Why My Sites Failed...
This thread was inspired by a question asked of me in the Welcome forum. 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 soap opera I used to watch (Days of Our Lives). Another site that couldn't never get over the 200 visitor per day mark. Entertainment 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?
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