not accurate, just an example,
and don't take them as accounting advice,
I'm just trying to simplify what I mean).

But if you remain into the "bad habit" of spending your proudly earned income
right away, (some are forced to due to bills etc)
without putting money aside,

It becomes then more of a problem when you start earning $10,000 a year,
and still operating with the same bad habit of not putting money aside,
you see the government may then ask you to pay up $1000 ish.

And the bigger issue comes in when you have an even better year the next online.
So in my second year when the government said:
"You owe us $ 8,000, how would you like to pay?

I realized that even though I consider myself to be a pretty
crafty, entrepreneurial kinda guy,
I suddenly didn't feel so smart at the time.

I guess this "not so smart" feeling balanced out,
knowing that I was able to quit my full time job
and work from home full time, on my own time.

And I just talked myself into knowing that if I owed money,
then heck, "that means I made money!! yeehaa!!"

(however I did beat myself up for a while.)

My advice would be to consult with a knowledgeable accountant.
One who has internet marketing clients would be even better.
This way you can set yourself up to operate the right way,
and know how much $ you need to put aside from either
every $10 ebook you sell, or from your $1,000 + product.
before you start earning (fill in your annual big $ goal here).

You don't want to deal with government people calling you,
and asking you "how would you like to pay"?

(when you don't have it).

Hope this helps.

Arnold.

Not spending money wisely enough and often times wasting it on ineffective advertising. Taking bad advice and generally being behind the eight ball so to speak. When I started to really step up my game, I realized that I was years behind everyone else in terms of what I was doing. An example would be just starting to set up blogs a little over a year ago in spite of being an affiliate marketer for the last six years. Not really doing anything with list building until late in my career and just basically struggling needlessly for most of the time that I’ve been doing this.

Choosing the wrong niches...

Not finding this forum sooner!

A couple of hours on here a few months back could have saved me a LOT of time and money!

I agree with Darthtoon - not finding this forum sooner, although its not a 'mistake' as such.

Spending months on end looking at courses sold on Ebay about how to make money on the internet. However one of these did lead me to the Warrior Forum so grateful to them for that.

My Biggest mistake that I made was honestly being a perfectionist. Trying to make everything perfect and the "right" way made it almost impossible for me to put out anything. I put in so much work to get the right product, but really wasn't working on getting the product out there. I learned about actually "doing it" rather than "perfecting it" from Justin Blake and Alex Malave. If you want a successful way to go about things check out my blog at rapid money monkey and get Alex's $500 in 15 Days challenge. It worked for me and you gain a lot of valuable information.

Cheers,
Aynka

Spreading ones self to thin!!!!!

I tried to do too many projects and
never was able to finish them.

Now I focus on 1 or 2 items at a
time and it works much better.

Falling for the 'next big product launch"!! Got me so many times

I don't know if there is ONE big mistake that i've made in my entire career, but to quote some of them, they would include:

1. Not capturing enough targeted leads at their First Optin and waiting for the Double Optin confirmation.

2. Not revising and re-revising sales pages (split-testing).

3. Promoting products to every niche possible earlier on in my career. Now I focus on one niche at a time, depending on what demand there is for products in that market, and only investing and deploying products in it if the niche has low advertiser and products supply.

--

Reading and buying too many IM products. This will only get you out of focus.

Starting a "serious" blog on Blogger (you can see it in my signature ), building links to it, just to get it locked by automated Blogger spam-detection bot. I've managed to get it back, but I got my positions harmed and I just lost interest in it.

Now I focus on doing SEO for new and small offline businesses, building a list of high paying customers (quality instead of quantity, and no, I won't reveal a niche) and a little bit of Facebook when I need money. However, the mistake mentioned above still affects me as what I am doing now I pretty much knew when I was just starting out a year ago, and I could already be making a couple of thousands bucks by now instead of just a few hundred :/.

Jumping from one project to another!

my N 1 mistake was trusting people

Taking too long to roll out my product, focusing on traffic before having anything to sell..

Won't take any of it back though, learnt so many valuable lessons in my first year.

Losing focus is one of my worst mistake. I always try to do everything I can at once not realizing that doing things one at a time can actually speed up my work. I overlooked important parts of my business because my attention was captured by the new systems that pop outs every now and then. Now I knew better.

Ryuchi

My mistakes are:

Giving up
Losing focus
Boredom
Overspending on shiny objects
Scattering my energy on multiple niches.

