The Best Way to Succeed Online is to Fail

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I’m proud to say that I have failed.

Wait…what?! “But Pat,” you say. “you’re earning upwards of $20,000 a month, you have a leading website in a specialized niche, you work only 10 hours a week max, and you’re making money while you sleep! What do you mean you’ve failed?!”

Let me elaborate. While in school, we’re brainwashed to think that failure is bad. This is why we studied so hard and worried so much about our grades. If you get an “F” in a class, you’ve failed. You don’t get any credit, and you have to retake the class. In order to succeed, failure is NOT an option. As much as I respect the schooling system and everything it has taught me – the one thing I can say about doing business online is that failure is not a bad thing.

Failure Teaches Us

When we fail at something, whatever it is, life is teaching us a lesson. What’s the difference between those who are successful in life and those who are not? The successful ones learn from their failures and follow those lessons, while the losers end up doing the exact same thing, or nothing at all. This can be related to anything that you do in your life.

In the online business world, it’s exactly the same. Those who succeed online will do things using what they’ve learned in all of their past failures. The trick is to try something out, and if it doesn’t work, understand why and then do it again with that information in mind to make it work for you.

The beauty of doing business online is that it’s relatively inexpensive to fail. Therefore, it’s smart to use this to our advantage and be fearless about it. The rewards far outweigh the risks of failure. Heck, I’d fail a bunch of times if it meant that I would eventually end up with a successful online venture – which is exactly what happened.

Projects I’ve Done That Have Failed

I’m proud to show you projects I’ve done in the past that have failed, and explain a little bit about what I learned from each. As you can see, I’ve been involved with many projects, but if it wasn’t for what I learned from each of those failures, I would not be where I am today.

Selling My Stuff on Ebay

When I was in high school, I wanted a job to earn more cash, but my parents told me to focus on school work instead. I decided to sell a bunch of things on Ebay, which included some baseball cards, my Magic the Gathering deck, clothes, and some sports equipment. I think I earned just about $100 which made me sad because I know a lot of the things I sold were worth much more than that. Fail.

• What I Learned: I learned how Ebay worked and I liked the system, I just needed something different to sell. Selling my own stuff was fun at first, but I ran out of stuff to auction off. Plus, I sold some things I wish I hadn’t sold. I really want my Magic the Gathering deck back. It was a land destruction deck that no one could beat. Yes, I was am a nerd.

Selling Tickets on Ebay

Instead of selling my own things, I started to research how to sell other things that I would buy first and then resell at a higher price. I looked into buying stuff wholesale, buying items broken for repair, and drop shipping, but nothing seemed feasible at the time. Then, in my first year of college, I ended up paying $250.00 for two $35.00 Coldplay tickets because the concert was sold out. I knew what I could do, so I gave it a shot.

The next week, I ended up buying two tickets from ticketmaster for a Jack Johnson concert that was about a month away. I paid $40 in total for both tickets. The concert sold out, and I ended up selling the pair on Ebay for $150.00 right before the concert date. Cha-ching!

The next week, I bought 10 tickets for various concerts, totaling about $250 bucks. It didn’t go so well this time. Some of the concerts didn’t sell out, so I wasn’t able get more than face value for those. I ended up profiting only $50 for 1 month’s work and 5 trips to the post office. Fail.

• What I Learned: Although I was successful at first, another go at it showed me that it was not a great idea because I had to spend a lot of money, and just wait in hopes of a concert selling out. Plus, I was tired of selling things on Ebay and having to go to the post office all of the time. If I was going to sell something online, I wanted to have it all done automatically for me.

My First Attempt at Blogging for Money

While in college, I really enjoyed writing on a personal blog of mine on the Xanga blogging platform. I wrote everyday about what I did, what I ate, who I hung out with, etc. We even had the ability to insert pictures into our “journal entries”, which was an “advanced technique” back in the day when blogging started.

Fast forward to life after college, I was motivated to do something in addition to my 9 to 5 job that could bring in some income. I soon found out that people were making decent money from blogging, not by writing about themselves, but by providing information and also entertaining. So, I gave this a shot too.

My first attempt was a blog that I thought my girlfriend (now fiancee) and I could do together. It would be a blog featuring two blog posts, side by side on the homepage, one by me and one by her. The content would focus on a “topic of the day” and people would get to see both a male and female perspective on different subjects.

I think we prepared a total of two entries, but it was hard to come up with new material without getting into small arguments about things. So, for the sake of our own sanity, we threw the idea out the window before we even published anything. Fail.

(If you’re interested, you can visit the unpublished website at http://www.acoupleofthoughts.com. I’m not going to create a direct link from here, however, as it may compromise the rank and SEO of smartpassiveincome.com) A tip from Pat: direct links to bad websites, like websites that don’t update their content too often, may hurt your rankings in search engines.

• What I Learned: Working with someone you are very close to can be difficult – especially if it’s your significant other. People work at different paces and have different ideas, so as far as blogging is concerned, I figured it would be best to blog on our own instead.

My Second Attempt at Blogging for Money

Before I got engaged, I had an idea to create a blog about a guy’s perspective on being engaged, and provide helpful tips and resources. The website was all setup (http://www.engagementhack.com), and I actually wrote maybe a half-dozen blog entries before losing interest and finding it hard to find good material to write about. Fail.

• What I Learned: On this blog, I tried to use an alias, J.D., because I wanted to make sure April didn’t find out exactly how and when I was going to ask her to marry me. I learned that trying to be someone you aren’t online won’t get you anywhere. I’m sure you can tell from reading on this blog that I’m not afraid to tell you about who I am and what I do. Another thing I learned was that it’s difficult to write about something you don’t know much about, which led me to my next project…

My Third Attempt as Blogging for Money

My next project was a blog about improving memory and enhancing brain capacity. I had done some keyword research and found that there was some good traffic looking for tips and tricks to improve memory and learn faster. So, I created http://www.how-to-memorize-anything.com. I used the thesis theme because it was much faster for me to set up.

I heard about this guy who had 20 different blogs, but used hired help to write content for each of them. I decided to post a job description on elance.com for someone to write all of the content for me about improving memory and study tricks. I asked for 50 articles, each at 500-1000 words in length. Bids came in between 400 and 2000 dollars. I almost pulled the trigger, but then got scared and just let the project die. Fail.

• What I Learned: Here, I learned that I really was trying to make money in a field that I had no passion for. Without the passion and drive, it’s very difficult to maintain a blog. Even if I had gotten someone to write all of the blog posts for me, it wasn’t my content and I would probably lack the motivation to respond to comments and keep the website fresh. Also, by not pulling the trigger, I never gave it a chance to succeed.

In Reflection

Looking back, my failures online were a part of my path towards success. It’s kind of like past relationships and how they teach you about who exactly the right person is for you.

Without all of those failures, I would not be where I am today.

So, if yo’ure thinking about doing something bigger online, what are you afraid of? Failure?

Although we should always strive not to fail, consider it a blessing in disguide when we do.

Tagged as: fear

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