What's the Biggest Mistake You've Made in Your IM Career?

12 years ago

Well done buddy for adapting to change. A lot of people find that difficult. The secret in any situation is to diversify and plan ahead. Your an inspiration to us all.

The biggest mistake for me was buying too many wso's, suffering from information overload and then not taking action. However, that's all changing. As Clint Eastwood said in he film In the Line of Fire 'A man has to know his limitations'.

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RogueOne

12 years ago

In the early days ( almost five years ago now) I listened to someone who said traffic exchanges were a good way to get traffic and subscribers. I wish I had all that time back.

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robestrong 12 years ago

Where to begin? Jeesh I could literally fill up pages writing about my many, many, mistakes. A couple that spring to me off the top of my head include buying products before they've had a proper review/vetting, and buying things that aren't viable or I won't need simply because I have the money.
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sal64

12 years ago

Taking advice from people who can talk the talk, but don't walk the walk.

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Rod Cortez

12 years ago

Originally Posted by eightofdiamonds

I broke one of the Golden Rules, don't put all your eggs in one basket. All my traffic was free search engine traffic through SEO. Most of that disappeared with the Penguin update. I always knew it might happen so luckily I had some other idea I could put into place and I'm better off for it now.

What's been your biggest mistake?

I've made so many it's hard to pick which one was the biggest. One of the biggest mistakes I personally made was not creating my own products sooner and then getting others to market them for me.

Another mistake, for nostalgic sake, was waaaay back in the day (late 1990s?) I sent an unsolicited e-mail to Paul Myers. Yes, I spammed him not knowing any better. His response was short, merely asking me for proof that he opted in to receive such information. I responded that I didn't and that I was a newbie who had no clue what he was doing.

He was ever the gentleman.

RoD

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TheClarkey

12 years ago

Early on it was too much reading and less action taking. Fortunately though I have never done any big financial mistakes.

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Sean Doody 12 years ago

I was gonna say buying a whole heap of s**t that promised miracles with little to no work when I first came online but I have come to the conclusion that that is part and parcel of the whole online journey

I would say the biggest mistake I made was not getting a mentor straight away.

The single best thing you can do is find someone who is where you want to be (for free) and invest in that person to help and guide you to where they are.

It usually seems expensive but in the long run it work out a hell of a lot cheaper than buying all those shiny objects!

It's a real solid investment in your online career. Just do your research on your potential mentor

Peace,
Sean
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nicholasb

12 years ago

sitting on my ass and working all day without getting up and moving, I got all the way up to 280 but am now back down to my normal size

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davidsu

Banned 12 years ago

1. Building a website that no body knows what the function is and no body needs it

2. Spend thousand dollar in advertising and only get a few clicks.

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PR Wizard 12 years ago

Believing the hype that making money is easy, requires little work etc. This thought process sent me down a few dead ends and wasted my time.
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shaynjordan

12 years ago

I have been really behind becuase I have been focusing on my network marketing company, now I have to learn about Penguin and learn how to fix it. I wondered why my numbers went down

.

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Matson

12 years ago

Buying products because I thought I might need it some day. Well I never even got around to reading most of them. Only buy what you can use today!

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Alex The Lion

12 years ago

It seems buying plenty of products and not taking action seems to be the main problem.

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tori73

12 years ago

honestly.... my biggest mistake is ''not joining Warrior Forum'' a few years back
it would have saved me TIME and MONEY.

This a great forum to educate yourself on Online Marketing Business

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dwhs

12 years ago

Originally Posted by tori73

honestly.... my biggest mistake is ''not joining Warrior Forum'' a few years back
it would have saved me TIME and MONEY.

This a great forum to educate yourself on Online Marketing Business

And... what sort of stuff did you learn?

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tori73 12 years ago

Many ways of making money online that I have learned "the hard way" I could have learned here at this forum nice and easy.
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- ShaneBoyd 12 years ago
  
  Good thread. Jolly good indeed The single biggest mistake I've made in my IM career is not building a list "of my own" sooner. And I put "of my own" in quotes on purpose.
  
  You see, back in 2010 I joined an IM coaching program. One of the cool things about the program (or so I thought) was the fact that you were given a 52 week auto responder series all filled out. All you had to do was put in your affiliate links and put the series in Aweber.
  
  So I spent around 250 and got a list of around 300 subs...but NOBODY would buy. You see, whenever I sent a broadcast email...it was obviously in a different voice than the other emails and I would get spammed and unsubscribes at a rapid rate.
  
