I'm pretty new but my first mistake was not doing enough research here before buying my first keyword research tool. I chose Market Samurai. It only worked for me for a little bit and hasn't worked right since.
well, the only mistake i made so far is , i trusted my JV partner blindly, as they say "trust, but verify" . After the JV, he not only copied my site and the idea, but made atleast 10 clones and sold them, and he still runs a clone site of mine with my traffic sources, in the end he posted all the secrets about my traffic on a public forum, and my idea died with the website.
Dont switch shit up. Dont try something, then when you dont see results in 20 seconds, move onto the next thing. Be patient.
My first mistake? Mate. I made so many in my time, I just don't know where to begin. I think my first mistake, was buying ebooks from "SEO Guru's". Lol.
Main Mistake in the beginning was to think it is So Easy, and doing just a little of the action. also reading and reading but never actually doing.
Having "Broad" selected in adwords instead of "Exact" when doing my first keyword research. I was so excited when I got my site to the first page within a week. It took me ages to figure out why I was only getting one or two viewers a day for a niche that was supposedly getting around 1,900 searches a month. Clicking Exact took that number down to about 110 a month. Yeah, I felt pretty stupid.
my first mistake was that I thought I had to buy a lot of tools and ebooks to learn. don't get into that mentality, you are better off attempting a case study and failing. You learn more this way and this knowledge sticks with you for good. Also learn to test things out on your own and not just take peoples word for it, there is a lot of misleading information out there.
Being content with what I was making. I was pretty fortunate/lucky/successful when I first began my IM journey. I banked $1600 my first month and was so happy I didn't even consider scaling up and I kept making about the same amount every month for the next 4 months. Then all the sudden I decided to try and make more money. I started in IM about 14 months ago and now I'm bringing in over 12k every month in pure profit. Honestly, I could have started scaling up the second month instead of waiting months and months to do so. I'd probably be making closer to 20k a month right now if I didn't wait so long to start trying to scale up my operation.