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 and the site was around for over 6 years. 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. Too competitive. And at the time 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.

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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Oh wow... thanks so much for sharing your failures Lisa. I could go on and on and on and on and on about mine. I can be very hard-headed sometimes and it takes me a few bumps upside my head to finally realize I need to change my focus.

I made numerous attempts to try and re-invent the popular sites like MySpace, Amazon, etc. My first site was a mega store. But as you talk about on your site, I didn't have the traffic or credibility to make it work. Stores are very hard to make popular unless you have a very specialized niche. The reason is most people don't use search engines to shop for popular/regular store products. They just go to their favorite retail sites or they use one of the popular meta shopping sites like bizrate.com.

So here I was trying to create a store like Amazon.com and I think my traffic never got about 5 per day (and those were probably me!)

Then my 2nd failed attempt was the myspace-like site. Geez, Lisa I wish I had seen your video on myspace a year ago! I paid a guy to setup a mini version of myspace for me. And as we've talked about so much on this forum, I didn't have anything unique about my site to take away from the myspace users. I tried promoting my site to my group of myspace friends and a few of them joined up but never used it. Why? Because why would they when all their friends and things they like are already on MySpace!!

So my lesson was never to try to copy or re-create something that's already out here unless you have an idea that is so drastically unique you can actually steal part of their market share. And most people don't have the budget and/or expertise to do that.

To all you guys just starting out I cannot stress enough how important (and much easier) it is to just start off simple and do a content-only site on something you enjoy. START SMALL and work on your niche then expand if that begins to get popular. Forget trying to compete with Myspace, monster.com, Amazon.com and all these heavily branded sites. It's too hard to compete.

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Just call me Max.

What I would have done differently is taken the time to learn basic HTML & CSS in the beginning rather than having someone create my site for me. A lot of people get turned off/nervous when they feel they have to learn how to program to build a website.

You don't necessarily have to become a top coder, but you should learn the basics and you can get all you need to know from basic software programs like Dreamweaver, FrontPage, etc.

Knowing the basics not only gives you confidence, but you don't have to rely on someone else to update your pages for you. And it's not hard to learn at all. My family is always asking me to do a site for them and I try to encourage them to get a copy of Dreamweaver or CoffeeCup and experiment on their own because it's really not hard to learn.

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Is it Friday yet?

I just started doing this and thought I'd done OK in spite of the silly mistakes I've made. My biggest failure was not planning.

Started a "net marking" site and didn't now jack about net marketing.

Bought a PLR to sell, put it up, THEN realized I need to re-brand it.

Bought email space with the domain name.

Had to buy a second domain to go with the "branded product"

Tried to do it all myself b4 I gave up and paid someone to do graphics for me

Start the blog with no set keyword list

3 weeks and 20 posts later I'm NOT feeling the niche!

Got my first opt-in yesterday and WOW I'm feeling good!

I'm finding my site on Google!

Today I get this mail from the lead.

She mis-spelled grammatically but I didn't mention it.

It was my first opt-in so I felt generous and gave here the package, and pointed her to the blog

Not sure what I want to do with this site...maybe I'll use the blog to promote affiliate products and ditch the package.

Methinks I'll PLAN the next site

Now I need to look for an editor...any suggestions?

Mike

I would definitely have spent more time thinking of a topic I love instead of rushing into trying to get rich. My latest site is my passion. My first site wasn't. I was chasing the money by trying to copy other's ideas.

MikeD, do you mean an HTML editor? I used FrontPage for my site but wouldn't really recommend it because it's getting phased out but it has worked for me. Many people here seem to recommend Dreamweaver. It's just a bit pricey for me.

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I think one of the main points with regards to starting out is to research and plan. Even in business there is always a business plan before a company starts up. All financial institutions want to see the business plan before they hand over any money.

The plan is the first step to success. Without it, you will more often than not fail.

I have been using HTML for many years (too many to count) so my editor of choice is still notpad. I have used the WYSIWYG editors, but everytime I used one I went into the HTML mode. I like to have full control over the HTML and hate how the editors always formats it.

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attackdepression,

I think you meant miles...

Here is NVU. It's free and a lot of folk swear by it...I use front page because it came installed on my machine!

http://www.nvu.com/

--Mike

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Saw this post from your blog, Lisa. I love what you do and your style!

My biggest lesson has been to NEVER, EVER use a free host. I spent a month building up my site only to find out I was not able to do what I wanted to do (technically)

It's worth spending the few dollars per month to have a company host your website.

My biggest failure was trying to run before walking. Within no time I was launching a new site any time I got an idea (still do). It got to the stage that it was a nightmare trying to chase each one so I sold some.

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This is great info for someone just starting out. Keep 'em coming folks!

__________________
Don't put the cart before the horse.
Plan your website, then create it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Recent Blog Posts...

Most Bloggers are Poor Marketers
Make Money as a YouTube Partner
Don't Discount Amazon's Affiliate Program