  I realized then that I didn't really have my "own" list. I had a list for the coach who was teaching me how to sell his stuff. So I deleted the list, quite the program and quickly shifted to article marketing and SEO stuff.
  
  But now...in the past 45 days or so I've built a list of my "own". I have over 500 subscribers that are responsive. I predict by the end of June I'll have near 1,000 subs and by the end of July I'll have 2,000.
  
  Now that I'm building my own list IM is fun again and the money is a lot better. And the way I see it, by the time "product launch" season opens up...I'll have around 5,000 valued subscribers to promote quality products to.
  
  I'm looking forward to it.
  
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  JEasy 12 years ago
  
  Plenty of mistakes here, but the biggest was not getting coaching in the beginning from those who were already successful.. All the money I spent on buying stuff and time spent trying to figure out things for myself would've easily covered quality coaching and training.
  
  Get coaching first!
  
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Chrisbroholm

12 years ago

Wasting ages building websites without knowing keyword research, buying domain names on gut feelings and probably worst of all looking at "broad" instead of exact for the first few websites - that was horrible.

Another was simply not taking more action once I had the basics down, it's much easier to learn what you are doing wrong when you are actually doing it.

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Kurt

12 years ago

One of my many mistakes was early on, thinking of people who made related products as competitors instead of potential partners.

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Exel

12 years ago

One simple one was - using free hosting. Never do that even for remotely serious projects.

Besides that, reading, "learning", researching and all that and not putting it into action.

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dwhs

12 years ago

Outsourcing our support to India, they got hacked and well password where exposed and weeks of hell and havic.

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Steven Miranda

12 years ago

Not starting soon enough.

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Alfredo Carrion

12 years ago

I started some years ago in a niche that I loved (at the time) but they were mostly non-buyers. I spent a LOT of time developing my "business" in that niche, until I realized I didn't have a business at all, only a group of people who loved me, but without money.

I still receive emails from people that were inspired by my words and decided to change their lives and that, but no money :-P

So, lesson learned: make sure there's money moving in your niche. If no one is selling anything there, maybe it's because there's nothing to sell.

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marketinguk

12 years ago

My bigeest mistake so far is exactly the same mistake that you made and i also got badly hit by the penguin update, it is crucial to diversify so if one thing goes down the others are still there to pick you up, otherwise you're left nowhere!

Originally Posted by eightofdiamonds

I broke one of the Golden Rules, don't put all your eggs in one basket. All my traffic was free search engine traffic through SEO. Most of that disappeared with the Penguin update. I always knew it might happen so luckily I had some other idea I could put into place and I'm better off for it now.

What's been your biggest mistake?

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Chronic IM

12 years ago

Hello! I think buying some crappy products and softwares without even knowing more about the product itself is my biggest mistake. Buying unuseful things that I don't even use, now they are just piles of junk on my PC.

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NicheDad

12 years ago

Blew thousands on PPC.

Sold some of my biggest earning/most valuable domains and sites for 5 figures. Spent the money on a dream wedding...

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JEasy 12 years ago

Originally Posted by NicheDad

Blew thousands on PPC.

Sold some of my biggest earning/most valuable domains and sites for 5 figures. Spent the money on a dream wedding...

I hope the wedding was worth it
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Adie

12 years ago

Being lazy and lack of drive...

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peewhy

12 years ago

Learn from Warrier experiences

Alway act on a WSO, don'y jusy buy it and do nothing

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condra 12 years ago
Excellent thread!

The biggest mistakes of my early IM career:

1
Investing a lot of time and effort in creating and promoting a non profitable "free info" website.
Keyword intention is paramount.
I would much rather have 500 visitors for "buy laptops online", than 1000 visitors for "free laptop tips" ....
Now I focus on profitable micro niches. More on that in my last point.

2
Trying to find a new WP theme for each website and learn all the intricacies of each theme. I wasted countless hours in the early days messing around with different themes on different websites.
Learn to prioritize, and be efficient in regards to time and effort as well as money.
To be ultra efficient, find one great theme that you can apply to many websites. I use one theme for all my sites. It's very clean and simple, but still quite stylish and modern.
I don't subscribe to "gurus" who tell you to use default themes. Yes, simplicity is important, but so are first impressions.
There are lots of tasteful themes out there that look simple, but give the impression of being custom designed.
Check out Aqualine, Business Lite, Photoria, Paragrams
...... Pick one.... Learn it backwards...Use it on multiple sites with minor tweaks to logo and CSS.

