These are the most important lessons in IM I’ve had to learn the hard way, by making the mistakes myself and learning from them. You can save yourself from making the first two mistakes but the last 3 are something I think everyone has to realize for themselves.

Re-purposing

Never Ever get rid of anything you publish online, ever. If you decide to shut down a site, fine but take everything you’ve put on it and store it somewhere else, you’ve spent precious time or money on that content, do not throw it away. You may not be able to re-purpose everything but you will come across something eventually and if you’ve let the content go you will really regret it. Even crappy old articles you have no idea what to do with can be used to chuck a link in and submit to an article directory.

Back Up!

You’ll make a stupid mistake or just get unlucky eventually. I accidentally deleted a database for a site that was growing rather quickly, everything was gone. We managed to get some of the content back from Google’s cache but we lost most of it, it took the wind out the project and we ended up letting it go. Back up your sites and everything on your own PC as well. Sadly most of us learn this lesson the hard way.

SEO

When it comes to making money and you’ve chosen an affiliate program/product, after creating the content for your site to help sell it the most important thing you can do is SEO. Your SEO ability is the deciding factor in if you will be successful as an internet marketer, the value of a number one position can’t be underestimated. SEO will promote your website and promotion will improve your SEO, build links. It is boring for most, including me but it works. You should understand what is important in SEO, I think this article does the best job at illustrating that, however if you target long tail keywords the on site stuff can have a bigger effect on your rankings.

The Hump

If you are not one of those lucky few who throw up a site and are off like a rocket when you earn your first Adsense dollar you will like most Internet marketers spend at least a few months, possibly even a year or more struggling and wondering if it is even worth it. If you keep persisting, keep learning and most importantly keep practicing what you learn eventually it will begin to pay off. The hump is the tipping point, you struggle up the hill and eventually you start seeing the gains and income that indicated this is going to work. You’ve reached the hump, making money just becomes a process, it’s no longer such a struggle, the anguish about reaching your goals disappears, now you know what works and what you have to do.

It Takes Money

Yes you can do it for nothing, the question is how long do you want it to take to reach the hump described above. If you join a program that has a formula to follow and at least a support forum. I joined The Keyword Academy and retrospectively it is at that point that things started to move for me. Another I would consider is Wealthy Affiliate. Programs like these have a proven formula and include some of the tools you will need.

Other tools like UAW for article marketing are usually recommended, I don’t have a UAW subscription, for the number of submissions I do the cost is not worth it. Don’t feel like you have to subscribe to these tools, there is a market out there for people like me and you, many people let you send them your submission and they will submit it using their account for a small fee. When this becomes more expensive than the subscription cost sign up and start doing it yourself.

A world of warning, ebook programs suck, I lost count of how many I went through. Real programs offer support in one form or another, IM ebooks are just other IMs trying to make a quick and easy buck off newbies. If it’s free, take it and learn what you can, if you want to buy an ebook that is fine, you’ll probably learn from it, but don’t expect it to fully equip you.

So there are the 5 hardest lessons I’ve learned in IM but it is not all, there is at least one more major thing you need to to learn… next post, Self Responsibility.