If You HAD to Start Over - What would you do Different???

[tiger325]

I would have spent less time on reading every how to book and actually putting it to action sooner. But it all worked out so I cant complain.

[bronnamdi]

Good for you and congrats on your success.

[johnbarton]

I didn't have the money to promote it so it was hard to be "seen".

[mwong]

There are a lot of things I would like to do if I can start this business all over again and the first of it is to know this business earlier. I always imagine how I am today if I started my business when I was 20 years old.

Then I wish I would stop procrastinating and focus 120% in affiliate marketing. It was difficult to motivate myself while fighting to believe that I made the right decision to join this business. I think that fear of failure really delay a lot of my work.

If I can turn back time again, I wish I could pay more attention during my course. I thought I could refer to the handouts whenever I have any question about the business. But what I got from the handout was so basic, it was nothing compare to the explanation in the course.

Lastly, I hope that I will do my research before I do anything in the business. You can't imagine how much I spent when I started affiliate marketing. I can get a lot of good tools if I invest that money properly. Until today I still tell myself that I what I get from my lack of research is priceless experience and that is something money can't buy.

[sidallan]

There's a famous quote from Burt Munro,

"If you don't go when you wanna go, when you do go you'll find you're gone!"

I sincerely believe and practice that. It has helped me a lot. I hope it'll help others too.

[Iceman]

I probably would have taken as many classes related to SEO as possible. I would have focused on a niche market, and then ran with that!

[Codrut_Turcanu]

Just as a quick refresher, I would definitely do something which solves one of the burning problems of my readers.

[Iceman]

I think I would have also paid attention in the classes that I took a bit more too!

However, I wouldn't really do that much different because I am the person I am today, because of the decision I have made. Everything I do is a learning process, so maybe I would not have learned as much if I would not have made the decision I did.

I tend to try and not look back, although it can be inevitable.

[gowithabc]

If I were to start all over again....


As an affiliate manager, I made a plethora of mistakes when my company first ventured into the affiliate marketing world.

Our company had been very successful with other direct advertising so we had every confidence in the world that our affiliate program would be successful from day 1!

Of course, people on the web are a lot more skeptical and most times need a lot of convincing to try something new!

The first thing that I would change is the order in which we did things. Before a single sale had converted online, before our affiliate landing page was even completed we were firing off emails to business websites, blog sites, and even some government sites like chambers of commerce!

Needless to say, email marketing when the landing pages for affiliate recruiting are not done is a bad idea!

We also never built our backlink foundation for our website, or even tried any type of "establishing" ourselves in any way.

The worst was forum posting. Once we discovered how powerful posting on forums could be we did it in a bad way. Create an account, go to the affiliate section, and post "Hi try our new program heres the link bye" and that was it.

We didn't realize that you have to become part of the community, provide good information and become a resource BEFORE you start spamming your links and recruiting

Same thing with article submission sites: Driving traffic through article submission sites is a great form of traffic! By creating a network and again: being ACTIVE in the community is what makes these types of things effective.

(As of right now we have received about 1,025 hits from Stumbleupon for the day and it's only 10:30am!)

The most important thing that I would do again if I could would be to test the sales conversion and make sure our sales page converted for our affiliates before we started.

We had some really great affiliates join our program, load up our banners, sent loads of traffic but no conversions.

We had to test and test before we finally found the perfect page that is now converting very well.

We lost a lot of good affiliates from not testing and not converting an online sale before recruiting.


Overall, after the trials and tribulations of "newbie" mistakes, we have developed a great consistent flow of new affiliates joining our ranks, conversion that keeps the affiliates happy, and still a lot more to learn and improve upon as we go!

The number one source of information is always Five Star... If you take the time to actually research get everything in place BEFORE turning the "ON" button on... You will be much better off and you will not have to worry about backtracking or having to start over!

I wish you the best of luck!