Lessons From Losing: a Summary of All My Blunders in My First 18 Months Online

Sometime back around 2004 or 2005, when I was the CEO of my last company, Dyrand Systems, I gave a speech to the Vancouver Board of Trade titled, “Lessons from Losing”.

I had volunteered to give the speech because I was looking for more exposure for my company, and I thought getting up in front of a few hundred business people for an hour would be just a great way to get that exposure.

What I didn’t expect was the response that I got from the audience…which I’ll get to in a bit.

The speech, as the title suggested, was a talk about all the stupid mistakes that I’d made while running my company to that point.

While the talk was only an hour long, trust me when I say that I could have probably talked all day long because I had plenty of mistakes to talk about.

For anyone reading this who has run a fast growing company, I’m sure you can relate to this statement: the faster the growth, the more mistakes you make!

Why Talk About My Blunders?

I chose to talk about my mistakes because, to be honest, it just gave me plenty to talk about, plus, I wanted to help other people from making the same stupid mistakes that I did.

I hoped my message would resonate with the audience….but, to be honest, I really wasn’t sure, because, as I’m sure you are aware, most CEOs who give a talk, generally talk about all the awesome stuff they have done – not all the blunders they made!

Much to my surprise, the audience absolutely LOVED my talk.

After the talk, I was literally bombarded with questions, and the feedback forms generally said something to the effect of “best speech I’ve ever heard at a board of trade event”.

Wow, talk about flattering.

Upon reflection, I realized that the reason the talk went over so well was because my honesty allowed the audience to relate much better to me than if I was up there telling them how awesome everything was in my business.

In other words, I was just a regular guy telling story of goof ups and stupid decisions; instead of trying to be Captain Awesome.

No matter who you meet, and not matter how successful they look, trust me when I say that they have plenty of things happening at any given moment that are not awesome, and if they’d be willing to share just some of their lessons from losing, it’d be a huge hit.

My Many Mistakes

So, it’s with that thought in mind that I’ve written today’s post. In it, you are going to hear me talk candidly about all the mistakes that I’ve made so far in my Internet Marketing business…and trust me when I say, there have been plenty of mistakes!

Mistake #1: Focusing on Micro-Niche Sites

18 months ago, building micro-niche sites (under 10 pages of low-value content) was a very popular way to make money online. There were thousands upon thousands of people doing it. Some were making a killing, others, like me, were brand new and just getting our feet wet.

Here’s why I think this was (and is) a stupid way to try and make money online.

First, you really aren’t adding any value to anyone and that is a huge violation of the #1 rule of business. You must add value!

Rule #1 in Business: You must add significant value to others if you want to succeed online (<- Click here to tweet this quote)

In my case, I was enamoured with the idea of having a couple hundred sites that would make me money on auto-pilot and the thought of all the ‘easy-money’ clouded my judgement. Shame on me.

By the way, Spencer Haws has returned to building micro-niche sites and he reports here that it’s working just fine. All I’m trying to say is that building them was a mistake for ME because I believe that you MUST add value in order to succeed and I don’t believe thin sites with poorly written content are adding any value to anyone. With that said, if you can build a site with 10 pages or less that provides quality information on a very niche topic, I see no problem with that. The guys over at Adsense Flippers have also posted a lengthy debate on Micro-Niche vs Authority sites that is worth reading.

Mistake #2: Not Diversifying My Traffic Sources

The second reason that this was a stupid move was because I was building a business that was completely dependent on Google for traffic, and, as such, if Google were to significantly change their algorithm, all that free traffic could dry up in a heartbeat – which is exactly what with the release of the Pegnuin update. Having a single point of failure for anything is just a bad idea.

Mistake #3: Having Only One Monetization Method

The third reason this was a stupid move was that my entire monetization strategy was also reliant on Google, and as such, if I lost my Adsense account (as has happened to many), my income would immediately go to zero. This is another single point of failure.

Mistake #4: Not Building a Customer List

And finally, by far the worst offense on the stupid-meter was that I wasn’t building a customer base that I could have an ongoing relationship with.

In other words, I was trying to take a shortcut to success.

Guess what, there aren’t any shortcuts!

Luckily for me, I also decided to start this blog as a way or recording and sharing my journey with anyone who felt like reading it. That was a moderately smart move, but even there, I made some pretty massive blunders.

Mistake #5: Failing to Focus on a Super-Targeted Audience (or their specific problems)

When I launched the Online Income Lab, I didn’t have a specific target audience in mind, nor did I put any thought into trying to understand what specific problem(s) that target audience might want to solve. Having skipped that incredibly important step, I was also ill-equipped to provide a specific solution (content) that was laser focused on solving the problem of my target audience.

In other words, I really didn’t do anything to differentiate my blog from the myriad of other make-money-online blogs that were on the net and because of that, getting meaningful traffic took much longer than necessary.

Mistake #6: Failing to Build a Prospect List

Building a customer list starts with building a prospect list – which, by the way is the natural result of clearly defining who your customer is, what their problems are, and then offering a solution that solves those problems.

If you don’t have a prospect list, you are never going to have a customer list, and without either list, you are left to continually search for ways to get people back to your site. Lame.

The One Thing I Did Right

Thankfully, despite making all these horrible mistakes, I did do one thing that worked.

I took action and wasn’t afraid to fail.

I didn’t sit and read eBooks all day.

I didn’t right some lengthy business plan.

I didn’t make huge lists of all the things that I could do.

I didn’t get caught up in analysis-paralysis.

I just got up each day and started building sites and blogging about it.

My Take Away For You

My message to you is this: follow the basic laws of business (identify target customer, identify their problems, offer them a valuable solution) and then take massive action every day, day in, and day out.

Do that, and I absolutely guarantee that you will succeed online.

What Do You Think?

I am always very interested in the opinions of my readers. When I know what is on your mind, it helps me immensely to come up with ideas for what to write about in the future, so if you have a thought or comment, please share it below. Thanks so much, you rock