Lets talk about failures…

[zerofatzreturns]

I once spent over $1,000 on a SiteBuildIt site. I don’t know if any of you know what that is but I’m not saying it’s a bad system, I’m just saying that I failed at it. I basically made about 5 bucks a month on ad sense. Lol it was horrible. So much for big plans. Honestly though, just growing pains right?

Anyways, we are always talking about success and what will work and what can work. What about our failures? Anybody have a big one they want to share?

[rick-salas]

Yea, I know failures for sure. I was spending money year after year. I mean, no telling how long you can go just buying things that don't have everything that is needed to have a fully functional business. You know, all the components that work only for you. The internet gives this false sense that if you just buy their one product you can make so much money. Wrong... Now, I see that all the money spent did help in a way with experience but it's the passion and value that we bring to others, a total package to help across the board that works. Maybe I'm not a bonified expert yet but getting there, because of my passion is the fun part now. Because you can never stop learning what you love. Without that passion I would have quit a long time ago. I think that passion kept me going through all the worthless expenses and getting to the place where I see the bigger view of building businesses for different people is the secret to getting results for others. That was what really started bringing me out of it. But yea, nothing like spending money on things that you never needed. That can go on forever.

[ridgley]

Yeah, true! There are so many things that offer in the internet that seems good for our business. I did buy things that I think necessary to my business. Only to realize that it's not worth it and I just wasting money. Failure is part of life that cannot be avoid. Success always accompanied with failure.

[Lynn Terry]

One of mine was a $5k investment (a solid one) at a time I *thought* I was ready to dive in head first and bring the project to completion. Life had other plans. Shortly after I became incredibly ill which ultimately lead to emergency surgery and an unexpectedly long (5+ month) recovery. I never followed up on that investment, which in hindsight, turned it into an expense instead. It's been 2-3 years now. Hmm. I should still follow up.

[ladylinux]

There are time investments and money investments. The biggest time investment was a system back in 2005 - expensive ebook, forum, etc - by a now well-known "Super Affiliate" who at the time was really a developer making the transition to affiliate marketing. My money sites had tanked in the Florida and subsequent updates. I needed to create a cash flow. The system involved using AdWords to drive traffic to single-product (higher end) landing pages that had no links out. Not a big money investment but it was a HUGE time investment; I knew it wasn't sustainable longer term but I at least expected it to create a cash flow long enough to reconstitute my business. Google caught on to the system and very soon after the system was useless because of quality scoring. The "Super Affiliate" disappeared, forum gone, and that was that.

Money-wise the biggest failed investment was Perry Marshall's wwwKeywordDomain.com AdWords "breakthrough". I was in his club, so no money for the advice, but I bought over $1000 in wwwKeywordDomain.com domains that ended up being almost useless - when you put in those extra three "www" before a domain name in the url, it takes up too much space in many cases. I lost most of the domains the following year because I couldn't afford to renew them.

There've been many smaller ones - pretty much anything from the Warrior Forum or WSO's that I've bought over the years. Cumulatively that would be my biggest failure. It's very rare that anyone sells a system that is currently producing for them.