Why My Sites Failed...

[jonathanfigaro]

This thread was inspired by me wanted to express my old frustratons. I agree that sometimes it's great to hear why people fail instead of why they succeed. You can learn a lot that way as well. Anyway, I'll start the thread by talking about a few of my failed sites from back in the day.

Feel free to chime in with lessons you've learned along the way...

My very first site was about Internet marketing. It had a lot of tips on how to market a site, get traffic, etc. and attempted to make money by pushing a lot of the Internet marketing books. I could never get over the 200 visitor mark. I spent a lot of time learning from Allan Gardyne and promoted a lot of the products he promoted. I used a lot of his ideas, but never had enough traffic.

Lesson Learned: Stay away from Net Marketing sites unless you have a very unique approach with your own success story to back it up. When I first started my site, I wasn't making much money, so it's hard to tell other people how to get traffic and make money if you aren't doing it yourself. You need to appear credible. And if you aren't walking the walk, you run the risk of getting lumped into all the other "how to make money" sites.

That's a big mistake I see with many 'how to make money sites." People who visit these sites are leery enough as it is, and if you cannot prove you are actually making money then people are going to get skeptical and feel like you're just pitching them. Not to mention the competition is fierce!

I had another site on a skateboarding I used to skateboard alot. Another site that couldn't never get over the 200 visitor per day mark. Skateboarding sites are very hard to monetize. And this site was mostly visited by teenagers so their spending power was very weak and I had a hard time finding products to promote that people would buy.

And at the time AdSense was not around so I couldn't even monetize it with ads. This was in 2000. I kept the site around for a couple of years.

Lesson Learned: Entertainment sites can often be hard to monetize, especially if your main audience is teens. Of course, AdSense and other similar programs have helped, but this wasn't available when I created this particular site.

Another site I tried was a forum for TV reality junkies. It was called 4TVAddicts.com That's when I learned you never launch a forum without having a site that already gets traffic. I tried to use my soap site to help promote it but the forum never got more than about 10 posts per week and it just wasn't worth it.

Lesson Learned: Never launch a forum without a decent traffic base.

What lessons have you learned?

- JOnathan Figaro

[Deal_Maker]

I don't do sites, but I can tell you what I learned in business in general:

1. Don't trust anyone
2. Always remain optimistic
3. Cover all your bases
4. Never take no for an answer
5. He who speaks first loses
6. If someone attacks you, attack back
7. Never give up
8. Never assume; verify everything
9. Never doubt a victory

[Lambo]

i had an internet marketing site and i was getting some good hits, but then i realized that most of the people in the business were scammers and fraud. so I stopped.

Now I only do things that are legit, no MLM and that kinda stuff

[BALLERMODE]

I don't do sites, but I can tell you what I learned in business in general:

1. Don't trust anyone
2. Always remain optimistic
3. Cover all your bases
4. Never take no for an answer
5. He who speaks first loses
6. If someone attacks you, attack back
7. Never give up
8. Never assume; verify everything
9. Never doubt a victory

You should make a poster with these RULES TO LIVE BY.

[KennethFoo]

Well I did the very same mistake while ago to teach people how to make money when me myself is not doing very well at it. Bad mistakes. I guess that's what most people have this false thought to get rich quick is to teach people how to make money. I guaranteed there is never an overnight rich system, if it does he might just be in luck.

In my opinion in order to make good money on the internet is to solve a problem or provides solution. There's no point trying to marketing to a group of people who are not interested on investing their money in you. The internet is growing and definitely have a huge potential to creates wealth from it.

It all narrow down to the question "What Is Your Strength". That's the business advantage you will have compare to your competitor and if it is really your strength, people are more likely going to listen from you and probably will invest in whatever your services or products.

I run too many websites before that eventually leads to failure because I thought the market is hot and I have to get in there quickly. But the niche that I'm in is not my strength, I cannot provide something special to the customers and of course they don't want to spend money for it.

Realizing what is your strength is really an important question to answered or perhaps the hardest things to find out. I'm still in the process of searching it.. hopefully I can find the very one thing that will make me special and have advantage over people.

Cheers

Kenneth Foo