I started my site in 2009 and made LOTS of mistakes early on. I'm quite embarrassed at how awful it used to look! Nevertheless by taking a lot of hits and quite a few misses, I was still steadily building traffic.
When I started I didn't have any kind of business plan, I had no idea HOW I was going to make money or what kind of site I wanted to even have, I just had a vague idea of, well I'll start a blog about what I eat and people will read it and I'll make a lot of money... Thankfully, I was steered towards SBI by Steve Pavlina's fabulous review, so instead of starting a blog that no one would read, I instead started an SBI site.
I was quite sketchy about following directions in the Action Guide, I would often go ahead and do something and then read the action guide later, figuring out that I'd done it all wrong! So growth was probably a lot slower than it could have been. I would also get a burst of enthusiasm and work for a little while, then get deflated because I wasn't seeing the immediate results and then procrastinate and do nothing for months at a time!
