If I Only Knew Then…Business Mistakes

I don’t know one person that has a blog or some other form of online business that hasn’t uttered the phrase, “If only I had known then what I know now…”

I’ve said it myself more than once. When we started blogging it was looked at as a hobby. This fact, coupled with the newness of the blogosphere from this perspective (the blogging side) allowed us to make a number of mistakes. Years later, I am scratching my head wondering what I was thinking.

Some things I am happy to say I avoided just out of sheer vanity and stubbornness on my part, but a lot of those common mistakes that people talk about making, I made, too.

photo credit: Mab879

Blogspot/Blogger vs. WordPress: The Website Conundrum
Before Blogger and the blog craze you could apply this to Geocities or Freewebs vs. a standard website and/or domain name. If you’re looking to pimp your services or you want people to take you seriously then you need to ask yourself how it looks to have a URL like http://jennifersbiscuits.blogspot.com. Assuming you are selling biscuits (or whatever it is you might be doing with your biscuits) a .com is always going to be the more business savvy choice.

A Blogspot/Geocities free web option always seems to say…”I thought I would try this out before I invest any money.” This also means that on some level you A. Do not believe it’s going to work in the long term and B. Do not think you have the skills to make it work. People tend to think that setting up on a free site is easy because they can use canned templates and do not have to handle things that they are not familiar with (like buying domain names and handling back end website issues), but what they do not realize is that on the off-chance their website/business/blog does pick up, they will want to move to something more specific to them and that offers them more control. This move will be the biggest pain they will ever experience from a business sense.

photo credit: austrini

Free Template vs. Professional
Back when I was writing articles for Real Estate agents I would write quite a bit about curb appeal. For those that are not familiar with the term, it’s when you look at the outside of a home and it appears to look so good that you can’t help but want to see the inside of it. There is such a thing as curb appeal for websites, too. If your website is messy, unorganized, lacks focus, and has irritating graphics or poor colors then people won’t want to look any further than the first page. They won’t read your articles or learn about your business because your site design will scare them off. In general, the average person makes up their mind whether to stay or leave a website within seconds. Obviously, these are not seconds spent reading the entire page. No. They are seconds spent looking at your design. This is why a professional design is so important. If you have basic design skills yourself that’s fine, but if you don’t you should highly consider hiring someone that does.

I think of free templates kind of like subdivisions. I choose not to live in a classic representation of a subdivision because it’s unnerving to me that all of the homes look identical. I prefer individuality. More importantly, people that use free templates run the risk of other people in their niche using that same template. This might not seem like a big deal, but if a person ends up at your site second they have a better chance of leaving just on the basis that they think your site is one they’ve already visited.

photo credit: gettattoo

Never Fear Monetization
There seem to be two kinds of website owners. The kind that have 100 ads all over their site from the jump just proving the intended point of their website and the kind that don’t have any ads because the main goal is to provide information and insight into something the website owner loves. Eventually, this second group tends to get with the program, they do put up some ads and their sites begin to make some money. Of course, it’s money they could have been making from the beginning.

Some things to understand about monetization. 1. If you’re offering a valuable service, whether it’s conversation, entertainment, or free articles, people will put up with the fact that you have ads as long as they are not interfering with their ability to enjoy your content. 2. There are plenty of ways to monetize without having flashing pop-up ads jump out at your visitors faces. 3. Loyal visitors will click your ads or buy products that you recommend because they know that if they help your website succeed then you will be able to continue with the upkeep of your site.

Slow & Steady Wins the Race
Burn out won’t do you any good. When you start a site, it’s so easy to have the mentality that you need to get a massive amount of posts on that site. However, what you offer on a consistent basis is what your readers are going to expect you to offer. If you write 100 articles or you post 100 articles in a day and that lasts for say, two weeks, then your readers are going to expect to see that frequency in the future. However, writing a ton of articles every day is going to burn you out eventually and your posting frequency will dwindle considerably. Instead, decide what you can logically offer for a long time to come and begin with that. If you think you can post twice a day for as long as you need to then go with that. It may not seem like a lot, but it will add up. Furthermore, if that is what your readers know you will offer they won’t complain. It’s better to have two quality articles a day than 30 subpar articles in place of the two.

I am proud to say that the only mistake I made here was not understanding how to properly monetize a site (a topic we will get into later) and posting so much at one point that I wanted a month long vacation sooner than I should have had one.

So, what mistakes did you make that you wish you could have corrected with the wisdom that you have now?

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