You work long hours everyday and ... feel like you've ... It can be as ... as doing the dishes. Your website is free for ... but it's not free to you. There are peo
You work long hours everyday and sometimes feel like you've accomplished
nothing. It can be as thankless as doing the dishes. Your website is free for everyone, but it's not free to you.
There are people that for whatever reason will see what you're selling, by pass your link and go straight to the company. They just hate to see you make a profit off a sale to them. It doesn't save them money or anything, they just don't want to be a source for your income. This happens more than others think, and there's nothing you can do about it. For $87 you know of
at least 18 'gurus' who will solve this problem for you, but logic makes you hang on to your money. Scams are very where.
Everyone who knows you're trying to make money on the net is spamming you to death with get rich
schemes, get more traffic schemes, get people to buy your stuff schemes. Confusion sets in. You keep wondering what the best ways are to get people to your site is, to get them to buy something, to get them to sign up for your newsletter, to get then to want to return. So you work more at optimizing keywords, content, and graphics in hopes to sucking up to the mighty search engines, because no self proclaimed 'guru' is going to get rich off you.
Finally some traffic comes. But your sales conversion is still under 1% and no one is signing up for your newsletter. You put up a mini poll at the suggestion of some website 'guru' but no one participates. Same with a forum or Yahoo club. You spend hours tracking your visitors page views trying to give them what they want, then realize that people are just taking and taking without leaving any compensation for your work. You begin to resent the people who just take for granted that everything on the web just got there somehow. Of course you were like that too. Now that you have a website you will never surf the web the same way again. NEVER!
You check your sales stats and hope you can keep your site going for another few months on nothing. You think about trying to build new sites to support your main site, which by now has become the love of your life. You even go without essentials to pay the bandwidth so more people can come and take your stuff for free. You suspect you're crazy.
You threaten to start a porn or gambling site just for the money, but dismiss those thoughts rather quickly now that you realize there is no such thing as free money on the net, or anywhere in the world. And you don't want to start all over again. Besides, your heart just isn't in it. It's in your main site.
And the 'Super Gurus', (who you now know by name), are offering to sell you there secrets for a mere $200. But common sense tells you there is no secret. So you go back to work pruning and rearranging your site over and over.
Cool. Now your rank on google is going up. That's great. You get a few letters from people telling you how they love your site. Just enough pats on the back to keep you going, but not enough to pay your bills. You're not even breaking even. Just before you throw in the towel you read where 90% of websites fail because they give up within the first year. After a year you read that 90% of websites fail because they quit before 2 years. So you go back to work.
You call it work even though you're not getting paid. You start to wonder if you've got nothing more than a very expensive hobby, or worse an addiction! And round and round you go, not realizing that you're learning everyday. And you make up your mind to never quit. You find yourself wanting to hug everyone who spends a few minutes on your site. You are proud of your accomplishments, so you go back to work and wonder how long or if ever you will make money doing something you love so much.
And that is the secret. There. I gave it to you for free. Did you miss it? I'll say it again. The secret is you love what you're doing. You love your site. You constantly read about how to make it better. You never give up.
For someone like that, time is on your side. You will eventually succeed, but success is secondary if you are doing something you love.
You've seen sites that are obviously ghost houses. So badly neglected with broken links and out of date information. That's a failure. You spend everyday doing something to your site. If you don't know what to do, there's always an HTML validator that will tell you a million things that are wrong with your site. There's websites and newsletters giving away free information.
You'll read something that makes you run to your site and change something. It's always getting better. Everyday is a day to improve something. Everyday is aday to get just one more person to land on your site. You are blessed if you love your site and are teachable. Those that think they know it all can't be taught anything, because they think they already know it. In fact, tonight throw a party for yourself. You have are a wonderful asset to the world wide net and you already are a success. Celebrate, then tomorrow go back to work.
