Before this site came about, I built four websites about various topics. With each one, I had high hopes. Each one I thought would attract millions of visitors. Yet, each one failed miserably to meet my expectations.

What I want to show you is that even though I quit each site. And even though each one of them eventually failed to meet my biggest goals, I learned a lot of new things and used that knowledge to build this site.

You see, the best way to learn is by doing.

You are going to fail time and time again. That’s how life is. It’s all a part of the learning process. The one thing that separates the successful from the unsuccessful is how they deal with that defeat. Do they quit entirely thinking that they don’t have what it takes. Or do they learn from their mistakes and have the attitude that they are one step closer to getting it right.

Let my site building history be a lesson to all of you site-builders out there. Learn from my mistakes so you don’t fall into some of the same pitfalls that I did.

You are about to learn in 10-15 minutes what took me 5+ years of terrific failing to learn.

Consider yourself lucky.

Failure At A Poker Site

My first website that I made that was aimed at making money was a poker website.

I was a huge poker junkie. I played all of the time with my friends. I especially loved playing online poker. I had all kinds of knowledge about what sites to play at and how to win at them.

I built that site with great success. In fact, it doesn’t even exist anymore and I still get monthly checks in the mail!

So what made me quit?

I have to admit, I was a lot less wise back then. I didn’t have nearly the type of grit and determination that I have now.

What happened was that President Bush signed an act that made many of the poker sites I earned money off of illegal in the United States. And, as it turns out, this is where most of my money came from. So basically about 75% of the income I earned completely ended overnight. Just like that!

Now, I could have stuck with it. After all, there still were some sites that I made money from. And there still were sites that you could play in the United States. But like I said, I wasn’t as determined or experienced with building websites as I am now.

But nevertheless, it still was a huge hit having most of my site’s income halt overnight. So…

Lesson #1 Don’t build a site around gambling or anything frowned upon by the public.

There are plenty of things to make websites about. Make the world a better place because your website exists.

Poker is a great way to make money. And I certainly did! But more people lose than win. And something isn’t right about that. Build a site where everybody wins. The same thing applies if you decide to build a product. Don’t make a product that will sucker people into making you money. Build a product where you and the customer feel they are a winner.

Failure At A Movie Quotes Site

This site was probably the worst one I ever did. And yet, it received more traffic than any other site!

It received hundreds and thousands of visitors. One day alone it received over 14,000 visitors! But there were so many things wrong with this site. Things that I didn’t realize at the time. And some things I didn’t realize until just recently. One of those things, the most important lesson was this…

Lesson #2 Don’t do a site that you aren’t passionate about.

You can try! But you are going to fail. If you make a site purely for the money, you’re not going to make any. You can start and maybe see some early success. But eventually, it’s going to get boring and your desire will start to fade.

This is what happened with my movie quotes site. I didn’t care that much about movie quotes. I only started it because it was a site that I knew I could create a lot of content in a short amount of time. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “content is king.” It is, but it has to be great and passionate content. There was know quality content to the movie quote site, only quantity. Which is my next lesson…

Lesson #3 When it comes to content, think quality over quantity.

There is plenty of quantity floating around on the Internet. Thanks to Google, the quality content can be separated from all of the trash that is out there.

If you are filling your site with useless content you are simply wasting your time. It might get you some traffic at first. But eventually Google is going to figure out that visitors don’t find it useful and will no longer send people to your page.

When you are making a new page, writing a new blog entry, or whatever, you should be excited when you hit the submit button to post it on the web. You should be saying to yourself, “Gee, my visitors are going to love this!” What I learned is that if you are constantly thinking about what is best for your visitors, everything else seems to take care of itself.

When you are building content that really helps people, the revenue/traffic/sales and all that other great stuff starts coming your way more and more.

Finally, the thing that made my movie quotes site really suck is that it had know uniqueness to it.

In the world of the Internet, you have to stand out from the crowd. There is no denying this. If you did a search, you would find hundreds if not thousands of general movie quote sites out there.

If I was doing a movie quote site now, I would try to put some unique edge to it. Perhaps I would have a comedy quotes site where I have only funny quotes from movies, even funny quotes from the serious horror or drama-type movies. That would be a new spin on things and would separate it from the crowd. It could have a headline to the effect of “Finding The Humor In Every Movie” or something like that.

The point is, and don’t ever forget this lesson…

Lesson #4 You have to be incredibly unique and stand out from the huge Internet crowd.