3
Not knowing how to use Excel.
I only got into Excel about a year ago and it has become one of the most powerful tools at my disposal. I use it for keyword research, niche research, keeping logs, and more.
In internet marketing, maths trumps gut feeling every time.
Doing some simple calculations can be very revealing. If you want to get into Excel but don't know where to start, you could start by setting up a simple spreadsheet which calculates the average PR for the top 5 competing websites for any given keyword. You can then refine the spreadsheet to use more complex formula to give an overall score for any keyword, taking into account different factors.
Want to get real fancy? Get Market Samurai, export some results and use your own formula to weigh up which keywords you can tackle.

4
Being intimidated by keywords with large search volume. I aimed way too low when I first started, and I ended up ranking number one for a handful of keywords with dismal search volume. Unless you're selling yachts or insurance, low SVol words are not worth pushing for.
Now, I do look at those keywords that are getting upwards of 100,000 monthly searches, and often I can tell from a quick glance at the SERPS.. I can rank for that!
Learn to assess keyword competition. There are still lots of profitable key-phrases out there just begging to be optimized, and new ones are being born daily as new products are launched, new hobbies gain popularity, and pop culture throws up new buzzwords.

5
Not seeing the bigger picture.
I'm a graphic designer. When I first started in IM, I figured I could make nice looking sites, and blag my way through other aspects of website creation, such as content, and SEO.
Successful websites are like houses of cards: every single piece of crucial!

Your website needs to:
- look smart, bespoke and trustworthy
- have valuable content
- rank for relevant keywords that convert to money
Find your websites weak points and fix them.
In my experience, newbie marketers tend to have lazy content, and tasteless themes. If that sounds like you, don't be surprised you're making no money.

6
I was badly organized and wasted countless hours sifting through bookmarks menus, and desktop folders.
Set up a well organized Speed Dial on your chosen browser.
It will save you hours if not days in the long run. I recommend SPEED DIAL FOR FIREFOX:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...on/speed-dial/

7
Finally, when I first started, I went for really dang obvious niches, such as DVD reviews and digital cameras. (face-palm!) These niches are completely saturated.
Now I find micro niches packed full of enthusiastic hobbyists. If you have the right combination of objective strategy, and creative brainstorming, you CAN find those micro niches that haven't yet been mined.
Try some cross pollination, monitor some trends, get out of your comfort zone, keep your finger on the pulse.
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Dragontech

12 years ago

Spending more time reading than doing in the first 3 months, which was a big waste of time.

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Curtis2011 12 years ago

No huge mistakes on my part; more like lots of little mistakes.

I guess they all add up to deviating from the rule of "focus on one thing that works" instead of experimenting with everything.
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- stefan schulz 12 years ago
  
  Buying one product after another and did not taking action!
  
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NicheNick

12 years ago

For me, it was creating an entire software product and all the related marketing pieces for a niche that was WAY too competitive and crowded. PPC costs were off the chart, and the niche was used to getting so much for free, they weren't motivated buyers.

I should've done my research better, instead of thinking a big market is a good market.

Fortunately, I now give away that software as a loss leader for another product.

Lemons into lemonade, right?

-Nick

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Miriam Higginbotham

12 years ago

The biggest mistake I made was suffering from shiny object syndrome. I wasted so much time going from one product to another and not focusing on any of them. It was not until I decided to stop this nonsense and find a proven system and follow it that I my IM career turned around.

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dannn1 12 years ago

The biggest mistake I made was being sold hyped up products that didn't really do anything. Had I taken the time to thoroughly research how actual online money is made rather than suffering from the fatal shiny object syndrome, I think I would have gotten started a lot faster.

Constantly buying garbage info products is demoralizing - it makes you feel a little dumb after you are sold another product that fails to deliver.

Luckily I started doing more research into the business and realized that you actually have to BUILD your business as opposed to buying it...

The biggest mistake in IM when getting started I think is the mindset that you can buy your way into success. You really can't - you just have to put in the right work in the right places for the right amount of time if you want to see results.
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sanjx01

12 years ago

My biggest IM mistake in the beginiing was trying to work on too many projects at once.

The lesson I learned was to focus only on one thing at a time!

Hope that helps!
~S

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Asim01

12 years ago

My biggest mistake was taking on too much information from a number of so called gurus. I didn't know if I was coming or going a bit like a headless chicken!

Now I follow a strategy that works and focus on one site at a time.

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dizen

12 years ago

- Relying all of my traffic source to Google
- Built 100+ mini sites .

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NXmarketeer

12 years ago

My biggest mistake was to not implemend an Aweber form on my websites from the beginning... It is really a big pain to do so afterwards a transfer or something...

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