I will try and keep this from rambling on, but no promises....
I started my main website back in 1998, and that site now gets over 2.5 million page views a month and provides me a very comfortable living. I started programming 35 years ago, and have been a CTO, Senior Vice President and Technology Director for several different companies.
If I knew then, what I know now, I would have done several things differently, here are what I believe to be some keys to have a successful Internet business.
1) Traffic and buyer traffic is a websites oxygen, take that away and you are dead. Try something every day you work to get some more traffic.
I started my main website back in 1998, and that site now gets over 2.5 million page views a month and provides me a very comfortable living. I started programming 35 years ago, and have been a CTO, Senior Vice President and Technology Director for several different companies.
If I knew then, what I know now, I would have done several things differently, here are what I believe to be some keys to have a successful Internet business.
1) Traffic and buyer traffic is a websites oxygen, take that away and you are dead. Try something every day you work to get some more traffic.
1a) I don't pay for any of my traffic, people have to have a reason to come to your site. Give them a good reason to come. Give them a better reason to sign up for your mailing list.
1b) I do pay to get great content created. Articles, calculators, quizzes, website design, banner ads (I advertise on parts of my site to get visitors to other parts), and ebooks.
1c) In the general health area, you need at least 500,000 visitors a month to make a living (at least a standard of living for me) off CPM advertising.
1d) When any other site gets "hot", Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, ask how can I leverage that to get traffic? Test, test and test.
1e) Use old reliable sites to get traffic heading your way, for me that is sites like questions.yahoo.com and livestrong.com, I get tons of traffic by answering health questions on those sites.
1f) Your mail list is your backup plan if your search traffic goes to hell. Get people on your mailing list, and communicate regularly and sell about 1 out of 5 times. The other 4 times give them excellent content worthy of their time to read it.
1g) CPM advertising should be your FINAL revenue model, you should learn to make money first as an affiliate or selling a service, then creating your own products, then publishing products for other people.
2) Don't try and know everything or do everything.2a) Get in a Master Mind group. Find a group where you are the dumbest person in it and they will just barely let you in after pleading, begging and pimping yourself. Listen to everything they say, execute as much as you can.
2b) Use Meetup or something similar to find Internet people in your area that you can use as a resource to help you outsource, review code specifications and bounce marketing ideas off of.
2c) Go to Internet events and meet people face to face and then keep in touch with them.
3) Technology changes in a hurry, you cannot keep up.3a) In 1998, there was HTML, now there is HTML5, ajax, jquery and more. MySQL version was 2.1 it is now 5.5, PHP was in version 1.0 and did not run on all servers. You can't learn enough from scratch to do the sophisticated websites that users demand today and hackers can't break into.
3b) Now there are iPhone and Android apps that don't use web languages. Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Python are all the "fashionable" languages of the day, don't get sucked in. Coders are cheap hire them.
3c) If you have a simple website you should be using a CMS like Wordpress or in a few cases Joomla.
3d) Learn to write project specifications, that skill will last you a lifetime. It won't matter what platform, what language, what database, good specs can be converted into a good website/app/software by a decent programmer.
4) Learn how to write copy that sells and you can make money anytime you want.4a) $7.00 domain + $4.00/month hosting + affiliate program + good copy = $$$$$
5) Don't buy any program or class that you will not dedicate yourself to fully execute in the next 60 days.5a) I have a slowlaner's salary worth of classes on my shelf (and hard drive) that I was just stupid when I bought them with no real plan of execution.
6) Don't overplan.6a) Just try stuff, things I thought would be a sure hit, got nothing, other things I just threw out on a whim, big $$$. You just never know.
6b) Don't try and make it perfect, barely working is good enough, you can always upgrade later if revenues warrant it. If you fill a need, people will buy your product/service. Use the WayBack machine to look at old amazon and yahoo websites from the late 90's. That is some ugly website design.
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