Why do Most People Fail to Make Money on the Web?
by David Lim
Success in any venture, whether online or offline, big or small, can almost be 100% assured, given enough time, drive and capital.
But we live in an impatient society - people to meet, places to go, things to do. This Internet venture is just one of many things that you want to do.
You just want to "get it done", or succeed, and move on.
So, what is the quickest and best way for you to do it?
The first step would be to study those who have come before you, and failed. Failure, in itself, is not bad. There are many successful persons who have said that it is failure that have brought them to where they are now.
But failure is a waste of time.
So, take some time to look through the following examples of how people have failed. Study them and make sure you understand why they failed. You will save a lot of time and money, by not making the same mistakes.
MLM Programs
You may be lured by MLM programs promising easy money. The advertisements will typically have words like "prelaunch", "forced matrix", "spillover", "explode" and "get in early".
The advertisements will generally give the impression that the programs are new, and that if you get in now, you can sit back while somebody else builds your downline, or does the work, for you.
I suppose there may have been some rare cases where you reap the rewards while somebody else does the work, but most of the time, those expecting easy money will be disappointed.
Unless you have some insider information, by the time you find out about a (launched just minutes ago) program, many thousands before you would have found out about the same program...and they will be sitting in the choice spots that you thought was yours. :(
There is good money to be made in legitimate MLM programs, but it still boils down to pure hard work.
Shopping Malls
Some have built shopping malls with a wide assortment of products. They have stocked the malls with everything from pencils and rulers to the kitchen sink, and more. The rationale is that with a wide selection, there will be something for everybody.
They will proceed to promote their malls in free classifieds, ffa links and banner exchanges. Some may even pay for advertising.
They will get a trickle of traffic from their advertising, but many of them will not even sell a single item!
Web surfers are generally more interested in looking for specific information rather than shopping. If you were to offer them what they need first, and then attempt the sale, you would probably do very much better.
That means building a site or mall with a narrow focus, catering to a specific audience.
Paid to Surf the Web
There are many sites that will pay you for practically anything that you do online, including reading email, visiting sites, searching, chatting, playing games and even listening to the radio.
I guess you can make a couple of bucks from such programs but I don't think anybody has managed to make serious income from such programs.
Automated Marketing Systems
And then there are those marketing automated systems. Invariably they will start with what you already know - that internet marketing is hard work, that it isn't easy to succeed, and that it takes a lot of perseverance.
And they will tell you that most will eventually fail.
They will continue by claiming that after years of experimenting, they have come up with an automated system that does the recruiting, selling, marketing or whatever else needed. A system that guarantees your success.
All you have to do is to follow their system to the letter, and you are on your way to riches.
There are many variations on the above theme, too many to go into here. Generally, you will be asked to pay a one-time fee, or a monthly fee, or do some grunt work and you will get a reward that is ridiculously disproportionate to the work, or intelligence, or money that you put in.
If you are tempted, as I have been, ask yourself this question:
"If I did develop such a system, would I sell it at such a low price?"
or
"If I did develop such a system, would I be selling it at all???"
I built a great site but nobody came
There will be some that have done their homework.
They will have decided on the theme for their site, registered their domain and built their site. They optimized their pages for the search engines and submitted them. They approached webmasters of similar sites and exchanged links. Some may even have started a newsletter.
And then they waited for the masses to come.
Three months passed and a trickle of traffic started to come into the site.
Another three months but the expected torrent of traffic just refused to materialize. And they gave up in disgust.
Actually, this group of people had it right. But they were too impatient.
The process of getting decent traffic to a site is like falling dominoes - the first falling domino will hit the second one, which will hit a third, which will hit a fourth, and so on. The dominos fall one at a time, not all at the same time.
Similarly, it takes time for you to promote your site and get it listed in the search engines. This will bring in some traffic resulting in more people knowing about your site and more links to your site. Which leads to a better ranking in the engines and more traffic. Which leads to even more links leading back to your site and an even better ranking in the search engines. Leading to even more traffic and....I think you get the picture. ;)
But all this takes time. It probably may take up to a year before you can get any sort of decent traffic to a new site.
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I'm sure that you can think of lots more ways that a person can
fail on the Internet. On the whole, I think you will agree that
failures can probably be traced back to one or more of the following
factors:
- a lack of understanding of Internet marketing
- a lack of drive
- a lack of patience
- greed
We are all subject to the above "sins". Get it under control and you WILL start making money from the web.
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David Lim is the webmaster of http://QuittingYourJob.com, a business
resource for the entrepreneur looking to start, or grow an online
home-based business.
This article may be reprinted freely, provided this resource box
remains intact.
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