If you were starting in IM, what advice or tips would you give yourself?

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

To be realistic about it, though, this is almost always going to be the case.

It doesn't matter.

What matters isn't just "how much you know on your chosen subject". How much you can deliver of what your customers want to know about it is far more important.

And people who know "everything about everything" often don't have that skill set at all, so you have an advantage over them, really.

That said, I actually disagree with many of Entrepreneurjay's points, myself. For example ...

- many of them seem to be almost entirely SEO-based, which is exactly where so many beginners find that the wheel comes off. If you're dependent on Google for your traffic, then however well you do everything else, as so many Warriors found out to their cost earlier this year, you're always potentially one algorithm-change away from disaster;

- "high page rank backlinks" are of steadily decreasing relevance, these days. Page ranks, as Google openly admits, count for less and less: what matters for off-page SEO purposes is that your backlinks needs to be of quality (and that doesn't mean just page rank!) and relevance. No surprise here, I think: we can all see this for ourselves, just from the regularity with which lower-PR pages with fewer backlinks outrank higher-PR pages with more backlinks in Google's SERP's (and from many other things, too);

- I think "never give up" is a dreadful fallacy: when things aren't working, there comes a time when it's highly appropriate to give up, and futile to continue;

- for many business models, "obviously monetize your site with AdSense", and so on, won't be right at all. It may be counterproductive and dramatically reduce income (I'd hate to give people additional ways to leave my sites, rather than staying there, which earn me only pennies);

I agree about starting to build an email list as quickly as possible, as long as you know how to build relationships, nurture and manage a list.

I'd would like to add that I'm not for a moment questioning Jay's observation that all the stuff above is genuinely what worked for him: it's just that the game has changed a lot over the last couple of years and is also probably changing at a faster rate now than previously, too, and it's far from certain that specific techniques which have worked well in the past will still work for people starting now. Especially SEO-based techniques. Indeed, there are actually many specific reasons for thinking that they probably won't.