So your website is not working the way it should: the menus aren't working, you've changed the theme and it still plays up - Grammarly that everybody raves about freezes your laptop to a screeching halt - everybody reports traffic and even some sales and you? You see nothing, nada, zilch. Well, except for error messages that is. All of a sudden your lousy job, the one that inspired you to start this online "thing", doesn't look so grim at all... and even though that job sucks, at least they do pay you a little something.

Does that sound like where you are at the moment?

Listen to this then...

The year was 2011. I got enthusiastic about this "internet marketing thing" and learned how to make an HTML website. (Yeah, I know! Should have gone Wordpress from the start. But that is how it goes - you do what you are taught. That is why it is so important to learn from those who have made a success of this business! But let me go on with the story.)

I was stuck trying to choose a niche. (Same place that I've been at for the past 5 weeks too! Argh!) My dear Hubby has specialist technical knowledge in his field of work, so I convinced him to write eBooks that I can sell on my website.

He enjoyed writing the eBooks - writing about that which you know so well, comes easy, doesn't it? (Exactly what we are taught here at Wealthy Affiliate!)

I took his manuscripts and made it into professional looking eBooks, configured Aweber and got it all ready and working like clock-work.

Meanwhile Hubby got enthusiastic about the project and made a short YouTube teaser video, which gives a tiny bit of information and then refer them to the website. Hubby also went to technical forums which specializes in the subject and made sure that his comments added value. On one such forum they allowed him to pay a fee for the privilege of adding his website to his signature.

Sales started trickling in, painstakingly slowly, one a month, sometimes one a fortnight, sometimes one a week.

Hubby went to a lot of trouble to make a video, which he hoped would sell like sweet cakes, since it shows the technical process in great detail, rather than the client having to read through the eBooks (which has no pictures or photos).

But to our utter disappointment... the eBooks kept on trickle-selling and not one video sold. Hubby adjusted the price of the video, up and down. He tried to bundle the video with the eBooks, then adjusted the price of the bundle up and down. Still no video sales.

Meanwhile I felt that Hubby took over MY project, just after I had suffered through all the HTML hiccups, pulled out my hair and even got the teething problems sorted! Such audacity! ;-) LOL! So I officially handed the project over to him. At some point he tried his hand at Wordpress, but that didn't work out too well either. (Let me tell you, it is really difficult it you aren't able to look over Kyle's shoulder! And in 2011, there weren't all the courses available on the internet that there are today either.)

Then some of the Google updates happened... which we knew nothing about of course. We only saw that the trickling of sales seemed to have dried up. At some point Hubby decided that for the amount of sales that trickles in, Aweber is far too expensive. So I spend days to investigate another autoresponder, but long story short, Hubby couldn't get that autoresponder to work and it was in anyway far above my level of elementary knowledge.

By this time we were both fully and truly fed-up with this project - wading through all that HTML code every time we are trying to do something, having to read up and "study" for days to get the simplest of CSS things done, dealing with customers who pretend that they never got the download link, but when I check the software, they have indeed downloaded, but I could also see that they tried to forward the link to somebody else, who obviously couldn't open it, because our download link checked the IP address. Argh, so much hassle, for so little sales...

We never made the formal decision to abandon the project as such. "Life just happened" you know - we got busy with life... we moved to another town, then went overseas to see the family, then a fishing trip came up, then there were things to do, even just the daily hustle and bustle... the project was never placed on the back-burner, it just totally fell off the stove ALL BY ITSELF. [tongue in cheek and fingers crossed] I "promise"! ;-) LOL!

Fast forward to 2018... I joined WA 2 months ago... A supportive community, Wordpress, the SiteRubix platform - oh my goodness! Totally amazing stuff!

Then a few evenings ago, Hubby decided to check up on THAT website again and this is what he found:

• Doing a plain old Google keyword search, he found his website, his YouTube teaser video and some of his forum posts all over the FIRST page of Google!
• Checking his YouTube teaser video, he found that it had thousands of views! (WHAT?!)
• Signing into his YouTube account he found hundreds of angry comments, of people who WANTED TO BUY his eBooks, but the links weren't working (since he cancelled Aweber and couldn't get the other autoresponder to work).

We sat there in silence, with question marks in our eyes and big question marks in the empty spaces above our heads. ("ABOVE our heads", I said - although I won't hold it against you if by this time you probably are thinking that we have empty spaces between our ears too!)

We just couldn't believe it!

The unspoken question that was hanging thick with emotion in the air was "WHY?!?"

• Why did we abandon this project so easily?
• Why didn't we seek outside help when we couldn't get the autoresponder going?
• Why did we get so discouraged when the sales were only trickling in? At least they WERE trickling in! We should just have done more of what was producing the trickle, right? Why didn't we?

As we lay awoke that night, staring blankly into the darkness of the night, I searched for answers, character flaws, reasons...

.... because we both had that utmost nauseating realization that if we hadn't abandoned this project, with that amount of YouTube views and angry want-to-buy comments - Hubby could probably have resigned his job a long time ago already. We could probably have been sitting at some beach, in stead of here. We could probably have started other websites too that could have been a success...

We could probably have . . .

. . . . . Don't let this happen to YOU!

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PS: Yes, yes, I committed to BoTipton to blogging here - so this is my first blog post! Thanks for the "kick" Bo! ;-)

PSS: Okay... if you feel like also kicking our backsides for having done this - please hit the Like button below. ;-) Okay-okay, and the kindhearted ones among you may also hit the Like button, without the kicking. ;-) LOL! Has anything like this happened to you? Is it giving YOU a kick? Please comment below, I would love to hear from you! ;-)