One of my favorite books dealing with standing out from the crowd is called POP!

It will give you hundreds of unique ideas that will make your product or website one-of-a-kind. I highly suggest that you check it out!

Failure At A College Site

My next failure came when I tried to do a site about being successful in college. I placed a large emphasis on have quality over quantity when it came to writing articles.

But after writing around forty solid articles, I realized that this site wasn’t for me. For starters, it goes back to Lesson #2 and that is to not do a site that you aren’t really passionate about. Don’t get me wrong, I loved helping people and I loved making college easier for people.

The problem was that I wasn’t an expert in the world of college. My grades were good but not great. I only had a certain amount of tips and advice that I could give to people.

Once again, I think that if I was working on it now I could have made it a much larger success.

And once again, I needed to make it stick out from the crowd a lot more. Since it was targeted towards younger college students, I probably would have given it a more fun and catchy title. I also might have tried some marketing techniques to target college students to visit the site.

There were little things I could have done to make it successful. But I don’t think it would have lasted long enough because I didn’t have the passion for it.

So what to learn from all of this? It’s a good one…

Lesson #5 You need to actually BE an expert on what you are talking about. You can’t fake it.

Now, this lesson can be a little misleading. You don’t have to be an expert when you first get started with a site.

Instead, you have to constantly learn new things as you move along so that as you grow in knowledge, so does your website. It’s very simple…

If you stop learning more about your subject, your site has no room for growth. Constantly become more of an expert so that one day you can be the only person on the planet that knows what you know. Whenever you are the only one that has knowledge about something, that makes you extremely valuable. And with your unique knowledge, your website is sure to be a success.

Failure At A Laptop Site

I know a lot about laptops. I’d have to call myself a tech-junkie. I’m also very good at explaining complex material so that people can understand it.

Many of my qualities suited very well for this website.

When I first started the site, it was incredibly unique. A little background…

It was a site about a unique laptop brand that I was passionate about. And was designed to praise that site and show why it was the best laptop brand in the world. The problem was, I ran into some legal issues with the domain name of the site. I have to admit I was a little too inexperienced to understand the concepts of legal issues. I thought that since it was a site that was praising their product, they wouldn’t mind me using their brand’s name in the title.

Wrong.

Around six months into building the site, I had their lawyers calling politely asking that I change the name. They were understanding of the situation, and even paid for all of the fees related to making the switch. So I learned this lesson the easy way. But don’t ever forget this…

Lesson #6 Make sure that you check in the beginning any legal issues that might be involved.

Don’t think that a company will never find you. If your intentions are to make a really quality site, somebody is going to find out eventually, especially if your site receives thousands of visitors a day! And even if your site is 100% in support of their product.

With that being said, I changed the title and took a more broad approach to the site. Instead, I pointed out the unique qualities of several laptop brands. This, of course, made my site just like the thousands of other sites. But I kept with it. The content was great. The problem was something I didn’t anticipate…

With any kind of technology, things are constantly changing. You love something one day. But the next day, something is newer and way better than the product from yesterday.

This makes it extremely difficult when it comes to building a website.

Everything has to be constantly modified and updated. In the world of laptops, almost everything you can talk about becomes obsolete within a year. While this gives you plenty of fresh and new pages to come up, it’s easy to confuse your visitors.

The only way that an individual can succeed with any kind of technology website is to focus on a really targeted niche. And even then, you have the complications of your product no longer mattering in the technology world.

I once knew a site about the latest Windows operating system. It received millions of visitors. It was truly an amazing site created by one individual, who I truly admired. The problem, as you might have guessed, arrived when Windows came out with a new operating system! His traffic appeared to cut in half in a matter of weeks and months.

There are just too many problems that you have to deal with if you want to start a technology site. And it’s hard to compete because there are many technology sites out there that are run by hundreds of people who have much bigger budgets than you!

What’s the lesson behind all of this? It’s something that I want you to strongly keep in mind when you are starting a new website…

Lesson #7 Write timeless content.

Write content that will still be relevant ten, twenty, even thirty years from now.

This ensures long-term success of your site if a majority of your pages will still be relevant years later.

Now, understand that every page doesn’t have to be written for the long-term. There are many times when you may need to talk about a current event or something that may grow out of style.

The important thing is to keep a larger percentage of your pages fall into the category of “useful for a lifetime.” When you do this, your site can receive a steady increase in links and revenue year after year!

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