The Mistakes I’ve Made in My Internet Business Journey.

I made many mistakes when I started out, and throughout the last seven years of working online, I have learned that it is a double-edged sword: it can make you rich, but it can also waste your time and cause you to lose money. If you’re persistent and not lazy, earning a mid-4-figure salary is not that hard. This could be a significant amount of money for people not living in the most developed countries. In this post, I will share my suggestions and the mistakes I’ve made over the years.

Failures and Expecting Overnight Success

In my first year, I made almost no money. Why was that? I was 15, so I was mostly learning and doing silly things, which was my own fault. But don’t expect to start making money straight away when you start working online. If you’re doing your own projects or start-ups, you shouldn’t expect to make money instantly. But if you’re doing freelance work and you get orders quickly, then yes, you can. However, getting orders without a portfolio and knowing how to get customers is hard at first. So if you didn’t prepare a fund in case you went all in on working online, it’ll be a disaster. I recommend having a full-time job and spending an extra 3–5 hours a day working/learning about online business. Once your online revenue is at least the same as your real-life job, focus on it fully and work hard. Don’t get discouraged if you fail. Don’t watch YouTubers who lie about how they make millions – 98% of them are liars and ‘fake it till you make it’ cases. I failed with 6–7 projects in the first 6 months before my first successful one. By ‘successful’, I mean it made me around $30–$50 a day.

Copy others and learn from others

Why create a perfect landing page when it has already been done millions of times for other products? Find a highly successful website that sells a similar product to yours. They have probably already optimised their landing page to maximise sales. Simply change the text to be about your own product, its features and offers. Once you get the hang of it, creating excellent landing pages in hours is not that hard.

If you want to create a YouTube video on a specific topic, go to Twitter or Google and see if anyone has already written an interesting blog post or Twitter article about it. Paraphrase it and use it for your video. Are you doing CPA? Look at what other people are doing and copy them. The problem with doing unique and new stuff is that you’re paving an unexplored road. In most cases, this will result in failure. If it doesn’t, you could have a good business with good revenue. But why go that way when it’s much more profitable and faster to copy others?

If you want to learn as quickly as possible, the best approach is to join online communities about making money and find people who have already succeeded in earning 5-10k USD per month. They will be more willing to share their experiences and help you grow, too. This website and our telegram group chat were made for exactly that purpose.

If you are Lazy, you will fail 99%

This is the worst one. As long as you’re not lazy and willing to work hard, you will get somewhere, as the internet is full of opportunities. You should also work on not getting distracted by YouTube, Netflix, music or anything else. If you lose focus, you can waste hours of your time on useless stuff that won’t help you, and you’ll never get that time back.

One distraction leads to another, and before you know it, you’ll be spending more time scrolling through social media than doing what’s important. Here’s a post I wrote about how to get more work done in less time.

Overspending, over-investing and putting all your eggs in one basket.

Don’t overspend on things you don’t need. For example, if you’re just starting out with your website, instead of buying 5–10$ hosting, you buy 50$ hosting. This is a waste of money. Buy hosting that is good enough so that your visitors will see that your website is fast and has no issues, which a small 5–10$ hosting plan can accommodate. Scale up as your visitor numbers grow. This way, if your first project fails, you will have only spent 5–10 dollars on hosting that month, rather than 50 dollars. You will then have four more months to test new projects with the money you have just saved.

It’s only good to over-invest in a single project when you’re just starting out. Once it’s making twice your living costs, though, you could start automating it and hiring someone from a third world country to take care of it, as long as nothing changes in terms of quality or cost.

This way, you can focus on building a second project or source of income. For example, if you grew a YouTube channel, you could hire someone to create similar videos. You would just need to write the scripts and then focus on building affiliate marketing earnings. On top of that, you could invest some of the revenue in passive income by buying dividend stocks or crypto, and then doing staking airdrops with that crypto.

Learning English

This might sound funny since this post is in English, which all of you can read. However, 80% of this website’s readers aren’t native speakers, so I reckon at least half of you don’t write grammatically perfect English and don’t speak it fluently (I don’t either). But the better your English gets, the easier it will be to make money online. You will write better landing pages and ads, and customers will like and understand you more, those are just some of the perks.

Starting a Company

While I was still under 20, I wasn’t able to start many things because in the third world country I was from, nothing was available, including Stripe, Etsy and many other payment systems and processors, not to mention ClickBank. So I couldn’t easily sell products or register on some playforms, so if you’re in same place as I was, juts use 1stFormations or any other company registration platform for UK, create a compan in UK and use it for everything.

I would recommend using 1stFormations, though. I have been using them for four years and cannot recommend them highly enough. I have never had any issues with them, and you can start for just $20–30 a year.

That’s about it for this post, though. If you read most of the articles on our site, you will probably start making money in a matter of weeks or months, which is much faster than if you were to wander around aimlessly. We have lots of amazing articles in the ‘Your New Hustle’ section that could help you get started more easily.