Pet Forum

Maybe I am stretching the numbers a bit, but the point is valid. As a person with less than one year experience with building websites and monetizing them, I believe that I have made just about every mistake that one can make at this point. If there is something that you could possibly screw up while trying to become an online gazillionaire, I would bet the bank that I’ve been there and done that. Looking back at it all, I honestly can’t tell you why I kept going. Any sane person (ie. not your average webmaster) would have quit and moved on to delivering pizzas or something long, long ago.

It took me a long time to finally figure out part of the online success formula, and I spent way too much time and effort in getting here, but I do believe that I have finally passed the hurdle. I’m making more money than I am spending these days, so you won’t be hearing a lot of complaining from me. But I do wish that someone would have set me down long ago and told me how dumb I was. I wish someone would have said, “Glenn, you’re a freaking idiot! Here you are trying to make nice websites that people will visit, and all you’re making is crap that your daddy would disown you over!” I wish things would have went that way, but they didn’t. That’s life though, isn’t it?

The point of this little post/ article/ thread/ whatever you want to call it is that there are more ways to screw up online than there are ways to do things right. The people that are breaking the online bank are the people that have gotten things down to a pretty simple formula. They are the webmasters and online marketers that have figured out that there is a formula for success, and that you don’t have to work nearly as hard as you just need to work smart. In so many areas of life, less is more. In the “make a living online” world, that little saying has never been any truer.

I finally decided to sit down and write out a list of all of the mistakes that I have made along the way. Most of them are a bit embarrassing to me now, but I think it was a process I needed to go through to get to where I’m at. I am going to tell you what I did wrong, and how I fixed it. I’m not saying that this is the only/ right way to do things for everyone, but it was right for me. Maybe a few of you that feel like online losers (join the club! lol) will pick up a few pointers here. Maybe a few of you Adsense millionaires will get a few chuckles out of it. Whatever the case may be, this is how I made $100,000 by spending $200,000 online:


1. MISTAKE: The first site I built was just horrible. I had just read about affiliate marketing, so I decided to create a website to get rich off of it. I paid for a domain, used some trashy free website builder program, and filled that sucker up with every imaginable affiliate banner that you could find. I literally had pages with 10 times as many ads as there was content. FIX: I finally figured out that people don’t like to vsit pages with two words and 100 banners. Search engines don’t like them either. Having ads on a page is just fine, but don’t let your pages be ads only. Sneak your paying ads in there so that it compliments the content.

2. MISTAKE: I have mistakenly paid for three WordPress themes on Digital Point. For those that don’t know about this, you sponsor WP themes to gain backlinks. The goal is to sponsor a theme that becomes wildly popular so that a billion bloggers will use it and spread your little links throughout the internet. On all three of these transactions I was cheated, or at least made a bad buying decision. The first one got a total of 2 downloads. It was so bad, and not promoted at all, that the two that downloaded it changed themes after a few weeks. On the second theme I sponsored, the jerk just completely cheated me. He did not promote it to any site, and the stupid thing didn’t even work properly. On the third theme, it looked really great to me. I was so excited until a knowledgeable friend pointed out that the theme was messed up and was based on an old version of WordPress that was not compatible with most of the modern plug-ins. FIX: I am not a designer, and I barely know how to turn the computer on. I never spent another penny on any theme sponsorship without having a designer look it over. When you are weak on something, have someone that is strong help you.

3. MISTAKE: When I first discovered Google’s Adsense I was so excited. I couldn’t wait to place their codes on hundreds of horrible pages. I immediately started placing Adsense ads on a dumb site that I built about an illegal product (well, illegal in most countries). Luckily for me, nobody ever went to the site unless it was by mistake. A friend called me up after about 3 weeks and told me that I may want to remove those ads before evil G yanks my account. FIX: Read the dang Terms Of Service. Whether you are monetizing your sites with Adsense, affiliates, Kontera, or others, you should at least take the time to read the TOS to make sure that you are in compliance. I finally read all of the TOS and decided that I better follow their rules. It’s their game after all, so why do something that these companies tell you that you can’t do?

4: MISTAKE: On the first dozen or so sites that I built (yes, I have made way too many websites), they all looked horrible. My bounce rate was dang near 100% on all of them. I kept telling myself that the content was awesome. I kept thinking that sooner or later Google and the rest of the world will realize that I am the greatest writer in history. Guess what? It didn’t happen. FIX: Don’t make something that you can’t be proud of. If you are too dumb to recognize a poor design (that’s me), have a little test where you have friends look at 10 sites. Don’t let them know that 1 of the websites is yours. Ask them to rate the appearance of each. When everyone rates yours as a 1 out of 10, chunk your design and start over. The internet is full of nice looking sites these days. If yours looks like crap, nobody will want to stay around very long.

5: MISTAKE: I have bought so many new domains. Every time I bought one I would fill it up with articles and such, work away at getting backlinks, and sit back to watch the big traffic flow in. It never really happened though. On all of these “early sites” that I made, only one of them had any level of mediocre success. It may have gotten 200 visitors a day after a few months. FIX: If you want to make money online quickly, you need to spend some money on an aged domain with nice backlinks. Some sites are just so great and awesome that they will gain traction right from the beginning on a brand spanking new domain, but that’s the true rarity. For most sites, you need to start with a nice, aged domain if you want to nail the serp rankings early. If you don’t mind waiting a year or two (or three or four), starting with a brand new domain is just fine. If you want Google to respect you right out the gate, you really need to spend the money on a nice domain that Google already trusts.

