Mistakes are a valuable lesson. When you make mistakes you have two options on how to deal with it: you can either run away or you can deal with it.
I made a mistake over the weekend. I sent out an email to one of my lists recommending a product from someone that I trusted. I had got one their products in the past and it was good.
Shortly after I sent out the email, it was identified that this particular individual had posted some fake screen shots about his earnings. He was exposed by someone who understood that particular platform of revenue very well.
I sat there in horror for a few hours watching the evidence mount up against him. Eventually the product was taken down. Now I had a problem. I had recommended this product to my list and it turned out to be a scam. So the next morning I sent out a letter of apology to my list explaining what had happened. The people that replied were very understanding and appreciated me apologising.
Then I got the email that I had been dreading. A very upset subscriber accusing me of being a scammer It made me feel sick to my stomach. I then replied to his email stating that I had been fooled too.
I could have chosen not to send out that email of apology and pretended it did not happen, but I just knew that it would eat away at me unless I sent it out. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and admit you made a mistake. There will be repercussions but the bottom line is not what other people think of you.
It’s what you think of yourself.
When you put your head on your pillow at night, will you sleep peacefully knowing that you did the best you could? Or will it eat away at you slowly poisoning you?
In another instance I messed up really badly a few months ago. A client had asked me to make some minor changes to his site. While I was in there I noticed that his permalinks were not set to ‘PostName’, so in my arrogance (everyone knows that permalinks should be set to PostName) I went and changed them.
After a few days I received an irate email from him stating that his traffic had dropped by 50%. I went in to check the stats and he was right. As a direct result of me messing with the links, his most popular search terms were getting an error and so his traffic plummeted.
I felt completely sick to my gut. Now I had to fix it. I changed them back to the original structure, resubmitted his site to Google and then went on a Social Media Marketing and back-linking campaign to get his site back up in the search engines.
Eventually his traffic returned to normal and we fortunately still have a good relationship but I learnt a valuable lesson from all that. DO NOT mess with an established site’s link structure that is getting great traffic.
So realise that you WILL make mistakes. It happens. The question is how will you deal with it?
By the way, that upset subscriber replied to my email with a very understanding reply.
