Mistakes I've Made!
  Written By Raven

When I first started in the biz, I used a single third-party credit card processor for my pay sites. They were great. The stats were easy to read. My surfers seemed to like them. I made money.

One Thursday morning, there was a rumbling on the Internet. Black Thursday for me. My billing company went down, never to return, taking my hard earned money, plus all of my rebills. I could hear the death knell, tolling in the background. I came very close to becoming yet another webmaster that went out of business because of short-sighted thinking. I had no back up company and my pay sites were poised on the edge of financial ruin. Fortunately, the news came early in the morning. I was up and running, with another billing company that day. It's only luck that brought me the news in the morning and not days later, which happened to other webmasters.

Believe me, it's not the last mistake I've ever made. My former host was using our pipe, concurrently, as his dial-up ISP, leaving my surfers with little x's where pics should be. He liked to experiment a lot. The cache server he bought almost put me out of business. It never worked right; but, hell, he loved gadgets, despite the prostests from his programmer and me. That he installed the cache server that never worked during the busy season for my sites matters not. I rarely recommend burning bridges. With this particular individual, I supplied the wood and lit the fire, never to return, never to recommend. To my credit, I did pay the remaining amount of money, to avoid being thrown into collections. I took pleasure in writing a check for the minimal amount. It took me two years to pay him off. That I annoyed him every month gave me a delightful feeling :)

I am to blame because I didn't do everything I could to learn about hosting. I waited longer than necessary, before researching another host. I'm much smarter now. After finally throwing off the chains that bound me to this guy's small potato outfit, I found UUNET. They were wonderful, especially for co-location. Located an hour away, it was nice to drive up to Atlanta to pet our server and go out to lunch. When it was time to give up self-maintenance, we took three months to find another host. 'Never again' is our motto, after a mistake is made.

When I first opened up Sin-Text, I failed to do some important research on a particular niche. I wrote ad after ad, thinking they were the hottest words off the press. I figured they'd sell so well, I could finally buy that island in the Pacific, the one with cable modems and satellite television, cute young studs and maids. Because I cut corners, my ads were wrong, wrong, wrong. The gods must have been smiling upon me that day. I was surfing the web and stumbled upon a site that was marketing the same product, for which I was writing ad copy. The light bulb went off and I re-did every single word. The client was happy and I was relieved. I could have put myself out of business before the ink dried on my business cards. Talk about professional suicide!

One of my favourites occurred when I operated a site called Online Spankings. Yes. Raven, at one time, was an online domina, wielding paddles and hairbrushes on the bare bottoms of paying clients. I was thinking about accepting online checks. I had reservations about doing this; but, I wanted to offer the surfer more payment options, than just credit cards. On the join page, I wrote a simple, straightforward statement. "If your check bounces for any reason, I will snail mail a letter to your home. I will contact your place of employment and hunt you down until you make this check good." -- I do not remember the exact wording; but, this is a reasonable facsimile. It doesn't take a genius to figure out my sign-ups went to zero. For an entire week. Waiting a week to take the statement off the join was my second mistake.

Then, there was the time I uploaded one pay site into another. I do not wish to discuss this one. I never did that again.

I don't even want to talk about the time I didn't have any backups and my hard drive failed.

Back in the day, when Alta Vista listed a site within twelve hours, I got a little carried away. I submitted every single page of my sites for hours and hours. Every single day. If I didn't see my site listing by that evening, I submitted it again. That I didn't get banned is merely good fortune, for search engines will ban people who spam. I had no idea that I was spamming. I thought I was being diligent as a submitter. Oy!!.

I received a letter from a site owner who yelled at me. Loudly. I could tell by his words, he was one angry man. I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong, until he finally realised how new I was and patiently explained that hot linking is wrong. At that time, I had no clue how bandwidth really worked. I was so filled with remorse, he took pity upon my soul and showed me how to link his button correctly. We went on to become pretty good acquaintances and my banners flew proudly on his sites and I used my own bandwidth to fly his.

Using only one sponsor was a huge mistake. I loved my sponsor. I was paid a certain amount per month. I thought life was fine. Until that sponsor went down. I was used to working twelve hour days. For three days straight, with only little twenty minute catnaps, my head on my keyboard, was not fun. A new sponsor had to be found and not just one. Several. Signing up, downloading banners, creating text links took precious time. The clock was ticking; every minute meant one less sale. My mortgage company would have been real pissed off, not receiving a payment that month. I doubt if they would have excused me for being stupid. Every banner had to be changed. Had I been using more than one sponsor at the time, I might have gotten more sleep.

Never bring up the fact, that, when I first started making galleries, I would make up different names for my email address. It's too painful to remember. That I didn't get banned from every major TGP is only because I am well versed in the art of doing the backstroke. Begging helped, also.

For the first three years of my webmastering career, I did not read the boards, nor did I go to conferences. I was successful. I didn't think I needed to go. The cost was high. The time away from my computer was too long. I knew everything I needed to know about my corner of the Internet and I was doing fine.

Wrong. By chance, I learned that J.D. Obenberger was speaking at an Adult Webmaster Event in Atlanta. As it's only an hour away from where I live, I attended. I wanted to hear about the legalities of 2257. As the Reno years were coming to an end and Mr. Ashcroft could come knocking on my door, I wanted to learn more about this law. By the time the weekend was over, I was hooked on networking. I met webmasters. I had something in common with other people from all over the country. No longer were these nameless faces, whose existence was mere myth or assumption. These were real people who did the same thing I did, made the same mistakes, and led similar lives. Not only did we share our stupidities, we shared pertinent information about money making on the Internet.

Every once in a while, I kick myself with regret, for not having added this ingredient to my life sooner. When I attend a conference, read a board, or go to a chat, I learn something. I catch little tidbits of precious information that helps me with my earnings potential. Over breakfast at the hotel, we trade stories about our newbie days. I believe there are gaps in everyone's education. There's always that golden nugget that passed us by, when we were learning the basics. Webmasters getting together are wonderful story tellers. While I might be laughing at the bonehead boo boo my friend made, I'm also going through my own data banks, thinking about my stuff and whether or not this is a piece of information that would apply to my situation. I learn from others' mistakes, as well as my own.

I've traveled all over the country. I've put faces to names of friends on the boards. I am branding myself, gaining recognition as Raven from Sin-text. When people meet me, it serves as reinforcement that I'm real. We can take each other's measure, compare what we see with what we've presumed from our chats on the boards. Friends are essential in our online world. Business is improving, as I depend much on word of mouth recommendations.

It is the nature of this, or any other, business to make mistakes. It's a trial by fire that is inevitable. No one has ever become a member of our hallowed hall of veterans unscathed. No one. The most experienced webmaster can regale you with uproarious tales of errors. Perhaps they weren't amusing at the time; but, after a few years of distance from the mess, one laughs. I have no doubt that I'm not finished with causing my own downfall, one way or the other. The whole point of this exercise is to realise I WILL mess up. The other point is to learn to listen to others' who have gone before me and to try not to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

Making mistakes is a rite of passage, a part of the path to learning. Making them more than once is the sign of someone about to go out of business.