Explain what your biggest mistakes were....

Shouldnt went with the first processor I saw in a adult industry mag. It was ibill

always thinking that making this money would last forever.

Trusting someone untrustworthy

How about trusting just about anyone.


Greed has a strange way of taking over a person. I have had several people I helped out big time when i was first getting started screw me over.

Taking on a partner that didn't work out in the long run.

Trusting 'highly-rated' processors - the moral is no business stays the same - they go up and can go bust. There are no exceptions - all are in this boat.

Offline - probably the biggest mistake ever was trusting where is was not warranted. There is always a first time - never ever had this problem in decades of doing biz, but... his ass will fry on various levels.

Not using a post bot

losing money daily.

Haha - so true Will. Greed will develop in a braincell and that braincell will lie, decieve and even portray a face attempting to justify fraud - it "needs" an excuse as to why fraud is "valid". It will also contaminate and "use" everyone around them to try and cover their offenses. Got one now and he will fry for years in a jailcell - after that, I'll fry him at various other levels.

Linda.

Never, ever, ever get involved with a bipolar Portuguese midget.

Not getting more Zango traffic, damn that shit is good.




















Just kidding will.

you did pretty well with out one. You can have my 9K or so post if you can get Ice put me back to 0 and transfer them over to you ;)

Definitely trusting people with large amounts of my money and not keeping on top of it. I have taken it in the ass to the tune of a ridiculous amount of money, but that will damn well never happen again...

Naw..as generic as my posts seem to be..they will never be assisted by a bot or transfered posts ..cheers

Be vary careful who you pre pay money to. If it sounds to good to be true it probably is. Save your money to pay taxes.

I have picked up a couple of catch phrases from your posts. "I'd butter that biscuit" and "I blame it on the reefer" are now two of my everyday staples

For me it is easy. I lost 5 domains that I owned. 3 didn't matter, they had nothing on them, but the other two had about 3 years worth of free sites and old galleries that were still getting nice traffic. I lost about 70% of my income with that.

In a nutshell I was having problems with my netsol account and couldn't log in. I call them on the phone and I will have to fax them a bunch of info so they know it is me. They don't tell me that the domains are about to expire (even if I knew that I had no way to log in and renew them, maybe they could have done it over the phone, but who knows, they seemed like they didn't care to help me much.) I leave for a week for vacation and decide I will deal with this when I get home. During the vacation the domains expire, netsol doesn't hold them and they get bought up by someone else who puts up an FPA and a bunch of pop-ups.

I'm not happy, I contact him and offer him 5K for the domains. He wants 20K for them. I tell him they will be worth $50 in two weeks once all the link lists and TGPs blacklist them for redirecting. He doesn't budge, I didn't have 20K to give him so I was screwed. Funny thing is about three weeks later those domains were blacklisted everywhere and traffic fell off to almost nothing. He then contacted me and wanted to know if I still wanted to buy them for my original offer. They were worthless by then so I turned him down. He should have just taken my 5K and been happy with it.

So I lost a lot of work and nearly left the business, but decided to stick around and rebuild and go in a different direction. The moral of the story is always take note of when your domains will expire and renew in plenty of time.

Lol..I kind of like them myself..I guess it's better than I would hit it reply and it boosts the count ;)

The most important thing I have learned from 8 years of doing this shit.... The sad thing was that it took me 6 years to figure this out.

This applies mainly to affiliates, but in some ways could be applied to everyone.

I started off (1999) as a membership site owner, spent countless hours updating the sites, adding more content, paying for plugins, dealing with members, etc.. After realizing all the time I put in just to provide a product to sell vs the amount of money I was making from advertising other people's sites, it seemed like a no brainer to switch over to being an 100% affiliate. Now instead of spending 20 - 30 hours a week on maintaining my membership sites I had that much more time to spend on advertising and getting more traffic. This made me a lot more money. Thankfully I was 100% away from my membership sites a couple years before ibill went under, so I only lost about 50K from old rebills. If I would have been going 100% strong with my sites right up until they went under I would have lost well over a million dollars, so I lucked out there.

Where I went wrong and got off course....

When I was promoting my own membership sites I was building something of value. As I made money from them they built a membership base. The more popular they became the more my membership base grew and the more my site was recognized on the net. So not only did I directly make money from my advertising (10 sales a day, say I made = $300 etc...) but I built "x" amount of value into my site as my membership base got bigger, site got more popular, etc. For example, if I would have grown my site to have 1000 active members not only would I have been making 35K a month, but I would have a site worth a lot more then that if I chose to sell it.

When I switched over to being 100% an affiliate, for the most part I used single pages or small sites built around that sponsor... I didn't put any effort into trying to retain people or build up the page/site I was using, I was happy getting sign ups from the traffic i sent to it. Fatal Flaw. Here I am busting my ass, making really good money, but at the end of the day, what did I have? A nice check and that was about it. I had nothing of value. I had grossed over a million in sales the year before just to clickcash but i had nothing of value. nothing. No site like hoes.com or a tgp that had 500K hits a day etc.. i had zero to show for it except for the checks I was being sent.

I always prided myself on the ability to make money off of everything I did and I totally missed the boat on that one. It finally hit me one day, why not make the same amount of money but build value in your sites at the same time. Some simple things to do this would be to add a forum, add blogs that update everyday, give people a reason to use your site and to want to come back and use your site over and over again. Get creative, there are many ways to do this but the point being is don't just make a site to make money, but build a site you are making money from. For the most part I had promoted 1 sponsor, so once the person signed up, if they came back i made no money off of them so I wasnt thinking this way. I missed the fact, popular site, retain traffic = build value in the site not just make money off of it.

