Why people fail to make money online

There are so many reasons why people are not making money online even though some of them have been online for a while. Some are the most common reasons.

1. Keep reading ebooks and keep discovering something without focusing on specific thing.

2. Registering a lot of domains and later on abandoned them because he have no time and/or discovered another domain.

3. Wanted an overnight success.

4. No perseverance and lack of focus.....

 

Number 2 is the big one here

 

The last 3 apply to me, which is why I'm selling most of my domains.

From a domaining perspective, I would add, "not finding the right name to develop".

 

my problem is i sell when i need to pay a bill ,i don't hold money reserves and i usually sell them when they start to generate money,i have tried lately to hold more sites but it becomes much harder when the cost of living outstrips your monthly incoming's...

 

Same here mate, I wanted to keep most of mine but had to sell to pay rent etc

I am hoping to set up and concentrate on just 5 sites this year, I don't have any at the moment, I scrapped what I had to start again.

Good luck

 

Always interested in buying sites like this if any are up for sale

 

I would say 3. and 4. are essentially the same. You really need to persevere in this game to make a living.

 

Because there ideas are stupid to start with....

 

I am not following any of them because I learn all these things from web and I am very care full to run my business. Internet learns too much things if you are reading properly.

 

I've wasted loads of money buying crappy domains and doing nothing with them...until I made the decision to buy just one or two names per year in the £xxxx range - this worked for me on the basis that (a) I couln't afford to waste this kind of money and (b) provided some sort of focus.

It's noticable though, that people who have big successes often find it impossible to replicate even with lots of cash/resources. E.g. I recently leased a domain from a guy in the US who sold his main site in 2008 for $4M and has subsequently ploughed a significant amount of the proceeds back into multiple failed internet ventures.

I think any sort of success should be applauded, bearing in mind that even giants such as Google find it difficult. ('Google Wave'?)

Like any job - luck/fortune/being in the right place plays a big part...but as someone one said... "the harder I work, the luckier I get"

 

I'm guessing that was the Bored.com guy?

 

This is the most important aspect. With the greatest respect, the names you are selling were never going to make your fortune. And if anyone has got names that they value at £20 etc. they should have never registered them in the first place, it's not cost effective to hold them. Flipping is a great way of trading domains but the most difficult.

 

very interesting...

i'm yet to start domaining so all I can say is you will not get a good return from anything that isn't hardwork...

doesnt matter if its domaining, window cleaning, banking or bank robbery there is no such thing as an easy life, you have to contribute, participate or add value in some meaningful way for any kind of result.

If i had $4 million i dont think i would bother with this!

what kind of timescales do you guys work to? how long does it take a new site to generate income? how long do you give a site before giving up on it?

 

Yeah, you're right, which is why I was selling most of them for low value. Learnt a lot about domain names since I started dabbling in it a couple of years ago and will hopefully pick up better names in the future that either hold potential for development or flipping at a good price.

 

But you don't do it anyway!

Lionel Bart wrote the musical "Oliver!" and made a heap of money. He spent it all on trying to produce a lot of musicals that were nothing like as good.

Lord Lloyd-Webber "assembled" a lot of successful musicals that made money - he started off writing with Tim Rice, then went over to project management. He picked good writers, delegated, and made the best use of his skill set.

Lionel Bart couldn't tell his good/ best work from the stuff he shouldn't have shown to the dustmen. But nobody was going to tell him he was "doing it wrong". If he'd bought material in, he would probably have been a lot more successful. He had the organisational skills.

If you can see how a business is put together, you only need one success to be able to replicate your ideas over and over again - but if you have a weak area in your business, you don't find out until the returns drop and don't pick up.

 

All four of the reasons you cite come down to one thing - the use and misuse of time.

Very few people truly value their time.

 

That's how you interpret the problem, George - I don't want to argue, your fundamental principles are sound, but I want to say that there are other ways of expressing a lot of "time management" concepts.

Let me run through those four points -
1)"Keep reading ebooks and keep discovering something without focusing on specific thing".

This is a "trust" problem. Very rarely will people follow something that does not accord completely with their own feelings. If you don't trust the advice someone gives you, you will never get started. If you ignore something they say because it is not in synch with your value system, you may jeapordise the whole project.

I've seen a blog post somewhere recently called "Follow Your Own Guru" which said, in brief, " If you don't know how to make money, you have to learn from someone - stop your search and follow a practical path which you can broadly ACCEPT into your belief system. WHEN you start to make money, start examining other methods and adding your own refinements".

2) "Registering a lot of domains and later on abandoned them because he have no time and/or discovered another domain".

Learn to make the domains work for starters. George would say minimise your "time" on them, I say minimise your "effort". Whichever you choose, doing nothing is what is called a write off. If you are new to this stuff, get some value back out of what you have invested.
Do some minimal site construction using free content and a free template. Shove them up on free hosting with links to all the other domains you bought at the same time. After a few months, a link to a new site from one of those is valuable. Doesn't matter if no-one looks at it.
I'm having no success with Storebust, but I am still putting domains on there in hope. A site that is getting a little SEO and exposure for minimal effort can be taken off there and used for a proper aff site later (and it gets it over the sandbox period).

3) "Wanted an overnight success."
It actually used to happen, up to about 3 years ago, when keyword domains were "free to register" and available, and Google hadn't twigged that minisites were exploiting its mechanisms. Put that point down to "TIMING". Try to make sure that your info guru is giving you stuff that works now, not a couple of years ago.

4) "No perseverance and lack of focus ..."
Trust and belief again ...
Keep working until you show yourself that you are wrong (no good showing yourself that you quit too easily). Your guru says "this works". If you think it doesn't work, you might be giving up to easily.
If you can't focus your own ideas, focus on the ideas and concepts of your guru, even if they don't agree with your feelings, until you find ways to bring them into your belief system.


About thirtyfive years ago, I told a 16 year old apprentice how to become a miser and save up pennies to get the Gibson guitar he really wanted. It was just an exercise in practical focus and objective setting (thank you, Dale Carnegie), and he believed me because I had a similar Gibson guitar already (actually funded by a bank loan). I got canned about 3 weeks later (because I got up the boss's nose, and he had to do it quick or he would have had to give an outright reason). He always said I could criticise him when I outqualified him - Jack Kershaw, you always were a self opinionated git!

So about a year later this kid meets me in the street and gets enormously gratuitous because my plan worked for him, and he got all the Gibson guitar and Marshall amp he wanted inside of nine months. At the time, I actually found the whole episode a salutary lesson in how powerful influencing techniques can be. Frankly, it scared me ...
On reflection, I would quote it as an example of how a person without the actual practical experience might just be giving you the product you need.
I know I have freely given ideas that made money and gave kudos to other people. They have returned this with thanks, favours, and the occasional pint of beer ...

 

Interesting Points, specially the second one.

 

This is actually my biggest mistake 2 years ago until I learned my lesson... lots of crappy domains expired and unused....