How to Avoid Internet Marketing Mistakes. My 7 Failures.

Avoiding internet marketing mistakes is HARD. Throughout my 7 years in the online marketing world, I have come across more failures than successes.

But the success stories I have yielded far more. However, most blogs nowadays which talk about online marketing and how to make money through it only post success stories and through my experience most of them are lying about it. 

But that’s a whole other story. In this post, I’d like to share my failures that I have come across in my 7 year journey through the crazy world of affiliate marketing. The point being is that I want people who read this post to not go through the same mistakes I did. So I highly recommend reading this page very carefully.

I have noted what my lessons were for each mistake. I promise if you read this, you’ll be much more set to success in online marketing. 

My History Of Failures In Online Marketing & How To Avoid My Mistakes…

My 1st mistake: Trying to make money through paid online surveys. 

I was a college freshman at the time, looking to make ends meet and not wanting to settle for a 9-5 job. Sitting in a computer lab one day, I was searching the web for opportunities to do something online for money and stumbled onto a promise that I could get paid $1000’s for just answering surveys.

Though I was skeptical, because I was completely new and dare I say desperate for money, I joined the site which promised this, plucked down $60 and hoped it would yield great results.

What happened? Most of it was nonsense.

The surveys you did only paid you percentages of PENNIES (seriously, read this). And the only ones which did pay good money (I received requests to do surveys for $200), were in real life where I would have to take some sort of product or participate with some sort of focus group. And this happened once every 2 months. Needless to say this site did not meet my expectations, not even close.

What I learned from this: If a product seems to good to be true it usually is. This was my first major lessons in online marketing. Don’t let promises of fast money lure you in. 99.9% of the time it’s a scam. 

2nd mistake: Trying to learn to make money through a program called $7 secrets.

Same background: While sitting in a computer lab and looking at ways to make money online, I found an eBook called $7 secrets.

It was only $7 (if it wasn’t clear lol) and showed me how someone who made $1,000’s in 1 week by promoting an e-book. I purchased the book, read it and it was quite incredible. 

In short, you were taught to create an e-book on any subject you loved (Mine was health & fitness at the time) and through the programs site creator be able to put it up there and sell it through a system which funneled traffic to a main website. In other words, I’d make the book and put it up for sale on the high visited website. 

I wrote up a 90 page e-book on health & fitness. I put my heart into it. I can’t even remember how many days and weeks I spent typing it up and making sure everything was safe, effective and good for the customer. It was a hell of a book. I gave it to a few professors to read and they loved it. 

With their green light and everything else prepared, I put the e-book on sale. The result? 1 sale. 1 measly sale for nearly $30. All my hard work down the drain and me thinking about quitting internet marketing altogether. 

What I learned from this: Don’t put all your eggs into 1 basket. In this example, I chose to try and put all my effort into creating an e-book and trusting a company to help me sell it through their site. This didn’t work and I only had myself to blame. 

I did however have good people helping through that program and one person recommended a marketing method called Bum marketing which would later lead me to join a membership website called “Wealthy Affliate”. And thus begins my 3rd mistake, but this time it isn’t what you think…

3rd mistake: Not taking full advantage of Wealthy Affiliate when I first joined.

This place was and still is the only source for learning internet marketing. At the time (2007), I knew nothing about it, but upon joining I read a few tutorials and without finishing the training, went off to make my first successful project. The result? I made nothing. 

What I learned from this: I had to finish the training at Wealthy Affiliate. I did and this FINALLY led me to my first successful projects in internet marketing. It was from there that other VERY profitable success stories would stem from. 

4th mistake: Depending too much on paid traffic because of past success stories.

As my experience in internet marketing increased, I was making more and more each month. I reached about $2,000 a month at one point through a steady pace using article marketing and free methods of making money online. Until I stumbled onto a hot topic which was gaining momentum with people. 

It was called the 17 day diet and it was quickly becoming the #1 diet in the U.S. I had no time to make a blog or article market this diet, so I made a 1 page website, put an ad up on Bing promoting it, but recommending an affiliate product which paid me $26.30-$38.06 which was VERY similar to the 17 day diet, but superior (which was my sales angle). 

