Biggest Mistake in your IM Career

jiipodd said:

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.

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+1

The biggest problem of them all if you lack on focus.

I to jump from one thing to another, and that's really a bad thing.

And it looks like this, I have a writing service and a few writers, I TO know how to write articles, but I never do it for myself nor do I ask my own writers to write for my projects, I just leave them standing in my excel spreadsheet and finish the orders from other clients.

And also the google keyword tool, that thing is like drugs. When I turn it on I just have to spend one hour on it in search of keywords and new ides. That would not be bad if I would not have any, but I have a 150 kb excel sheet full od ideas...

bigeazy said:

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:

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Am I seeing things right?? Does one of those keywords say 1,000,000 searches? That is a million right? lol

Getting greedy and lack of focus, they resume all my mistakes.

1) Not setting goals. When I was about 20 (ten years ago), I was making a shit load of money from a niche ($300k per year) and I got lazy (depression maybe too) and pretty much walked away from it, but it was on autopilot so continued to make six figures for a few more years, but kept declining. Looking back,t he only thing I could think that could have changed things was setting goals and sticking to them. But at 20, it was hard to not be happy with what I've done. But the truth is if I could have even put in a few hours a day, I would have been making 7 figures. Now with competition today, things are 100x harder. To give you an idea, I created a site in about 2 days, it was a list of pharmacies for seniors and other people to get prescription drugs cheap. I pretty much just copied the list from a free site. All I did was submit it to Yahoo directory (think it was $200 at the time), and two days later that site was making about $100 a day, and I never did anything with it again.

2) Giving up. This ties into my above story. Bigger competition came into the niche, and I got discouraged. One was a big time company with a lot of money, so basically made my site look like an amateur. The other big competitor spent a ton of money on blackhat (which I wasn't into yet). These two guys destroyed the rankings, and looking up at them, trying to get myself back into it, I felt I was at the bottom of a mountain that was covered in ice.

But finally, I did get back into it, and realized, I may not have the money to do what these guys did, but I'm smarter than them to capitalize on other areas of the niche (smaller keywords). Then I also became a regular here and realized things were so much easier lol, and I did have a chance. So I battled back, and I continue to climb and slowly take chunks out of their empire. How's this for white hat. After about ten years of my site being online, it had about 150 natural links, was depressing. I was about #60 in google for the main keyword which is 150k+ exacts per month. Frustrated that there was so much crap above mine, I started doing some BH. Today, I am #4 in Google, of course behind the two competitors, and wiki. But I also have about 40 other sites most ranking in top #5 for their keywords, and I'm developing another 60 sites.

I have a son now, and he is my motivation. That and not wanting to ever be 'normal', and live a 'normal' life.

Sorry, long rant.

I don't know if it's my biggest, but I tend to grow rather impatient. So I've sunk some money into some projects without doing proper research first.

Dan Da Man said:

Am I seeing things right?? Does one of those keywords say 1,000,000 searches? That is a million right? lol

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Yes sir

How are the marketed satellite sites working for you? Were you able to make any conversions?

bigeazy said:

Yes sir

How are the marketed satellite sites working for you? Were you able to make any conversions?

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That's a really nice op you have going.

My mistakes:
1. Spending a lot of money on "guru" courses.
2. Spending a lot of time on learning instead of doing.
3. Spending a lot of time on SEO tools and trying to master SEO.
4. Spending a lot of time on forums and other places.

Lesson learnt - If you just put down your head and work hard you will make money in any field... even IM.

Great going guys.. Here is one more from my side:

Confusing myself with too many options. If you knew something will work go ahead with that. Don't confuse yourself looking for other ways to do it. You will end up reading more than doing what you wanted to do.

Opening this dmmm thread.

Postponding works for tomorrow is the biggest mistake in my IM Career

JV. Yes and no. Lotta money. Lotta problems. I'll live.

The biggest mistake I ever made, was not learning how to use scrapebox properly before I started to use it.

I ended up with a bunch of porn backlinks to my professional service website, and they are still there to this date. Hah.

working on multiply projects at the same time and never really finishing anything started just because a new project was started.

Cnotey said:

The biggest mistake I ever made, was not learning how to use scrapebox properly before I started to use it.

I ended up with a bunch of porn backlinks to my professional service website, and they are still there to this date. Hah.

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Definately agree, I only used the auto poster on SB the first week of purchase yet I have it installed on a machine that is scraping, checking pr 18 hrs a day.

My mistake is to buy too many sites from flippa after some early sucess. I got lucky and got some really good sites that continue to make me profit since i bought them one year ago. I started to think i am good in spotting great sites and end up buying alot of junks. I have to write off those junk sites as losses and now i do not buy sites from flippa anymore.

One thing i learnt, althought everyone wants you to believe IM is easy money, alot of hard work is involved if you want to have a long term business

Great thread - this is what im looking in to at the moment, looking to invest idealy off line maybe property - if anyone has any tips - I would be interested to hear them.

bigeazy said:

Yes sir

How are the marketed satellite sites working for you? Were you able to make any conversions?

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Im confused, are you talking to me? lol

Yeah Dan, from an older thread, are you trying the: myproductforsaleonlytoday.wordpress.com method.

Information overload, tried to learn all of things as fast as possible. jumping to methods by methods.