Money for nothing?
Not hardly!
It is so easy to turn a newbie into an Internet junkie by
telling the tales of "gurus" making money with their website 24
hours a day, 7 days a week.
They go on vacation for a week or two and the site just keeps on
paying the bills.
Doesn't get any easier than this....
I still have my first website that I created when I first became
addicted to the Net. I haven't touched it in over a year now,
other than to change an updated URL here and there.
Everything that you can do wrong with your Internet business,
has been done to mine.
Mostly because I lost interest. My wife says that I'm bad about
that. Many of my hobbies have fallen to the wayside for this
same reason.
The site made me a little over $6,000 last year, and about the
same the year before. This year is off to an even better start
for some reason.
Whenever I talk to people about this, their eyes glaze over as
they imagine throwing up their own site and watching the checks
roll in.
Money for nothing?
Well, if you look only at this past year it pretty much looks
like it was free money. I didn't really do anything and still
pulled in a decent chunk of change.
Many of the "gurus" on the Internet have a similar story of how
they have a website or two that are on auto-pilot like this one.
This is part of the problem with our industry today. Too many
stories of easy money float around just like the ones above, and
the unsuspecting quickly fall prey.
Now let me shed some light on my story...
For the past year I haven't done very much, that's the truth.
But what I failed to tell you is how much time, and for how long
it took me to get that particular site to the point it was one
year ago.
>From the moment that I first discovered the Internet, I was
hooked.
Me and my AOL account were inseparable. For that first year my
website must have gone through a complete redesign every two
months.
I would spend hours and hours asking other webmasters to link to
my site, monitoring my search engine positioning, and trying to
find ways to make money from it.
When I was away from my computer all I could think about was
getting back to it to check and see how many visitors came
through, and how much money I made.
There were many letdowns and many frustrations in getting it off
the ground.
If you take what I made with the site last year and divide it by
the number of hours I spent, its one heck of an hourly rate!
But if you take what I've made from day one and divide it by the
number of hours I put into it, you'll find that I probably could
have done better with a part-time job flipping burgers.
And who knows, maybe I could have even spent more time with my
family because when I clocked out from my part-time job, I would
be off for the evening.
When you are bit by the Internet bug, you'll find yourself
watching the sun come up on some days...after an all-nighter!
The sad truth is that the vast majority of the "gurus" out there
leave out this part of the story. It doesn't sound quite as
awesome to hear someone say they are making money with their
website, but they might do better offering "fries with that."
At this point you are probably thinking: "Man! Chuck, what's up
with all the gloom and doom?"
I'm trying to set your expectations appropriately. In my last
job, one of the most important lessons that I learned was to
"set the customer's expectations."
When I went into a job that I knew would probably take 4 hours,
it was better to tell the customer that it would take 8.
If I was done in 4 I was a hero. If I ran into major problems
and it took 8, then I was right on time.
But if I had told the customer that I should be done in 4 hours
and it took me 8....
VERY upset customer!
It is all about perception.
You need to set your own expectations. Don't think that you can
"build it and they will come."
Don't think that you can put up a site and instantly put it on
auto-pilot.
If you don't use the right approach to your business, you can
easily find yourself on the list of "Internet failures."
The bright side to this story? Today, through the "school of
hard knocks" I have learned how to get a website up and running
in a much shorter time frame, and with far fewer mistakes.
Looking back on it, what would I have done differently?
I would have invested in some training materials so I could
learn what others have found to work, and not work.
I would have gotten my own domain name a lot earlier.
I would have invested in a decent log analysis tool instead of
spending hours "counting clicks."
And, I would probably have doubled my "expected time to
completion" :-)