To find success, one must:

Focus
Set goals
Research
Dedicate time and energy daily
Never give up
Set a clear vision how to achieve goals

Taking so long to build a list like others have said....When first starting out it was too overwhelming to build my subscriber list....Boy was I missing out on some serious money!

Definitly wasting 80% of my work day time watching cats videos.

Buying a ton of PLR that I will never put to use.

too many reading without do any action..

I'll just quote Big Mike on this one. In a topic like this he typed that his biggest mistake "Hands down, was giving my wife my PayPal password."

1. no taking action
2. looking for methods to make money ( not looking for skills )
3. does not capture users
4. don't trust their abilities

over complicating things, its much similar than you think.

My biggest mistake(s) have been squandering the large amounts of money that IM has made me over the years instead of reinsevting it and using it to build my business. Lesson learnt, won't happen again.

I neglected offline marketing because almost all Internet marketers on warrior said they made their money online.

And now, I make not less than $650 every month running online services as an offline consultant. I don't even do what they want, all I do is just to pay freelancers that do good job for a minimal fee and charge my client very well. What is in between is my profit margin. You can imagine taking a job worth $300 and paying a professional freelancers just $50 to do it and deliver it on time without any complain.

#1 Mistake:
BEING GREEDY

To be successful, you have to give first and receive later
- GIVE tipps
- GIVE information
- GIVE!

Everyone is looking for MORE Money, MORE income. The secret is and always will be: GIVE

Write something good, attract people and sell to them.
IF you think about money all the time
IF you think about an EASY method to get QUICK money, you won't make any.

JUST GIVE! Built trust.
Give more.
Money will come.

My biggest mistakes at first were not focusing on a niche. I had this big broad site that amounted to a big nothing.

Then I learned to take my passion for creating music to make my royalty free music site.

Now I know who my customers are: video producers, filmmakers, game creators, app makers, internet marketers, etc. who need hassle free, free music to use.

I also know allot about what they need and I how my free music helps.

Reading somewhere about the... "Build It And They Will Come" philosphy.

I did, and they didn't.

When I first started online. I did three of the biggest mistakes.

1) NOT building a LIST

2) NOT building a LIST

3) NOT building a LIST

haha. I guess you get my drift. But when I did, holy crap did my world and financial security change.

I think you get my drift.

Procrastination.

Procrastination, basically not taking action. I would read and read but what good is reading if you don't put it to action?

My biggest mistake was procrastrinate

For me, it has been not being persistence in one particular thing. ONe should really stick to a particular skill and master it so you can capitalize it.

Not building a list sooner.

Not getting into product creation sooner.

Giving up on viable products too soon, rather than spending more
time tweaking things that we're working.

I've run several ad campaigns for products,either my own or
affiliate products, that didn't sell initially. I later went back, made
a few minor changes, and they sold well. I knew that the
marketer wanted these products before I created or selected
them. I just needed to spend a little more time figuring out
what I was doing wrong with a given campaign.

Willie

Biggest mistake I made was wasting 2.5 years messing around with random IM methods. 2 months ago I started email marketing and have never looked back!

Right now making $250-$350 per day!

My advice, master email marketing then move on to other stuff, it really is the easiest way to make real money online.

Notifying the Inland Revenue that I was self-employed

My worst mistake was to believe that I knew the basics about internet marketing in the beginning of my online adventures, while the truth was that I didn't know what I was doing.

Lack of focus is the biggest mistake I ever made. Jumping for one thing to another. I know that sounds cliche but its the truth.

I would say that most of the number one mistake in our marketing career does not understand what it truly means. Most of us market without thinking. This leads us to paying more and earning less. Though marketing is an investment, we should always think before we spend so we won't lose our profit.

Trying to flog the same dead horse time and time again and getting the same result: nothing... but then not changing what you do and expecting something else to happen.

Get over a failure. Stand back, relook your approach and go for it full steam.

I entered the IM world through on the quest for passive income. I spent too long thinking that it was going to be easy.

Surfing YouTube too often. That is a career killer.

The biggest mistake I made was chasing every new shiny object and not taking action.

Lots of great points here made!

Some of the biggest of my mistakes were:

- not testing to see if there was a viable market before creating the product and launching things.
- not finding a coach or mentor to help me get to where I needed to go.
- trying to be a perfectionist, this always immobilized me from creating things.
- focusing on too many things at once, instead focus on 1 and make money with it before moving onto the next
- depending too much on ONE STREAM of income, as the world of the internet changes so fast you can easily lose a lot of money overnight (Google Penguin)

Mistake is to reactive this 3 years old thread...