While people are encouraged by my online success, some often frown when I tell them it took me six years to make enough online to at least match my 9 to 5 salary. Even though I made a profit every year, there were a lot of ups and downs in the beginning as I learned from my mistakes.
My success didn’t happen overnight and if I could do one thing over again I would have learned how to write for my audience instead of myself.
What I mean is that so many people build sites without regarding who their target audience is and what they want to learn about. For example, if you are going to build a fitness site, don’t write 10 pages about you and your weight struggle. Write to help your readers.
To put it bluntly, people don’t really care about your story until you show them how your site can help them first.
Check out your competition and add information that they are missing. Instead of talking about all the things people should do in regards to the subject, switch it up and focus on what they shouldn’t do.
Be different.
Stand out from the crowd.
And once you really know who you want to target and focus on their needs AND offer information that cannot be found anywhere else, then you will have success much faster than I did.
In the beginning, I kept copying other people’s concepts and would only have minimal success because my site was not unique enough and got lost in the crowd.
But once I realized the secret was to take a topic and offer information that my competitors were not, add my own voice/personality, really learn how to communicate with my audience, that’s when my traffic and sites started to take off.
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hey now-
great post! It’s important to me because I recently decided to focus on a serious video/youtube and other social networking/bookmarking campaign to get more traffic. I’m also enlisting some participation of friends and modeling pros for these upcoming products. Can’t wait to use your great tips when this is done. You’re an inspiration! This is my very first post on your blog with more to come. Thx