Maybe it was the root canal I had last week, but I’ve been thinking about roots lately. Not family, but root causes. What is it that keeps people from succeeding in their online endeavor to make money? What is holding you back?

Some people say it is due to not taking action. That isn’t the cause, it is just a symptom. Others claim it is perfectionism, waiting for everything to be perfect, and of course nothing ever is.  But again, that is a symptom, not the cause.

The main reason people do not get ahead is fear. Fear of failure. It is kind of a self-fulfilling prophesy: people fear failure, so they fail to act, and hence fail to make money. They become so involved in researching what they should do, that they never actually do anything. They start on a project, then when it isn’t perfect, abandon it for something else. They fail out of fear of failing.

Building a Web Empire, instead of a single web site, is one means of dealing with this fear. You don’t need to succeed with every site, when you have dozens, or even hundreds of sites. You just need to learn what works and what doesn’t. If you build one site, you have all your eggs in one basket, to use an old cliché. With multiple websites,  one or two or ten can fail, yet you will earn money on the others.

But not even one, let alone two or ten, need really be failures. You learn by doing. If you set as the basic goal of every web site that it must earn its hosting cost, you have a basis on which to judge sites. Put ten sites on a $9.95/month web hosting service, and you only need to earn $1 per month from any of those sites for them to remain viable. Based on that criteria, it is difficult to create a true ‘failure’ of a site — any site can earn $1 a month with little effort.

But of course there is no profit in having sites that just cover their own costs. A few such sites, however, provide traffic and links to your more profitable sites. They may not be earning much directly, but they contribute to your overall success. And success is where your focus should be, rather than possible failure.

If a site does fail, chalk it up as a learning experience. I support sites for three months, then if they do not pay their own hosting, I look for an alternate plan for that site, based on the domain. I may entirely re-write the site, giving it a new face and format as well as subject, if I can rationally do so consistent with the domain name. By the end of a year (the term of domain registration I originally pay for) I have at least three (given development time) tries at getting it profitable. If at the end of that time it still can’t earn its own hosting costs, I drop that domain. You can bet I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t in the process.

That is not failure. It is learning. I pay on average $9 for a domain and $1/month hosting, or $21 per year for my sites. After many years of creating sites I have not had a total failure in several years, but I still have the occasional site that needs re-writing after three months. The markets change, and the web changes, and the only constant is change — so you must continually learn, or you will be left behind. The best way to learn is by doing, and being very observant of the results.