As we learn and gain experience, we see where we have gone wrong, lost time and energy, and can see what we could have done instead. What is your hard learned experience that you can share with us? Not asking enough questions has cost me precious time and gave me lots of frustration. Therefore I am keen now to learn from others and their experience. It does not free me from treating their advice responsibly, but it certainly gives me new areas and directions to explore. So if you could start all over again, what would you do differently?
Learn from people who were actually having success in their endeavors. And also learn from the publisher's/producer's tutorials.
I'd definitely do keyword market research before I ever decided to build a site. That way, I could find a niche or microniche that still had decent traffic but not as much competition. A lot of time was wasted on my first couple of endeavors, where I had no realistic shot of getting to page one quickly. I also wouldn't make the mistake that I made with my first 100 page+ site, which was to build it all first and then submit it. I've learned that Google seems to like a site that grows gradually. Once it is already up and no changes are made, the only way to get the search engines' attention is by link building. This is probably why blogs are so effective at getting ranked quickly! Finally, I'd spend more time in forums like this, asking people who know what they are doing for advice. I'm glad I finally joined!
I agree with dco333. I'd would have started to build my list a lot earlier. I spent about a year looking for a way to earn money online until I was taught the importance of having a list of subscribers, everything fell into place and frustration got less and less.
I think keyword research would have helped a great deal more, I also would have spread my efforts out more rather then go nuts in one area.. then another then another.
It seems to my lists, links and keywords are the main things mentioned. It does not surprise me because they all drive traffic. How I would love to know WHAT you learnt! Will anyone share?
I wouldn't have wasted years building quality sites on remotely hosted domains (Geocities, etc)! If only I knew how big domain names would have been, I would have poured thousands of dollars into them in the late 1990s.