Don't Waste Your Time
Posted On: 2007-04-11
There's no doubt that making money in this business can be hard work. It takes time to put the pieces of a successful site or gallery together, it takes time to come up with text that is compelling and makes people want to buy what you're selling. It takes time to work some search engine optimization into that compelling text and it takes time to submit your site or gallery to the link lists and TGPs that will send you traffic.
And all that time adds up to some very hard work so it's important that you don't undo all that hard work with just one simple error. That's all it takes to turn a lot of very hard work into a total waste of time. Just one small mistake and your work is ruined.
Today I got an email from a webmaster forum where I'm a member. There were two parts to the email; one part warned of someone spamming members via private messages and the other promoted a new product. It really did sound interesting until I got to this part of the text: “... reveals how he made almost ,000 with two email promotions.”
Wow, this guy made absolutely nothing with two email promotions? How fantastic a product that must be!
Yep, those were the thoughts that wandered through my mind as I read that promotion. Apart from giving me a good laugh it gave me absolutely no incentive to go and look at this fantastic no-money making product.
A little care, a little time spent in proof-reading and the work of the person who wrote that email would not have been wasted. Instead, busy people who get that email are going to take one look at that line and hit the delete button.
A little later another email from the same place turned up in my email box. This time they were asking me why I hadn't active in the forum for quite some time and the email looked a little like this:
We've noticed that you've not been active on xyzforum for quite some time now,
and we miss you!
Could we not tempt you back?
There were further paragraphs in the email, all had the html code appearing in the text and after seeing that they couldn't even coax me to read the rest of the email. The text on the delete button was much easier to read than the text in that email.
Once again, if a little care had been taken, if a little time had been spent in proof-reading, I might have finished reading the email and I might have been tempted to go back to the forum but, after seeing that, all I wanted to do was get on with the work I had planned for today.
It only takes one small mistake, one minor error and all your good work can be undone. Instead of producing something that compels people to buy what you're selling that one small mistake can mean that all your hard work becomes a joke, something that makes people laugh instead of doing what you want them to do.
Now I'm not saying that it's wrong to make people laugh. There is often a very valid reason to incorporate some humour into your marketing but when you do that you do it intentionally and you do it to encourage people to buy what you're selling.
The humour that I found in that first email did nothing to encourage me to go and look at the product the email was trying to sell. It did nothing to encourage me to have enough trust the person who sent me the email to follow his suggestions and possibly buy the product.
And that's were mistakes can really strike at your ability to make money. If you want people to buy something from you, or to follow your suggestions, then they have to have some trust in you and in your site. If they don't already have that trust – and many surfers are very sceptical of adult marketing sites (free sites and galleries) – then mistakes, no matter how minor, are going to make surfers even less likely to trust you enough to do what you want them to do.
So often finding and fixing those mistakes is not hard at all, it doesn't require a degree in rocket science, it doesn't require years of marketing experience, all it requires is a little time and a little patience.
Like every adult webmaster finishing a site or a gallery is a major moment for me. It means that I can sit back, take a break, do something relaxing and it can't come soon enough. But that's a dangerous point to reach because we often reach it before we should.
The point at which a site or gallery is finished is not when we add the final word to the bottom of the gallery or the last page of the site. The point at which a site or gallery is finished comes when we have gone over our work and checked everything. Until you have checked your coding, your meta tags, your affiliate codes on the links and every other minor detail you can think of the site or gallery is not finished.
And until you do that checking and proof-reading all your hard work can be wasted by just one simple and very minor mistake.