I’ve had a lot of setbacks and disappointments since I started working online. I’ve also changed my mind a lot about how I wanted to proceed with my online business. There are a few things that I regret since I started working online, but the biggest one has to do with a website that I put a ton of work into.
I Created A Decent Dating Advice Site For Men
I started my online work in the relationship niche. I had a lot of relationships in my life and I had a lot of advice to give. I felt like I was able to clearly see issues that people were having in regards to finding love and keeping it, so writing about relationships seemed like a no-brainer to me.
I created one blog dedicated to men and it did decently. But it was my first attempt at creating a site and it quickly got to be something I didn’t want to deal with anymore. It wasn’t a good representation of me, my writing style, and what I wanted to write about.
So I created another site dedicated to dating advice for men and worked my butt off on it. I made very little money off it, but I was sure that one day it would be the website that would carry my online business to greatness.
Eventually, it started to get quite a bit of traffic. I was over 100,000 visitors per month. I had a good email list. I was making some money off AdSense and through affiliate sales. Then we had some financial trouble and I needed to make some money quickly.
I Undersold My Site
The amount of work I was putting into that site didn’t equal the amount of income I was getting out of it, so I decided to put it up for sale on Flippa. I ended up selling it the same day I put it up for sale at a price that I thought was pretty decent – $5,500.
It wasn’t until after the quick sale that I realized that I could have gotten a lot more for the website. I was so busy trying to sell it that I didn’t do my research to see what other sites similar to mine were selling for. So, the buyer got a huge saving on my site.
The truth was I had never sold a semi-big site and he was experienced and knew how to talk to me so that I thought I was getting a great deal.
A few months later he sold my site for 3+ times what he had paid for it and he hadn’t done much work at all on it.
It was bought by someone who already owned a popular dating blog, and all those articles that I worked so hard on got absorbed into that blog.
I Should Never Have Sold That Site
My biggest regret is not that I sold the site for too little… it’s that I sold the site at all.
I put a ton of work into that site, and now that I have more experience online, I can see all the things I could’ve done for that site to improve it for my readers and for my income.
I can’t even imagine how well the site would be doing now.
It pains me every time I see one of my old articles come up in the search engines knowing that I could be the webmaster behind that article.
It pains me to think of the different directions I could have gone with that blog and how much further along I could have been in terms of success online.
It pains me to see people who started the same time as me online but didn’t sell their blogs become successful because they stuck with their sites and kept learning how to grow those sites into something better.
Time, Energy, And Money I Can Never Get Back
I will always regret selling that site. It feels like I flushed hundreds upon hundreds of hours down the toilet by selling that site. Not to mention all the energy I put into interacting with the readers and obsessing over the site. I also spent a lot of money on things like pictures for my blog and courses to improve my knowledge and my blog.
All the work I put into it is not credited to me anymore.
I created huge eBooks for that site. I wrote them myself. I had them up for sale on Amazon and was doing really well with them. I sold all those eBooks with the site.
I spent so much time on my newsletter. Besides all the content writing I did, I spent a ton of time on my newsletter. I wanted my email subscribers to get something of value, and I can’t even count the number of hours I spent trying to put together emails that offered value.
I had even built up social media profiles around that site and they were doing pretty well.
The pain I feel has taught me a valuable lesson. I value my work and the time, energy, and money I put into it, and losing it for a quick payout is not worth it. However, finding out how to improve in areas that may be lacking is worth it.
