Sometimes I read the success stories from internet marketers and wonder how everyone except me became an overnight sensation. The sales pages always highlight the incredible results. What they leave out is the graveyard of failed projects that came before.<\/p>\n
The truth is that successful entrepreneurs fail constantly. Thomas Edison failed thousands of times. Michael Jordan missed more shots than most players ever took. And I once built a website about chicken coops that earned exactly zero dollars in revenue.<\/p>\n
Here is what happened. I was following along with a niche marketing case study and decided to test an article marketing strategy using a topic I knew nothing about: chicken coops. I grabbed a domain, hired a writer to produce some articles, had a virtual assistant submit them to article directories, and waited for the money to roll in.<\/p>\n
The article marketing actually worked as a traffic strategy. I sent about 3,500 visitors to the site and got a respectable 11 percent click-through rate to the affiliate product I was promoting. On paper, that should have produced sales.<\/p>\n
It produced zero. Not a single sale from 378 visitors to the sales page.<\/p>\n
I spent a lot of time analyzing why this experiment failed. Here were my theories at the time, and what I have learned since:<\/p>\n
The most important thing about failure is not avoiding it. It is failing quickly, learning from it, and moving on. Every failed project teaches you something that your next project benefits from.<\/p>\n
My chicken coop failure taught me that traffic without trust does not convert. That lesson saved me from repeating the same mistake on dozens of future projects. The cost of that education was a domain registration, a few articles, and some time. The return on that investment has been enormous.<\/p>\n
If you are working on a project right now and it is not producing results, ask yourself: have I learned everything this project can teach me? If yes, document the lesson, shut it down, and start the next experiment. If no, keep testing until you have.<\/p>\n
The path to success is paved with instructive failures. The only real failure is the one you refuse to learn from.<\/p>\n