The result? This project would yield nearly $200,000 in revenue over the course of 1 year (2011) and well into 2012. I was happy. VERY happy. Here is the full case study. This opened up my eyes to the wonders of internet marketing, but as I later found out this wouldn’t last forever.

What I learned from this: I should have utilized the popularity of the diet and did SEO while I had the chance. I could have easily made $1 million, no joke. That’s how popular this diet was. But through my method (Paid traffic), everything was easy and automated and I felt no need to do anything else. BIG mistake and money left on the table.

5th mistake: Hoping a slowly failing campaign would return me to riches. 

This is actually part of my 4th mistake because it also has to do with the 17 day diet. The popularity of the diet began to die out in early 2012. People weren’t looking for it anymore and slowly my profits diminished. 

But I kept living in the wonder years, still believing the good days would return instead of getting my butt to work and working on other projects. Eventually my ad which made incredible profits at one point was now making me lose money, yet I blindly held onto the belief I would get back if I stayed with it.

This led me to losing $1,000’s for no real reason whatsoever. I would also make this mistake with another market I would later find that year.

What I learned from this: Learn to let go. If the project isn’t working, make changes. If the changes don’t work, move on to something else, no matter what your history is. This project was my most successful one in my 7 years of online marketing and I developed a sentimental feeling towards it. It was hard to let go, but eventually the money ran out and I had no choice but to do that. Had I done that earlier, I would have saved $1,000’s. Not to mention the need to get to work on other projects!

6th mistake: Depending solely on backlinks to make my sites work.

Because paid campaigns were failing for me, I moved into SEO (natural listings) which would cost me pretty much nothing but yield greater potential profits. I discovered a website called Bring The Fresh which taught SEO like Wealthy Affiliate but the difference is…

Bring the Fresh taught it the short term way (which failed me) and Wealthy Affiliate taught it the long term way which ended up in my building a business that has lasted to today and is still going.

I decided to join it because it was recommended by someone I trusted and at the time I joined it, the place was truly great. It had great information on how to make money online using alternative methods. They were also taught at Wealthy Affiliate, but Bring the Fresh adopted more of a “fast approach” to things. 

They offered backlink packages to help people with online marketing. At the time backlinks were a good way to get your site to rank high on search engines. Bring the Fresh would send tons of links to your site, thereby giving search engines the impression your site was important and they would then rank it high which would get a lot of traffic and thus sales.

I used a few of their packages on 3 sites and saw success in only 1. But then 2013 came around and Google made changes to their ranking system. By this time backlinking would be in the past and if you engaged in these manipulative tactics, your site would be de-ranked or even blacklisted.

That’s exactly what happened to one of my sites which had success. The other 2 which I used backlinks on? With 1 nothing the site remained low in the search engine ranking so I received no rankings. 

The other site? NOTHING changed either, but the irony is that the work I had done on this site previously yielded the same results as when I used the backlink package on. Thus I spent all that money for nothing. 

What I learned from this: Don’t depend on ANYONE to make your website work. You hold the key to success and you should never use backlinks or any sort of shady tactics to make your website stand out. Eventually you will get caught. Stick to the natural listings. 

I also learned to listen to Wealthy Affiliate as they warned me about these things prior to me using them. Well better later than never…

My 7th mistake: Getting complacent. 

As Wealthy Affiliate began to bring me success, it also awakened a laziness in me and this caused me to really slow down on the work that had originally gotten me to the success I was once trying so hard to reach.

I happen to think the same percentage of people who fail to succeed at internet marketing also fail in the same percentage numbers when they succeed because of complacency. 

I had some major wake up calls when it came to business, and let me tell you when you see daily sales wither away to nothing, that’ll really get you back into doing what you need to be doing.

So the 7th mistake which you absolutely have to avoid is to not become complacent if and when success hits. To climb back up from this mistake, I did exactly what I had originally done to see my success grow, I re-followed the training at Wealthy Affiliate and got results once again.

I am not going to make this or any other of those 6 mistakes again. I hope you won’t either!