That's my advice, if you are an affiliate build value in something while you making money from it. As simple as it sounds, I can't be the only person that didn't realize this. I think back now, if I would have been sending all my traffic to a site like hoes.com it would not only be as popular if not bigger then his, I would have something of value worth a good bit of money. It would have been nice all this time to make really good money and ALSO own something worth milions. It woud be like the icing on the cake ( the cakes being all those nice checks).

My biggest mistakes were that I hadn't brought to a close several things which later appeared to be really important.

Damn sad story... btw i sent a request to be added to your site... did you get a chance yet?

hi,
if you can drop me an email at [email protected] or ICQ 254-324-198 and I can hook you up with some great free stuff on the site. The contact email on the site goes to someone else and it can take them a little time to get it to me.

thanks

Not learning how to correctly read my stats...

Not learning what a balance sheet is...

Partnering with friends...

Tripping over dollars to save a penny.

That I didn't take the biz seriousley when I started in '99, I just played along built some sites and galleries made a couple of grand a month and started to realize how idiotic I had been around 04

I am happy I didn't made a lot of mistakes.

The thing I have feeling about is I came into business quite after some years of being online. I could have jumped in earlier. I mean I wasted like 4 years as a pure chatter and time waster.

I guess mainly because I didn't even have a clue that there is money to be made on internet and in my country no one was making money online at that time. I can count myself in first a couple thousand people. Seriously.

not starting earlier...
not investing enough time...

wasting 5 years on GFY

selling my shit for the quick money instead of keeping it for the long term, at the rate of growth in my first site, if i would of kept at it, right now i'd probably pretty big making a DAMN good living, but instead im busting my ass for pennies just to get by...

mistake number 2, i bought a hella good domain at reg fee, and sold it cheap to someone else because i was stupid and didn't realize domains were of value without being actual sites...

$8.88 for exgfs.com and sold for $100 to sherm

My biggest mistake when I started: Being way too focussed on a few sites. Instead of spending your day improving, changing, hugging your sites, build new ones, fire up new domains !

not a real mistake

thats not a life-changing domain

Seriously?

nah man, there have been bigger mistakes perhaps
but I don't want to get into that

but yeah, I seriously feel like I didn't made of GFY what I could have
in fact - i didn't make almost anything of my presence here

you do have a point, but the domain is pretty good and could of gotten more, especially if i would of developed it.

anyone else out there have a problem buying domains, lol. problem being you like to buy them but you never get around to doing anything with them. I think the funniest part of a new project is getting the domain

It would have to be not focussing on what worked, wasting time, spreading myself too thin, etc.

I spent about 2 years building a couple of landing pages, submitting a gallery or two a week, a free site here and there, a few failed tgps and linklists... And every time something made decent money, I'd go "score! let's go party" instead of trying to duplicate that and make the same money again. It took that long before I was taking this seriously enough to be able to make a full time income from it.

So far, I would have to say my biggest mistake is not being aggressive enough. Instead of going after the shit the way I should have, I waited for it to come to me and it still hasn't.

Not getting in this earlier ...dammit

I think that is a common problem with a lot of people. Work hard make good money then spend it and take it easy, then run out of money, and start working hard again...

My most regretfull mistake for 2007 was not cashing
out all my damn USD-CND currency at 1.17 in the Month of March
(sorry i guess your topic is business since starting in the online bizz)

mistake would be talking and spending time to client but not getting your service! too annoying! heh heh

marketing and promotion is my biggest mistake - never enough

Very good points.

The tax stuff always amazes me.

I have ALWAYS paid my taxes. I write off as much as i can and then some, but they still get a nice chunk of money from me. And I always hear people who know how much i pay in taxes make comments like, man you are stupid for paying that much, I wouldnt claim this or that, etc... Well, I was audited a few years ago and past it with no problems . These same people saying, " your stupid" would probably owe 100K++ and be in jail if they did what they were telling me to do and they got audited. I just dont understand the logic of not claiming your income and paying taxes. I always error on my side when i do my taxes, i rather pay a little less and if i get audited again worst that happens is i come up with a small amount of money, but the people who don't file or claim like 1/2 of what they make are just waiting to get nailed. You can't beat the paper trail unless you have someone pay you cash, and that is not possible in 99% of the cases in this industry.

Taking on a partner that I was good friends with but had the same negative attributes...
we were and are good friends, lousy biz partners because instead of complimenting each other's talents, we diminished them....

a good partnership needs two (or more) people who compliment each other's strengths and weaknesses

Easy.

Not following through on ideas and pushing them through to completion/implementation. In retrospect, some would have failed awesomely. However, some would have been far ahead of their time in time units measured by years.

If I've learned one thing in business, if you're not moving forwards you are moving backwards. Ideas are cheap, people that actually run with an idea are rare. A shitty idea actually implemented is better than 10 great ideas just talked about with no action.

-Phil

I second that. That is one of my biggest flaws. Trying to do too much at once. I get a lot of ideas try to do them all. I have lots of projects, mostly smaller ones over the last 3 - 4 years that were never finished. I've been trying hard to limit the number of projects at any given time but it is tough.

50 mistakes...

some great pointers by all you guys, Thanks

I just thought of one. I would probably get back about 2 hours a week if I just ignored trolls and didn't reply to them but it is hard to not reply. Its like a mosquito buzzing by your ear, you want to swat it and can't help it.