I was just reviewing some old contributed articles on one of my sites, and noticed that the URL provided by one author was no longer active (just a domain holding page). This surprised me, as the author produced some good work.
The author in question is Tracie Johanson. According to her bio on Associatedcontent.com, “Tracie Johanson is the founder of Pick Up The Pace, a 30-minute health club for women. She has owned and operated a gym for 5+ years. Recently, Tracie has also started a new company exclusively for health club owners. You can check it out at cuecd.com”.
While Cuecd.com is still active, the domain letspickupthepace.com is not, and this has a lot of links directed at it. So why just leave it to die? Why not at least 301 redirect pages to the new site?
This is typical of many small business start ups. They employ web designers, but have no clue about SEO (search engine optimization) and therefore see a lot of hard work wasted. Her content is still being used on many sites, yet she is getting nothing back for her efforts. A true waste.
At least she still has an online presence. However, many people do give up, which is strange really. Seeing that web hosting and domain registration is very cheap these days, there seems little reason to ever let a domain just die. Even with no work at all it can still send some traffic to tour surviving business. Even if that is just a profile page on a business networking site.
When I first started learning about the Internet in 2006, I received some very valuable advice from someone on a forum. Unfortunately it was in the days before I bookmarked anything, so I now have no idea who said it, or where. However the advice was simple;
“Almost everyone that says you cannot make money online give up in the first year.”
This is certainly true, and the one thing that kept me going. In my first year, I struggled to see more than a few dollars a month, and this was very frustrating seeing that I was putting in so many hours, both learning how to build websites, how to promote them, how to host them and a whole bunch of other things. But in time, the traffic crept up, more people started to find my sites, more started to like them enough to join the discussions and then link to them. The snowball had started, and it is still rolling along. Three years later, all the frustration and hard work is starting to pay off. So, the first rule of building a successful online business – Never Give Up.
