Have you ever made a mistake? If not - are you human?
If I had a dollar for every mistake I have made in my life, I'd probably be able to afford a first house (or at least a few weekend's worth of smashed avocado on toast. Maybe even a side or two of bacon if I'm lucky).
But what really matters is our ability to learn from our mistakes. Even better, we should try learning from the mistakes of others ... getting all of the reward with none of the risk.
With that in mind, I want to share one of the biggest mistakes I have made in digital marketing - and what you can learn from it.
That mistake is not capitalising on success and "scaling up" when the opportunity presents itself.
My background is in affiliate marketing (selling other people's stuff for a commission).
My first serious affiliate project - a website about repairing Xbox 360s - was an overnight success that was about a year in the making.
I would write articles on repairing your Xbox, submit them to article directories, and then piggyback off their "SEO authority".
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I was getting great rankings, huge traffic, and excellent commissions.
But I made a mistake. I didn't capitalise on the success of this "campaign".
I left so much opportunity on the table with that campaign. Here are some of the "sub-mistakes" I made:
1) I didn't build an email marketing list. That's a massive miss. I probably could have amassed thousands, if not tens of thousands, of targeted contacts.
2) I didn't scale. I was writing all the content myself after getting home from school and doing my homework. However, I was pulling some seriously decent commissions ... I should have hired others to write the content for me and focus on scaling while the opportunity was there.
3) I didn't bother testing other traffic sources. I depended only on using article directories as "parasite sites".
So basically I left tons of money on the table by not maximising the opportunity of what was working and looking to scale. What's worse, is that I left what I did have perched precariously on the edge by not building up an asset (a list) and by not diversifying my traffic sources.
For digital marketing, the moral of this story is actually rather simple ...
When something is working well in your digital marketing, look for ways to take it further.
Let's say you've got a nice Google Ads campaign running that is delivering leads/conversions/sales at a competitive cost. How can you maximise the value of that?
What's more, how can you prolong the life of the campaign, or even shield yourself from the negative ramifications if your Google Ads account were to disappear overnight?