Why Failure Sometimes Happens?
UNDERSTAND YOUR STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
Getting into Internet marketing is like going into business for yourself. What most people fail to realize is that the same types of obstacles and challenges that people have when they go into business offline are the same obstacles and challenges they might face online, except in a different format. If you have difficulty selling items in a regular brick-and-mortar store, don’t think that slapping a website up on the World Wide Web is going to transform you into an instant super salesperson. It won’t. Instead, seek to become a better business person all around, taking your cue from basic business practices, and then transferring those skills online to be successful.
Business is a competition, just like sports. You don’t go out to the playing field assuming that your team will lose. You don’t let a few setbacks sour you on the entire game. You give it your all until the umpire blows the whistle and the game is over. Then, there is time for regret, but until then, the game can always be turned around at the last minute.
Having a positive attitude when you go into Internet marketing is essential, just like it is when you are competing in sports. If you think you will fail, you will. There is no better self-fulfilling prophecy than someone who halfheartedly goes into business only to make excuses for why the business failed. It didn’t fail after they started doing it. It failed the minute that they didn’t believe in themselves. If you want the stamina and persistence to get into Internet marketing and to be successful, you have to understand that there will be setbacks, but you have to be able to use everything as a learning experience to finally cross that finish line as a winner.
UNDERSTAND YOUR STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
Every business is a reflection of the owner who creates it, and Internet marketing is no different. If your strength is in structuring a product lineup and not in sales, then you have to get people on your team who can cover the weakness, while you cover the strength. Sit down right now and carefully assess any businesses you’ve created in the past. What were you good at? What did you fail at? Learning from failure is the key to success. Those people who fail to learn from their mistakes, as it is said, are doomed to repeat them. Therefore, you already have a fertile history of what types of obstacles you might encounter in this new venture, and can prepare an alternate plan to get you past them even before they occur.
If you’ve heard that you can make BIG money on the Internet, it’s true. You can. Will you make it immediately? While some people appear to have done so overnight, the truth is that they have gathered those skills over time until, one day, it all came together for them. If you think that all you have to do to make money on the Internet is to put up a website and wait for people to show up, you have a set of false expectations that are completely unrealistic. Here are the three biggest misconceptions to Internet marketing that will only lead to disappointment if they’re not tempered with some common sense.
YOU CAN QUIT YOUR JOB WHEN YOU FIRST START
If you have a job, keep it. Internet marketing is best learned as a side business until it becomes more profitable. Unless you are independently wealthy, you are going to want some steady source of income while you get more real-life experience with the Internet and with making money online. Set some monetary goals, but don’t make them so outlandish that they demoralize you instead of inspiring you. Do you want to make an extra $500/month? If so, do you have a strategy planned to make that income? Once you reach a goal, increase it. At the point you’re making what your job offers you, quit! Then, you are at the crux of learning how to zoom way past the small amount of money that your job offers.
Internet marketing is an exciting field to learn, and if you hitch it to your passion, it will seem like fun learning and not like homework. However, if you think that all you have to do is to learn how to put up a blog, that’s just the bare minimum. You will have to learn how to get traffic to the blog and then have the right offers to create income from the blog. It’s not just the technical aspects of setting up a website that take time to learn. It’s the art of marketing online, which is even more important, that will take some time to learn. Expect that there is some work and time involved, and don’t be discouraged if at first you don’t make a single penny and spend a few weeks simply learning the ropes.
BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME
This might have been true five years ago, but today, the Internet is flooded with competing sites. Don’t expect that you can just put up a blog or site and people will flock to it. More than likely, you’ll start off with one or two visitors a day, and then you’ll have to take action to attract traffic back to the site. That’s where learning the art of marketing starts.
The first thing you have to remember about the Internet is that you don’t have to be perfect to start making progress with Internet marketing. You just have to have a solid niche, an online presence to expose that niche, and traffic that is targeted to your chosen demographic. That means that, as much as a fancy, colorful, and perfect website is nice to have, it’s not as important as your marketing. Instead of spending thousands of dollars putting up a very complex site, think in terms of simple, fast sites that you can put up quickly and many at a time if necessary. Until you know which niche is going to be profitable for you, you may want to experiment with several sites at once that are quickly put together, don’t cost much to host or maintain, and can easily be dumped should they prove to be losers. The following elements are the basic mistakes beginners make when setting up an online presence.
