How Many Turds Have You Thrown at the Money Wall?

Posted in: Marketing and Promotion, Business April, last year

Exploring why old online business projects failed is crucial to fine-tuning our knowledge as marketers, and in them lies the secrets to future success.

I’d like to tell you about my most prominent failures and in return invite you to have your say at the bottom of the entry telling me and anyone else who reads this yours - I’m positive we can all learn from each others mistakes.

Personally I can think of 3 failures, or turds as I call them, that I have thrown at the wall of internet marketing success, not making the actual stick.

The fact I can only think of 3 inspires me as 3 isn’t that many at all - giving much hope to my current projects in development that I have applied the skills learned from the 3 failures I’m now going to mention:

1. Content Websites using Google Adsense

I believe I got in to this game way to late - I was under the impression that with quality content that wasn’t duplicate, which I had freelancers write for many, many websites that it would be possible to rank for hundreds of search phrases that weren’t searched for much.

Unfortunately while I had brief success with MSN Search due to it’s lax algorithm and favor of websites hosted in the UK, Google wasn’t having any of it.Even with plenty of back links built using free directories and paid directories and frequently updated content, the new sandbox (at the time) kept all of the content websites from ranking for anything at all.

I perhaps made a few hundred dollars with content sites and Adsense, and a few thousand dollars when I sold them as they weren’t making enough for my liking - never more than $8 per day.

2. Ecommerce Online Store using Google Adwords

As previously mentioned in my blog this was a venture that led to my bankruptcy. I imported select collectible items from the USA in to the UK and sold them using Google Adwords, which worked briefly until the errors I made in buying a lot of useless stock caught up with me and I headed right in to debt.

I’m re-starting this venture with more smarts this time 5 years on - time will tell if it becomes another turd welded on my wall of failed projects.

3. Pregnancy Fitness Guide on Clickbank

This wasn’t too well thought out - I ended up trying to market a product created for women who had just had their baby (it was on losing weight after pregnancy) to women who were still pregnant.I modified the guide to include information on having a healthy pregnancy but hit a stumbling block.

It was quite some time ago and I lacked some serious knowledge on marketing and sales copy etc. I sold the website and guide eventually for a few thousand dollars and moved on.

Have a think about your most prominent failures and share your thoughts on what went wrong using the ‘Have Your Say’ link to the bottom right of this post.

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