I’m nowhere near batting 1,000 when it comes to making money from blogging, but three of my worst ideas taught me a lot about learning from failure.
3 – Trying to drive traffic to a website using only a ‘catchy’ domain name.
I assumed registering the domain name ‘WachoviaMerger.com‘ would drive thousands of readers to a site that only existed for a week.
Wachovia Bank was in the midst of being acquired by a new bank, so I thought, “Easy Money!”
This screw up makes me laugh now that I understand the complexity of search engines and how much effort it takes to rank a site.
2 – Building a local website without enough expertise.
My second fail moment came with ‘Vermont Means Business‘.
I established the blog soon after moving to the Green Mountain State and just never got into it that much. No wonder, I wasn’t close to being a pro.
1 – Being a smartass.
I love dry humor, but the Internet has enough critics and naysayers.
My blog started to get much better readership when I stopped sniping and started writing like I was having a conversation.
The most important thing I’ve learned from these blogging failures is to plot out a strategy before I go all in.
And if something doesn’t work despite my best efforts then it doesn’t matter so long as I learn something valuable in the process.
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Good points and cute post. I love posts on experience with actual examples. Especially those posts where people are real enough to point out their own mistakes.
Thanks Dawn,
I’ve certainly made my fair share of mistakes.
The thing that gives me real pleasure is learning something useful even if it arises from something I did by accident.
I wonder what people have learned from their mistakes related to blogging, advertising, facebooking, and other forms of social media?