This Guest Post was submitted by Scott at Savvy Affiliate
For a blogger, making mistakes can be embarrassing, but missing an opportunity can come at a huge cost. One thing that new bloggers sometimes have trouble with is the idea of jumping into things with both feet. Often times people are afraid to make mistake, afraid to try something new, and it comes at a huge opportunity cost. In the world of blogging and online marketing your mistakes will quickly be forgotten, especially if you are relatively unknown, but missing an opportunity can put you way behind in the game.
What Do I mean? What’s an example of a missed opportunity?
One example of a missed opportunity by many bloggers is Digg. Digg is well known for its ability to drive large volumes of traffic to a site. Although this traffic doesn’t directly convert to money, it can help a site become popular in the long term. Digg was launched in November of 2004, and started to become popular in late 2005. In early 2006 Digg surged in popularity. If you check Alexa traffic, you can see that it doubled its reach in practically no time at all.
The missed opportunity comes from people waiting until Digg got popular before they joined.
Studies have shown that the top 100 Digg users are responsible for 56% of everything that reaches the front page. These top 100 users have the ability to drive huge amounts of traffic where ever they desire. Most of them became top users by growing with they site. They were early adopters and were able to increase the authority of their accounts as Digg grew over time. A new user has very little chance of breaking into those rankings, at least not without devoting a massive amount of time to it. Bloggers who jumped in with both feet and gave the new service a go before it got popular won big, others who waited to use established tools had to play catch up.
Missed opportunities abound on the internet
How would you have liked to be the guy who created the Million Dollar Homepage? Or someone who created anyone of a dozen different viral sites which took off? How would you have like to start your current blog 2 years ago, before your nice became as competitive as it is. People who did that didn’t do anything special, other than take a risk. They knew that the reward / risk ratio was enormous. An idea that pays off can pay off in dollars of thousands, tens of thousands. An idea that crashed and burned set the founder back $50 – A couple hundred dollars for hosting and site registration.
One problem bloggers can have is insufficient arrogance
Insufficient arrogance is actually a problem which can plague many entrepreneurs. You look around and see many other people who seem so much more knowledgeable and authoritative than you. You mighty not think that you can compete with them until you learn more. In actuality, most likely you are better than you think you are. If you are learning as you go, and just sort of playing it by ear, most likely your competitors are too. In the world of blogging their are no learned experts. No one studied how to create a successful website from scratch in college. Many bloggers who are successful today were just starting their sites two years ago. They learned what they know through experimentation and reading other sites, just as you do.
So what opportunity are you missing now?
That’s the problem with opportunity costs. You can never know what will turn out to have been a great idea until it pans out. However by the time it pans out, it is too late to be an early adopter, and to reap the benefits. Your specific opportunity costs could be wide and varied. Perhaps you are running your blog solo a little too long when you should start expanding and delegating. Maybe you started a blog on Blogspot when you should have spent the $50 to buy your own domain and hosting. If you are reading this article on Problogger, it is because when I saw that Darren was going to be posting some guest bloggers, I e-mailed him and asked if he would accept my submission, hoping that it would help drive traffic to my own blog. Although you can’t tell what risks will pay off ahead of time, you do know that if you don’t take any risks, you won’t reap any rewards.
