I made a huge mistake when I decided to pack in my job and turn myself into a full time online marketer/money maker (or whatever you want to call it!) I got to the point where I was happy in my own mind that I could scrape enough money together, and then I went for it! My mistake was not giving myself enough flexibility to re-invest my earnings and if you make that same mistake I promise you’ll end up kicking yourself too.
It was a comment left by Rebecca on my $100 a day Adsense post that finally pushed me into putting this in writing. I’ve been in denial for a while. The first thought running through my head on reading the idea of giving me money for the information I’d shared was this, “Nooooooo, don’t do that, reinvest what you make so that you can build and grow!” To not reinvest what you make early is equivalent of trying to run a marathon with a stitch from the start. You know the saying a stitch in time saves nine? Well in growing a website, investment at the beginning can save years of work! Trust me, I know.
Anyway, back to my story. I was only earning enough to live, I didn’t have a budget to put back into my websites. This meant I was responsible for everything. And by everything I do of course mean the tedium of link building and generating oodles of content. You know about that right? Everything worth doing was a struggle, everything not worth doing was easy. It’s like an uphill struggle to establish websites in what are these days’ mostly well populated niches. Money is like oil, money can make the worthwhile tasks that much easier. I’m positive that if I would have delayed leaving work for 12 months and instead reinvested every penny of my online earnings into growth my websites would be X times bigger than they are now. I would have far more traffic and in return far more income. In short if I’d reinvested earlier my life would be so much easier now. As a short real life example it took 6 months worth of traffic till I had enough data to decide on what was the best Adsense layout for one of my content websites. If I would have reinvested just some money into buying traffic I could have had that data in a week or two. The next 5 and half months I could have been earning at the optimum level!
Imagine if instead of having to write every article for your website you could pay a team of 3-4 writers to produce regular new original pieces. Imagine if instead of spending hours/days link building for whatever low lying links you could get you could outsource? Or perhaps even better instead of building a reputation the hard way you could pay for a few reviews and have your profile elevated over night! Of course all this isn’t possible if you’re only scraping together a few dollars a day, or less. But this is the web and this is how things grow. Put in the hard work yourself and invest, some quality content, some links, some traffic, buy an advert. More traffic equals more money and in turn more for you to reinvest. Most websites have a critical mass at which point natural exponential growth starts to take over, the more popular you are the more popular you become. It is in getting to that point where early investment pays dividends.
Even now, today, as I write this I don’t invest enough into my own projects. I reckon I should be investing half my earnings back into the business. In reality I invest a fraction of that. I have improved over recent time; at least I now have a regular group of writers that I can use to create original articles for my content sites. I have people that will perform link building tasks for me, I’m no longer scared at throwing a few hundred dollars at an advert that I think may pay-off. At my stage I should be doing more. The only thing stopping me is short sightedness and from next month I will budget half my income to growth activities. I KNOW that quality original content and links hold the key for long term success with any website. I am nowhere near the top of what making money online can be, I don’t even know if I’m in the middle yet but I’m confident that re-investing will help me up the ladder quicker and it will work for you too.
Reinvesting Early Is Vital
My advice to you is this. Sure with your first dollar you make online go and buy yourself a choccy bar or whatever else you like (I’ll never forget that buzz when I first made some money online!) Maybe when you get to $10 a day use one day’s money to buy yourself something. But in the meantime, when you’re first growing your online empire every single cent that you can reinvest early will pay dividends in the long run.