What Are We Missing? (Why We’re Not Making Money Online)

January 11th, 2007 | by Scott Weaver |

Every day, we hear about someone who is earning hundreds, if not thousands of dollars each day using the internet. It’s almost heart-breaking to know that people are doing it all the time, yet for most of us the dream remains just a dream.

If you’re like me, you’ve had a small taste of the sweet success that is getting a paycheck in the mail from an online source of income. I don’t think there’s anything quite like it.

Is it because it’s passive income, generated whether you’re sleeping, reading a book or taking a shower? I think so.

It is the dream that is no longer uniquely American. We’re a whole new breed of explorers. Now everyone wants money being churned into their bank account, and we are scouring the internet to find out how.

I remember back in 2004, when I first put Google AdSense ads up on Sitdiary (read more about this here). At the time, I was getting around 60,000 impressions every day and the very day the ads were placed, I made $19.29. You can not imagine how excited I was. Ironically, that was my best day on AdSense. After that, I got an average of $12.00/day. It wasn’t enough to quit working but it was enough to cover my car payment each month! And the best part was that it seemed so easy to do! I thought I could just keep building Sitdiary and the money would keep increasing.

Now that I’m making $5/day during my *best* weeks, I look back and wonder where I veered. It’s not that I feel regret or anything like that, but I can still remember the rush I felt and how it felt like I could make a lot more money.

When analyzing the situation, my questions are basically these: what was I doing right and what am I doing wrong? The answers to those questions, respectively are as follows.

What I Was Doing Right

People tell me I should sculpt my ads around my traffic and not the other way around. When I introduced advertising to Sitdiary, it had already been a running service for quite a long time. I had a large user base– around 10,000 active users all posting semi-frequently.

“So what’s your point?”

My point is that I spent a good deal of time, roughly a couple of years, building Sitdiary and accumulating a decent user base before I even *knew* about advertising. This meant that I was building it just for the sake of building something and watching it grow. I didn’t construct it because I thought it would bring me any money, I did it to meet new people and see what was on their minds. It makes sense, right?

It was also my only project. I wasn’t worried about my several other websites doing well; my focus was directly on Sitdiary and all of the issues surrounding it. Any time there was a bug, I was on it and it was fixed within a couple of days. Any time someone suggested an upgrade, I was hacking away within minutes.

This was also a key to success and I didn’t even realize it. By adding new features constantly, I was helping to generate buzz for new people to join up. Not only that, but I got the community involved in what I was doing by creating polls and asking what they thought I should do next. I placed the news posts right on the main page where everyone could see them. Next to that, I placed the “newest users” listing to show who the newest community members were. I also listed all of the latest posts on the main page. It was an excellent center of activity.
And one more thing I did that helped was to make the diaries customizable. Each user was able to upload their own pictures, change the color of their diary, change the layout and all from one simple page. At one time, they could even customize the color of the ads displayed on their diaries.

What I Am Doing Wrong

Currently, Sitdiary is not accepting new registrations. I am in the process of building a newer, cleaner and more simple version. The problem with this is that it takes a long time to complete, building it on my own. I’m losing users every day because I’m still not done with the newer version.

A very long time ago, I began to promise users that I would give them the option to upgrade. Do you believe it? I never got around to doing it. People were asking for the upgraded version left and right and I was just too afraid to take on the monster that was the upgrade. It meant reverse-engineering a ton of code and although I did attempt it a few times, it proved much too daunting a task. In fact, it led to a lot of downtime for Sitdiary for a while.

Now that I have more projects that I manage on a daily basis, my time has been thinly spread over each project. This is also known as spreading yourself too thin. Although, I will say I have done a good job at focusing on a couple of projects I have going.

On top of that, I am constantly searching the web for the secret cure to my money making blues. I hear this, I hear that and so far, it hasn’t really developed into anything but I still have hope. The problem with this is that it takes time away from actually developing what I know already works!

So I’m taking a long time to finish, spreading myself thin and focusing a lot of energy on monetizing my websites to generate income. All of this leads to … taking an even longer time to finish any of my projects. This is what I’m doing wrong. I’ve had the formula for success the whole time, but I am constantly looking for a better way. Here’s why.

When I couldn’t add the paid account feature to Sitdiary because I didn’t want to reverse engineer the code. I figured out that I should have built the code to allow more flexibility in the first place! If I had taken the time to think ahead, I would have saved myself a lot of future headaches. Looking back, I’m stuck in limbo because I’m trying to think of every possible outcome and it leaves me in a coma.

What I’ve Learned From Myself

Like me, you’ve probably scoured the web for any way to make money easily online. You’ve probably been given answers to your question, too! So what’s the problem? Why aren’t we making money from these methods? Impatience!

That’s right. We’ve become impatient. Of all things that have changed over the past couple of years, it has been my level of patience with my life in general. I want money YESTERDAY, baby.

When it comes to all of these solutions that are offered up to us, we push most aside as they aren’t time-effective enough and the others, we expect to deliver the results that are marketed to us. This is both a common and an easy mistake to make.

For instance, I’ve attempted the blogging for cash method. I had several blogs going at once for about a month, all relating to one topic and they didn’t do too poorly for having existed not more than a month. But after a few weeks, I began to get impatient and when I stopped seeing results, I gave up. It’s not because I don’t know that it takes time to build a webutation (web + reputation. Did I just make that up?) with search engines and other websites, it’s because I feel that these things should be growing faster. When they don’t meet my expectations, I stop doing them because I fear I am losing precious time and not putting my energy into the right stuff.

I’m also attempting the eBook method. I wrote up an eBook, put it on ClickBank.net and now I’m still waiting for the income to start moving. The only reason I’m sticking with this one is because I had to pay an initiation fee. On top of that, I know I can come up with good information that will sell. This is one example of a project I will see through. This is important to note as it shows that I am sticking with what I know will work.

Why We’re Not Making Money Online

Yes, I could pretend that the answer to the question is simply “impatience,” but that seems like a copout; don’t you think?

Let us not forget that AdSense is also to blame! Haha. Recently, I noticed a significant drop in my Google AdSense revenue so I decided to do some research and post to a few forums on the subject. It turns out, there are tons of people experiencing this issue. Someone suggested that it might be Google’s Smart Pricing, and after some research I did, it seemed that the person was right. This is also a significant reason you might not be making money online.

We also suffer from a lack of reputation. When Sitdiary was at its height in glory, I had a community full of people who knew all about me and linked to my website from theirs because I had a personal relationship with them. This is key if you want to be successful. Establish a personal relationship with your users and it will create a lasting effect in their brains. Think about it– if it were the other way around, would you forget about that website? Nay, my friend. Nay.

Finally, we must be dedicated to what we are doing. If we do not create quality content and frequently, we are not dedicated. Sure, you can spam the internet to death if you want to make a quick buck here and there. But the real money lies in the constant flow of information and in helping people to make their lives better.

I hope this post has made your life a little better, if not more than a little. So until next time…

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