8 Reasons Your Website Will Fail

Sorry about the headline sounding a bit negative, but unfortunately, some of us will fail with our current websites. Sometimes it just happens, and not only in affiliate marketing, but in other lines of career too.
So let’s try to make our websites fail-proof by taking a look at some of the common reasons of website failure.

1. Not Being Up-To-Date With SEO
Although this does sound quite basic, the keyword here is “up-to-date.” We all know that our sites need good SEO to thrive or to even exist. But not everyone remembers that SEO is actually a constantly changing thing. Therefore, not paying attention to new developments in SEO is the real killer here.
Think about it, new algorithm updates are being released regularly. First there was Panda, then Penguin, and now Penguin 2.0. If you’re not on top of all this then you might get in trouble. Especially considering the fact that affiliate sites are not Google’s favorite type of websites.
2. Failing To Understand The Technology Involved
These days it’s a lot easier to launch a new site than it was just a couple of years ago. With solutions like WordPress everyone can have an affiliate site in minutes (no joke; ThemeFuse, for instance, has a service where they handle the setup process for you with no supervision required).
However, sooner or later, you will need to move your site to a new server, or use some specific landing page themes, or install some custom premium plugins and then learn how to configure them correctly (not to mention, all the online-gaming-specific solutions that are out there). Getting familiar with all this can be daunting and some people will simply quit during the process.
3. No Real Email Newsletter
Everybody has an email newsletter as part of their offering these days. But is your newsletter REAL?
This is something we talked about in one of the recent posts. The thing with a big number of newsletters online (it’s a global email marketing trend) is that they are mostly promotion-driven. If that’s your strategy as well then you can’t expect to keep people subscribed for more than a month or two.
4. The Time It Takes To Make Money
For many beginner affiliates, this line of business is portrayed as a “get rich quick” model. So if they fail to make a substantial amount of money in the first two months or so, they decide to abandon this affiliate thing altogether.
This won’t be a revealing piece of advice, but only people who are willing to work hard long-term will see any serious gratification.
5. Doing Multiple Projects At The Same Time
From a technical point of view, it’s perfectly possible to take care of a number of affiliate projects at the same time (like promoting multiple things through multiple channels, and also launching a number of custom products or resources).
In reality, though, it’s very difficult to keep the right mindset when acting like that. As counterintuitive as this might sound, you are much more likely to succeed if you just work on one project at a time. Also, forget about multitasking.
6. Too Little Original Content On The Website
Quality sites have original content, that’s a well-known fact. However, apart from quality, you should also focus on quantity. Nowadays, Google gets very suspicious when dealing with sites that only have, say, 5-10 pages of unique content. For most keywords out there, you’ll need much more than that to rank well.
7. No Social Media Integration
Social factors are becoming more and more important both for SEO as well as proper user interaction. Google looks at various social indicators to determine how much the audience enjoys your content. And if there’s no integration or very poor integration, then well…you get the point.
8. Not Paying Attention To Your Metrics
Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools should be your top two tools for website management, tracking and ongoing number-crunching work. Analytics is where you can learn how the audience is consuming your content and what you can do to follow their preferences. Webmaster Tools is where you can check what Google thinks about your site and what you can do to improve it. Getting both of these tools handled will take you a long way.