Making Money Online: Handling Criticism
Don't ask for opinions unless you can handle criticism! - Ooops, another fatal mistake I quickly learnt from. At one stage I thought my first rather overbearing site was just the bees knees. So it was time to ask what others thought of it. Being a breastfeeding site, I naturally thought I'd join a few forums (we'll get to forums later!) and ask mothers what they thought.
Oh dear! I was almost flame-grilled! They didn't like me, they didn't like my site, they didn't like that I was making money (even though I wasn't!), they didn't like the layout, colours, topic... need I go on?
Of course, looking back I approached the whole thing completely wrongly but I ended up feeling dreadfully hurt and upset and genuinely couldn't understand what I'd done that was so bad. After all, my intentions were genuinely to help mothers who were thinking about or having problems breastfeeding. The people I'd asked though saw me as an intruder upon their territory and came at me all guns blazing!
What I should have done was learnt about forum etiquette! What this entails is joining up, introducing yourself, participating, helping out, making friends and then after a decent interval asking if anyone would be kind enough to offer constructive criticism and not just criticising for the sake of it!
Once all of the above is in order you can start thinking about how to attract ever-increasing visitors to your site and how to make money online.
Give your visitors an incentive to return to your site or to spread the word about it for you. You can do this in a number of ways, for example, by holding competitions, hosting special events, having 'check back later for more' posts, hosting a series of articles around a theme and so on.
More Tips for Making Money Online
- Choose your niche carefully
- Get the website name right
- Become an expert in your field
- Optimize your website
- Keep it short
- Go easy on the eye
- Keep focused
- Keep motivated
- Navigation, Navigation, Navigation
- Get interactive
- Provide useful tools or stickies!
- Start a blog, forum or both
- Offer a means of contact
- Don't overwhelm your visitors with advertising
- To thine own self be true!
- Advertise your site
- Provide products unique to your site
- Advertisements - Right or Wrong!
- Don't expect to get rich quick!
- Content is King
