wumpus

As a long-time newbie I am an expert at how not to succeed in Internet marketing. I thought I'd share a few techniques I use to consistently fail in case you wanted to stay a long-term newbie like me. Feel free to share your insights too.

1. Start projects but never finish them. That's right, I have six or seven sites 60-80% finished sitting on my PC with domain names to match them. Plenty of content I spent hours developing. They aren't "perfect" enough, however, and so I can't launch them to see if they work and learn how to make them work.

2. Fail once and don't try again. I tried Adwords once and MSN Adcenter too. But it didn't work and so that must mean it can't work, right?

3. Launch a site and then kill it in a couple of months because it didn't "work." Spend countless nights making a site and launching it. But when the money doesn't start rolling in in a few weeks, stop wasting money on hosting and kill the site. Even drop the domain name if you're really stingy.

4. Drink too much beer when you sit down to work. When a one-beer buzz is not enough to get me working, I find two or three beers completely frees me from motivation until I end up playing video games for two or three hours. Before I go to sleep that night I assure myself that over the weekend I'll be productive. Rinse and repeat over weeks and months.

5. Depend upon family or friends for moral support. You struggle to support your family with your hard 9-5 day job and then at 10:00 PM you finally sit down to work on your career in Internet marketing, but your wife or g/f doesn't appreciate it (much less understand it). This crushes what little self-confidence you have, and gives you the added bonus of having another excuse to drink more and play video games for the rest of the night. If your capacity for self-reflection and irony remains intact, you may also note that you do seem to spend a lot of time playing video games.

That pretty much sums it up for me. It doesn't matter how talented you are, or how much better your sites could be than the competition. If you follow these rules you'll be sure to remain in perpetual Newbiedom, and, over time, you too will discover the secret to failure in Internet marketing.

P.S.: I have considered selling this information in an ebook. But after all the useful free advice at WF that I have failed to implement, I figured I'd return the favor.

Boomstick

PM me a little info on your unfinished sites. Maybe I'll buy one and you can use that money to kickstart one of the others.

elabs

Oh you forgot, start watching countless hours of Lost and playing WoW.

barman

i dont see why you wouldnt launch even half finished sites so they at least build up some history. thats newb to the 50th degree

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conv3rsion

this is why dumb people can make money, they take action and dont over think shit. Some of them just do it.

I know where you're coming from, I fight the same shit myself. One thing that helps me is to think about the present exact moment like I was a third person watching myself and thinking "whats he really doing? Is he actually moving to his goals or just lying to himself in his head".

There is more time in the day then you realize, that half hour work out at the gym can seem to take hours some days.

Make a deal with yourself every day, start it like, "today if i can just do a and b then it will be a successful day. all that matters is that I do a and b"

wumpus

It's totally newbie, I agree, and for me stems from being raised as an underachieving perfectionist.

A bird in the hand beats two in the bush, and one crappy site live beats 10 great unpublished sites.

dragonfire

Good advice.