I learned the hardway as well.. focus on ONE project, and complete it.
My many failings have been that I would do many projects, and some I really shouldn’t even have started because its earning potential was quite low.
You want to be doing projects where the earning potential is high. Part of me also likes to discover new things, look at a system or website, pull it apart, see how they operate, make their money, market it and this always gets be side tracked.
The last few years, I’ve learned,
- if you are starting out – be master of a niche, become the expert in it.
- stick to doing one project, and complete it
- building a website is easy – and you can have the best website, but if you have no traffic, you have no earnings – so concentrate on traffic
- plan your website out, short term, mid term, long term – road map it, create mock ups
- make it brandable
- look at current technology and trends to do with the internet and traffic and utilise them as it happens
- surround yourself with people who can do the grunt work for you
- if you’re serious about this, invest money into it, build a war chest
- work on niches that will give generate you money quickly with your users have to do less intensive activity. eg. a user which can make you $100 a day, rather then a user making you $100 over 3 months.
Theres a tonne of other advice I’d suggest, but really.. thats starting to get into traffic, retention, interaction with your traffic etc. Above were some lessons which I learnt the hard way.