For the sake of all the newbies, let's work together and come up with a big stack of the worst mistakes that we have made online. Hopefully we can deter some people from falling into the same traps as we have, and prevent a few tears. I'll start with: 1) Using excel sheet and free mailing list subscriber software to capture opt-in email addresses. And in turn lost half of the total subscribers when I finally decided to pay and use Aweber. (While importing lists to aweber, they need the subscribers to reconfirm their email addresses, which usually cause opt-outs)
xohaib, a great topic, thank you. Well, the first thing I can think of relates to reputation: 2) Going into tech forums whining about some kind of web-site problems AND giving away the link or even your name. You have to remember that it is Extremely difficult to get the forum posts deleted and they will hang there forever and Google will keep on picking them up as alerts and then some day, when you're into some serious business, your business partner says, hey, I just saw this thing on the forum - do you still got the problem? And that makes you go, oh, ah, blushing!!! So, even if you're a newbie, regard your reputation as an asset from the very first day you approach IM. Think before you post something like "Aargh, I got this new site example.com and my fonts won't align to left, aaaah, what shall I do? :'("