If you had to give one thing you learned throughout your years of online marketing that paid off the most, what would it be and why? Mine would be: Every bit of work you do helps. If you think its a pain building links and you don't see any rewards right away, understand that every second you spend working on your site and things around it will pay dividends in the future.
Hmm... 1. Pick a niche. 2. Start a blog. 3. Use social bookmarking, link building, SEO, among other marketing techniques to increase traffic (use sites like Digital Point to expand your knowledge on online marketing techniques). 4. Add a forum for user interactivity and loyalty. 5. Add advertisements to your site, and keep adding original content.
Just do a little something everyday so that your link building efforts look natural in the eyes of Google - don´t wait till the last minute and dump a bunch of links on your site. It will have a better effect if stretched over a longer period of time.
When you see that things are starting to turn with good increase, if it's backlinks, profit, pr, or traffic one rules you should follow. Do not slack off becuase of this but allow this motivation to make your really promote and throw your efforts by double.
Research. I mean STUDY and TEST your site idea well before you pay for it and invest your time and blood in it. That is, if you value your time. I would bet over 75% of the people here on Dp are wasting time flogging a dead horse site (s)...and could have avoided it with research.
I agree research and learning every details of every market you enter before jumping in is great advice.
First, get some website design skills. Check out the Rich Jerk's website. And you wonder why he's so popular. I'm serious about this. Also check out his blog.
I agree that design skills are very very important, however I wouldn't use therichjerk as an example of perfection
Be prepared to Follow Through with your commitments. Most failures are the result of someone not following through
Your actions have an accumulative effect. So even on days where you may be distracted and or can't seem to focus, get one thing done: A paragraph of an article, run your site submission software, post in your blog, review a page on your website (you'll find yourself make an improvement), read entries at this forum or others and continue your education. Get some sleep. What you accomplished today might be small, but it is something that needed to be done. And when your focus returns and productivity soars, you'll be that much closer to your goals.
Don't be afraid of or underestimate the value of the "real world" - actual hands on networking can do a hell of a lot depending on your field. Don't burn bridges in business, it will come back to bite you somewhere down the line, I practically guarantee it. Once you've become a success, don't start buying into your own hype. Never assume you know all there is to know because when you start becoming complacent, someone with more drive, initiative and enthusiasm will come along and knock you off your perch. Don't be overwhelmed when starting out, and especially do not allow this to force you into rushing things and buying into a dead horse. Very few people achieve success easily and even fewer achieve it overnight.
It depends a lot on your niche. But the universal secret to success is work, work, work....unfortunately.
Not just "work, work, work"; but work effectively... The previous owner of one of my projects used to work his fingers to the bone on it providing a service which involved a lot of time and effort to conduct. When I acquired the project, I spent a lot of time and energy making the core of it as "automated" as possible - I removed the need for me to have to sell my services and instead focused on optimizing my products to be as hassle-free as possible. Within the first two weeks I had increased the earnings of this project tenfold; and it continues to grow. Now my time is split between providing the very best customer support I can while continuing to develop the business. Had I continued on the route he was going down, i'd be putting just as much time into it and getting very little back out; not to mention losing customers because I wouldn't have enough time to deal with their queries and issues. So I guess the moral of this is that working hard and making money isn't the be all and end all - you need to look for ways to either work less hard for the same amount of money; or earn more money for the same amount of work. Or... this could just be the incoherent rant of some sleep-deprived dude on a forum
For first timer webmasters its very very difficult without much knowledge on marketing. They just have to dig through forums and net to find ways. Its a lot of hard work learning all the techniques people used to succeed which they wont give way in general. But once you know it, you all set for the upcoming sites.