Biggest Mistake in your IM Career

Hey Guys,

Post here the biggest mistake you did in your IM Career. I am sure everyone has done some sort of blow up somewhere. Let others learn from your mistakes.



Update: This thread has got a lot of valuable information. I suggest anyone into the IM industry to read all the posts. Thanks a lot for all the responses.

Let me start:

I invested the money i got through IM into luxury rather than investing it back to earn more money. I got over excited and I ended up spending more time into my purchase (a car in my case) than work which lead to major disasters in my career. Lost a lot of clients and reputation because of that and it took me a very long time to get back in track.

So my biggest mistake was "Investing into luxuries during the wrong time"

My advice to others: If your hard work has paid off which surely will come by surprise, Don't get excited and start spending them. Instead save it and invest it wisely to earn more money. Once you are stable in your business, you can start spending as you wish. I hope this will help some one.

Getting greedy.

Not trusting others for outsourcing purposes.

reading this post. LOL

no really can't say yet. HOpe i never have huge mistake. peace.

insainty said:

Let me start:

I invested the money i got through IM into luxury rather than investing it back to earn more money. I got over excited and I ended up spending more time into my purchase (a car in my case) than work which lead to major disasters in my career. Lost a lot of clients and reputation because of that and it took me a very long time to get back in track.

So my biggest mistake was "Investing into luxuries during the wrong time"

My advice to others: If your hard work has paid off which surely will come by surprise, Don't get excited and start spending them. Instead save it and invest it wisely to earn more money. Once you are stable in your business, you can start spending as you wish. I hope this will help some one.

Click to expand...

That's pretty much it, and in overall just getting more lazy. When you're making money and have a proven method, it's exactly the time when getting lazy is bad because you could be making so much more if you spent the time then. Algorithm changes etc will come and will affect you later, so when you have a proven method don't get lazy, but always try to take it to next level. When you're making good money it's much easier to leverage it to make much more money.

I wasted my time thinking that following are the ways to monetize...

1.Build a website,copy contents,install adsense,wait for visitors,click,profit.
2.Build a website,copy contents,wait for traffic,sell ad spaces.
3.Click ads and get $0.001 per click.
4.Data entry (never did)
5.Blackhat={cheat|fraud}

And then I joined BHW.... irate: no need to mention what happened next...

Blowing $4k on bad investments before I knew what I was doing. :lalala:

Ouch, lessons learned. I've lost a few thousand but some of you...ouch!

Definitely getting greedy.

Too much is never enough.

biggest mistake - went for broad match search until i found cyberzilla's and IamNRE's keyword research tutorial (more of an SEO mistake i think)

Choosen a very low paying niche and worked on it for almost an year

broad search

I think most of us have done it.

Depending on adsense. I concentrated solely on just one niche authority site, for i know it had the potential to make around 10k per month in two years. 20 months passed and i nearly touched 5k. but them bam... adsense got banned. Such a stupid thing to depend on adsense for your entire income. If i had built an authority site that could be very well monetized by lead gen, i would be making a killing right now. But all hope is not lost for me i guess. I have moved onto lead gen and still have hope. Fire within me has not been doused yet.

These are some mistakes that I continue to make:
- Getting lots of new ideas constantly --> jumping from idea to idea before profiting from the previous one
- Trying to do stuff in "the most efficient way possible" --> afraid of wasting my time doing stuff (like building backlinks) in a bit time consuming way --> not building enough backlinks (--> reading too much BHW )
- Getting comfortable with the IM service income I get (which is not even that much, like 1000-1350 dollars a month) --> Not working enough on my own sites/products which would enable me to quit offering services altogether and scale up my business.

In short: Lack of focus.

But I am getting better with this and the amount of action I am taking for my own projects and sites is constantly increasing.

Getting greedy and forgetting security and covering all angles (mainly with adsense).

I started an office with just $1000 in hand. I worked my ass off. I got scammed $5000, then I couldnt run the office. So, never start an office or go fulltime IM unless you have 6 month expenses in your hand.

I might catch alot of heat for this but my biggest mistake was outsourcing. I spent approximately 18k in the fall of 2010. I own real estate, finance and insurance businesses which translate well on to online websites.

In January of 2011, I decided to teach myself and now my sites are in top 10 for those competitive niches. In a way I still outsource, but its in house within my office i.e. I hire my friends or ppl I know with basic computer knowledge.

Give them detailed instructions, detailed to the core. Literally they have to follow it step by step because they don't know a single thing about IM or any of the tools (eg. senuke/amr/sick campaigns, scraping on sb, etc) contract them out to between $15 to $20/hr.

A typical example would be me forwarding the title/subject for articles/content needed with key phrases to build the content around onto my technical writer. Once finished, I briefly review, forward to my publishing dept (senuke, magic submitter, venom, sick, website content) to post appropriately. I do the same thing with my web/graphic designers. It works great. I am still able to earn alot because there is alot of money in insurance, debt consol and real estate.

To put it in an IM perspective, a credit application or an insurance application is basically like a converted CPA so instead of getting say $50 per action I am getting $1,000+ because I have agents on the other side selling property/insurance/loan package etc.

And ofcourse, nothing would be true without proof. No "fake it till you make it" here. Stats from one of my sites:

Going into business with a friend of mine who later I found out he was suicidal. I quit because he was being shady, not letting me see business accounts and he would disappear for weeks on end without even hearing from him, wtf!! I actually only knew him for a year. Learned my lesson. Lost a year of my life and thousands of dollars of my money and my dads money. I had to quit because my health was becoming an issue with this psychopath (telling me he wanted to jump of his high rise building in Chicago)

Lessons learned- Make sure you know who and what you are getting into. Do not go into business with a friend or so called friend. (actually I dont know what that kid was)

P.S. He was also afraid of the dark side, so our business would never go anywhere. Puss!

Jeevs said:

I wasted my time thinking that following are the ways to monetize...

1.Build a website,copy contents,install adsense,wait for visitors,click,profit.
2.Build a website,copy contents,wait for traffic,sell ad spaces.
3.Click ads and get $0.001 per click.
4.Data entry (never did)
5.Blackhat={cheat|fraud}

And then I joined BHW.... irate: no need to mention what happened next...

Click to expand...

Totally what i did.

I tried survey filling, pdf to word conversion too.