YOUR NOT-SO-HOT NICHE
Hitch your passion to a profitable niche, and your chances of success increase dramatically. Do a little research before you even pick a domain name to decide what niche you want to target. This way, even before one piece of HTML code is installed onto your website, you have a good idea of how much success to reasonably expect and to avoid the losers before you spend too much time on them. Once you pick a topic or niche of interest to you, you can check out the competition just by entering search terms related to your niche on Google. Look at some of these sites, and then check them out on quantcast.com. It will give you an idea of the demographics of the site and whether they can attract sufficient eyeballs to reasonably market the niche. Pay attention to the types of products and services that appeal to that demographic. Think how you can market to the same niche, while putting your own unique twist to it. Once you have a few possibilities, start to see what domain names are available to the market.
YOUR MANGLED DOMAIN NAME
Pick a descriptive top-level domain name that is easy to remember, flies off the tongue, and isn’t easy to misspell. Avoid hyphens and other odd characters if you can, as these are very hard for people to remember. Make it all one word. Go to GoDaddy.com and see if the domain name is available. You may have trouble with getting one- and two-word domains, as these have mostly been sold out. However, a three-word domain is still a pretty good choice and you can get these very cheaply through online domain name registrars. Pick a few good domain names that are representative of your niches and get a package to host your website too.
EXPENSIVE AND FEATURE-LESS HOSTING
There are multiple Web hosts out there that offer packages for a basic website with limited e-commerce, and they step up to include that service too. While you’re learning how to do this whole website thing, it is better for you to grab a package that puts up a website pretty quickly without too much of a learning curve on your part. You can do that by setting up a blog, which anyone can do, using WordPress.org. Hosting sites like
Dreamhost.com will give you instant installations of the most popular website packages without having to learn a single line of code. Pay upfront for one year, and you avoid extra charges, including setup fees, in some cases. This way, you won’t be billed on a monthly basis, and if the website fails, you can simply let it expire and move on to a more profitable one.
COMPLICATED WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT
If you’re still stumped about what to do to get a website up and need a little HTML training, why not get someone to show you? There’s no reason you have to go it alone for this entire process, and what you don’t know, you should hire out. The idea is to get as many of these basic sites up as you can reasonably manage and leave them somewhat basic until you know whether you can drive enough traffic to them to make them profitable. Don’t worry if they don’t look perfect; just get them up quickly. If you’re worried about looks, just check out Twitter. It has got one of the most basic and ugliest interfaces around, yet there are millions of users on this site. You do want your site to look professional, but not so perfect that you spend a fortune getting it there. Keep it simple, put them up quickly, and get it done fast.
NOT UPDATING FREQUENTLY ENOUGH
Once it is up, you need to update the content fairly frequently to keep people coming back to your site. If you only update once a month, people will quickly forget to check back with you, and you will lose traffic instead of gaining it. If you get writer’s block and just don’t update the content on your site, you risk the chance of letting your site go stale. You can hire ghostwriters to add content to your blogs and websites for a small fee.
NOT USING SEO
Learn what you can about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This way, when you hire someone to write content, it can include SEO techniques to make it search engine friendly by adding keywords that attract visitors to your site and that make you money. This is the very first step to optimizing your site so that it becomes not only popular, but a moneymaker. Without a plan to make money from the site, it will never be a success in Internet marketing.
In a brick-and-mortar store, all a business owner does is set out his/her merchandise, do a little advertising, and if he/she got a good enough location, buyers will come. Taking this approach is deadly online. Not having a solid plan to make money with the site was a main reason for the biggest failures of the dot-com bust, and is still a big mistake for beginners. How do you expect to make money from your website? Internet marketing is about making money, so if you haven’t got a plan, you are planning to fail.
PICKING GOOD PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
The first idea that comes to mind for ways that business owners can make money is to offer a product or service. That’s great! You should include your products and services on your website, as well as include those affiliate offers that give you commissions for sales of other people’s products and services on your site. You have to be a bit selective on the types of products and services that you offer on your site so that they match the demographics of the people visiting you. You can’t market very high-end products to lowincome people. Always keep your demographics in mind when picking the products and services that you will offer.
NOT PUTTING UP SUFFICIENT OFFERS
If you only offer one or two products, once your audience buys these, what happens next? Make sure you have many products and services in your lineup so that no matter how much your audience buys, there’s always something new to consider purchasing. Having too few offers is one of the many ways in which you can fail to achieve significant income with your site.
See Related Story!
Originally published at https://www.dauntleast.com on August 28, 2020.