6. MISTAKE: I have spent so much money on paying for blog posts on big blog networks. If you are not familiar with this, there are guys that have a network of 40, 100, and even 1,000 blogs. You can pay them a few bucks and they will post an article of yours on all of their blogs. You do this to gain backlinks (that’s how you rank with the search engines, or at least a big portion of that formula) that will make your site “appear” to be really popular to the dumb search engines. Long story short, most of these blog networks are pure garbage. On almost all of them, the pages were never even indexed by Google. On the few that were, there is a duplicate content concern that weakens any value of them since all of the articles are identical. FIX: If you want to pay for blog posts, you are really better off finding a small network, even a one site “network”, with high page rank. You need to make sure that the blogs that are creating links for you are actually getting indexed. Better yet, work with someone that will spin your article with rotating terms and anchor text. The goal when doing this is to have your backlinks appear “natural”. Posting the same dumb article, with the same words and anchor text, is anything but natural. All you’re doing is throwing good money away.

7. MISTAKE: As a complete newbie to the online world, I used to listen to EVERYONE. I joined several webmaster forums and asked a ton of questions. Here is a typical pattern- (ME) Q: Do duplicate content pages get placed in the supplemental index by Google? (MR X) A: Yes! If you create duplicate content, Google will dump it in their supplemental index. (MR Z) A: No! There is no supplemental index. The page with the most authority will outrank the other page, even if the authority page just copied and pasted the content from the weaker site. You see the dilemma? No matter what I asked, I would always hear conflicting answers. Not just on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but everything! The online world is full of so many riddles and wrong answers that it really is a minefield. On many, many, many occasions, I would try to listen and respond to what everyone was telling me to do, and I ended up getting nowhere or exactly where I didn’t want to go in the first place. FIX: As with life in general, you can’t be the expert on every subject. Sometimes you need to trust other people. I figured out long ago to find THE EXPERT on any given field and believe in what they say. If you try to follow everyone that thinks they are the pro, you will end up confused and bruised. Of course this leads to the question, “How can you properly identify the expert to trust?”, but I’ll have to make another wildly popular thread to cover that. lol

8: MISTAKE: I used to write pages because I thought it was so interesting. If you hang around enough webmaster forums for too long, you will end up hearing this over and over, “Write what you are passionate about. Put your heart into it.” Well, I would write my heart out on subjects such as the reproduction cycle of crayfish. I would spend hours and hours on making pages like that utter perfection. Then I would sit back and just wait for the masses to devour my crayfish knowledge and reward me with huge ad revenues. FIX: There’s nothing wrong with caring about your subject, but don’t be an idiot. If you and three other people in the world give a rat’s butt about crayfish sex, you are wasting your time. I learned to tap into sources that showed me what was popular on the net. Then I could find a way to work these popular subjects in to what I wanted to say. For instance, let’s say that the most popular subject on the internet right now is “red doors”. Let’s then say that I could care less about red doors, but I am mildly interested in how the locking mechanisms work. So I would start writing about “locking mechanisms on red doors”. See what I mean? Yeah, it’s great to love what you write, but you’re getting nowhere if folks won’t read your boring stories and generate some revenue for you. I would rather spend all day writing a handful of pages that put another $1,000 in the bank than spend a week writing about crayfish butts that help me buy a stick of bubble gum.

9: MISTAKE: I used to spend too much time reading blogs by Shoemoney, John Chow, and other “pro bloggers that could buy Google by now if they wanted to”. I was truly addicted to them. I wanted so badly to learn how they got rich quick. I wanted to figure out how I could be worth more than Oprah just like them. I will be willing to bet that I used to spend more time reading “GET RICH ONLINE/ MAKE MONEY ONLINE” dumb blogs than I did on doing anything else. I figured that if some Asian goofball or bald cue ball could make so much with their dumb blogs, I could surely make a buncdle with my brilliant content sites. FIX: I stopped reading all of these blogs. If someone starts bragging about making thousands every day on their blogs, I run. Guess what folks? Asian blogs make big bucks off of suckers like you. If you really think that they want to help you get rich quick, you’re dreaming. Take all of that time that you are wasting being their worshippers and put that into your sites.

10. MISTAKE: I first started off placing big horizontal adsense banners at the top of the page. They stood out like a sore thumb, and I doubt that 1% of the people even read the ads. Then I switched to hiding the ads at the bottom of the page. It got to the point that I was embarrassed to have anyone know that I was trying to make money by having them visit my sites. FIX: Every site is different, but there are a few constants that I believe are always true. Never place big horizontal banners at the top of your page. Every retarded site has a big banner block going from left to right at the top. People have become blind to this placement, and they will rarely even notice them. You should also not be ashamed of your ads. Don’t place it after all of your content and try to hide it. The best solution usually involves placing one or two large square ad blocks above the fold (where people can see them without scrolling down), or placing it within your content. You should blend the color and border of the ads so that they look like a part of your site. The name of “the game” is to drive customers that are itching to blow a few bucks towards the respective sellers. Your goal is to make that transition as easy as possible. Placing ads where nobody will read them is the worst choice that you can make.


These are just 10 of the mistakes and fixes that I made while making $100,000 online by spending $200,000, or something like that. There are many more to come. If you would like to be notified about future releases (I already feel sorry for you lol), you can register here and I will send you a pm in advance. You can also contact me at http://www.forums.digitalpoint.com and my name is “glenndorsey” there. I will be more than happy to let you know when the next list of retarded online newbie mistakes comes out.

I hope you found something useful here, and that you make a billion bucks online without spending anything!

Glenn

P.S. You are welcome to copy this thread and spread it on your site. Just make sure that you reference http://www.bestforpet.com as the source. My good friend owns this pet forum, and he has helped me more than anyone else online, so maybe he will find a few new pet lovers out of all 10 of you that read this. Peace.

Thank you for writing this Glenn. I really appreciate it. Something tells me that we're not the only ones to have made these mistakes along the way.

I agree!! Can you follow up on this one soon glenn? I would really like to read some more.