The Fails that led to my First Success: Part 1

As with 99% of all entrepreneurs, I was not successful right from the start (in fact, I still haven’t found the perfect formula!). As the name of my site suggests, there will always be ups and downs, any my journey to my first real internet marketing success was no different.

In The Beginning….

In 2011, I was working on my own marketing business called KTP Marketing. I did a number of small jobs for people and made out ok, but I knew I needed to start marketing my business more heavily in order to find some bigger clients and bigger pay days. First thing I did was add my business to as many directories as I could find. I knew this wouldn’t lead to much direct traffic to my website, but it did get me more backlinks to my site. For a more direct approach, I decided that forums would be the way to go. I was already active on Warrior Forum and DigitalPoint, but I thought I should add one or two more to the list. This is where it all began!

I found an interesting community called The Million Dollar Network. It was a smaller community, but the site was well built and the members that were there were active. I created my profile in full and began posting. The creator was active in the community as well, and he contacted me about helping him take the site to the next level. He had a very well thought out business plan and promised a good return on my investment should I decide to help him. Young and naïve, I decided to help him and gave him $2000 towards the business. For those wondering, we did have a contract in place.

The Waiting Game

Months went by and I didn’t really see things developing on the site. I was still very active in the community and I did my part as a vested party. I was always in contact with the owner to see how things were going. He was a very smooth and positive speaker and always assured me that the wheels were in motion. I did my best to stay positive as well, but I knew if I wanted to see a return, the site actually had to make some money!

More months went by, and things were still not progressing as the owner thought they would. More members were coming to the site, but the revenue was just not there. Out of the blue (at least on my end anyway), one day the site was down and comes back a week later as a totally different site called Clickthrou. I was shocked, and of course expressed this to the owner. He sheepishly told me that MDN was a failure and decided to rebrand the site with a new name and a new format. He told me that our deal was still in place, but that it may take longer to realize. Of course I was pretty pissed off, but what could I do? It wasn’t worth any legal action because he lived in England. The only thing I could do was keep being active on the site and hopefully I would see something out of it someday.

Long Story Short….

I didn’t! The site limped along for another few years and the dream never came true. As of today the site is offline. I noticed the guy tried to sell it for $17,000 on Flippa with no takers. So there was my first huge fail that cost me $2000, but gained me some real world experience. Was it a huge gamble right from the beginning? Yes it was, but I had to take the chance. It was a failure, but that venture set me up for my most profitable venture to date!

Of course there was another fail first you’ll hear about in the next post.