When you first get started online you really have no idea what you are doing. Chances are, you are likely going to make a few mistakes along the way. It’s natural for us as online business owners to do this and it’s to be expected. In the close to 3 years that I have been building my online business, I have made many mistakes along the way.
Every single one of them turned out to be a learning experience for me and I turned a possibly negative experience into a positive one.
In today’s post, I want to share 5 mistakes that I have made when I first started out online, and that I experience on a daily basis. I also want to show you guys how I managed to learn from these mistakes and how I was able to keep pushing forward with my goals.
5 Mistakes That I Have Made Over The Years And What I Learned From Them!
1. Not Having The Right Training- This is the reason why most people fail when they try to make money online. 98% of all make money online programs are misleading and usually promises you instant money for no work. This was especially true for me, due to the fact that I had something known as Shiny Object Syndrome. I’m sure many of you may have this as well, I hear it’s pretty contagious lol.
Back then, I was brainwashed into believing that you could make money online fast and with no work. Building an online business is in NO way easy and you need to put in lots of work in order to reach any level of success.
It’s absolutely vital that you have A Proven And Tested Training System where instead of selling you on the dream of how much money you could make, they actually focus on providing you with valuable and high-quality training. Your chances of being successful online are slim to none without a step by step program that walks you through how to get started.
2. Expecting To Make Money In Your First Week- Many people think that they can come here and start making money in their first week. I was one of those people when I first started, but I quickly changed my tune shortly after I starting going through the training and realized the vast opportunity that was available with online marketing in general.
Now while some people may be able to make money in their first week chances are, they also have some experience under their belt and they know what they’re doing.
I want to put a few things into perspective for everyone here today and I want you to think about what I’m about to say. OK? Starting an online business isn’t much different than a traditional brick and mortar business in the real world. The main difference is the price.
If you were to start up a business in the real world you could go a couple of years before making a profit. Why would an online business be any different? I like to call your first 90 days your learning period and probably the most frustrating time of your whole online career. Why you may ask? You are learning a new skill which will take some time to learn and master before you’ll be good at it and able to make lots of money.
For Example: If you were going to school to become a surgeon and just started going through your introduction course, would you be ready to perform surgery on someone in the next week? Getting started online isn’t that much different. Your hard work will always pay off in the end.
3. Becoming Complacent- I had heard stories of other fellow Internet marketers doing this and I thought to myself, Why would anyone let this happen to their business? Once you start making money and your site is producing an income on a daily basis you may start to get a little too comfortable with the money you are making and begin to slack off a bit.
My business has been growing at a pretty good rate, but in the past 4 months, I have been guilty of getting too comfortable with what I was making and slacking off a little.
This is probably one of the worst things that you could possibly do when building an online business and definitely not something that I’m proud of myself. Like I said earlier, we are all human and make mistakes.
I would have your goals written out so that you can see them every day. Use these for motivation to avoid getting too comfortable and not being as productive as you could be.
4. Failing To Fully Understand Keywords- I don’t think people realize what a huge role keywords play in their online business. This is pretty much the lifeblood of your business and the primary way that you will be driving traffic to your website.
If you don’t have at least a basic understanding of how keywords work then you will be getting little to NO visitors coming to your site and even fewer sales.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind when doing keyword research that has helped me when I first started.
First of all, you need to have an Accurate And Up To Date Keyword Tool that provides you with results in real time and in under 1 minute. Without this, you will be in the dark and have NO idea how much competition you are up against, or if the keywords that you are targeting in your content is getting searched for or not.
The #1 thing you should be the most concerned about is your competition. It’s vital that you know how many other sites are out there competing for the same keywords as you. It’s also important to know some of the ranking symbols they are using so that you can outrank them and take over the first page of Google.
After you wrap your head around your competition there is only 1 other thing you should be concerned about and that’s how many people are searching for this keyword in a months time? Obviously your keyword has to be getting searched for if you want to get traffic to your site.
5.Changing Your Theme When Your Site Is Getting Lots Of Traffic- This should probably be higher on my list than I have it because this is 1 of the biggest mistakes that I have made since I started. As your website progresses along and gets more popular, naturally you’ll want to change the look and feel of it and give it a sleek and fresh new look.
Take a look below at how much my traffic dropped off by simply changing my theme. I have recovered some of that traffic, but not 100% of it just yet.
Here Are A Few Reasons Why This Happened To Me:
- Whenever you switch themes you will have to add your GA tracking code to your new theme under the header.php in your themes editor. This will be erased once you deactivate your old theme and upload a new one.
- If your previous theme was SEO optimized and you switched themes guess what? Your site is no longer SEO optimized. This could be another reason why you will experience a huge drop in traffic.
- If you were using excerpts in your previous theme and you switch to a theme that doesn’t support excerpts your new theme will create duplicates of those which is not good for SEO.
- If you change your internal linking structure when switching themes. This is probably one of the top reasons why you will experience a drop in traffic.
What Can You Do To Avoid Losing Traffic After Changing Themes?
I wish I would have prepared for this change better than I did. If I had done some research on this beforehand I wouldn’t have experienced such a dramatic drop in traffic.
Here Are A Few Suggestions To Avoid Traffic Drop Off
- Hire someone who is experienced in SEO
- If you do attempt to do this yourself, then please be prepared and do research on it beforehand
- Ensure that your new theme is SEO optimized
- Your theme should also be responsive so that it looks sleek on both mobile devices as well as a desktop PC
- Write content more often so that Google will crawl your site and index your new content quicker than they normally would.
My Final Thoughts!
We all make mistakes and this is actually a good thing. To be honest with everyone today, If we didn’t make mistakes we would never be successful at anything. I’m sure you have heard the saying you have to crawl before you can run haven’t you? As long as you learn from this and don’t make these same mistakes again you will be fine.
I hope this post has saved you the headache and frustration when it comes to building an online business. I’m sure that many of you can relate to the 5 things I have listed above and you may have even made these same mistakes yourself.
I would love to hear your experiences as well as your thoughts, questions, or anything you would like to add to this list in the comments section below.
Cheers
~Scott~
John Wang
Nice points overall. I totally agree with you about these points, though I think there is another crucial point which is to build the online business appealing to audiences, but not crowd it with all kinds of ads.
Scott Newkirk
Hi John,
I 100% agree with you that we should be building our online business so that it’s appealing to others and not cluttered with ads. This is actually one of my pet peeves and I find this very distracting and hard to focus on the content that’s on the page. Yea a few ads are fine, but when they fill up the first half of your page it’s entirely too many.
Thank you so much for dropping by and adding to this discussion and offering your thoughts on this topic John. It’s greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Your Friend, Scott