One of my goals with these weekly journal updates is to try and find the perils and pitfalls of online marketing so you can avoid them.

Well, I have one of those for you this week!

As we all know, online marketing today is far easier than it was five, ten, and especially fifteen years ago.

So much of what we have to do is now automated, plug-and-play, or "done-for-you" that even the most nervous technophobe should have no trouble setting up an online business.

And yet, it is still the case that everything you build needs a lot of careful testing before you unleash it on your trusting audience.

And I completely failed in that regard this week!

(Well, maybe not completely...but enough to throw a spanner in the works.)

You see, even just a small error can bring a process to a grinding halt.

It could be something as simple as adding an email subscriber to the wrong list, or failing to set a campaign trigger, meaning that no one receives any of your carefully prepared marketing emails.

This week, I've been experimenting with a new lead capture funnel, which I was very excited about.

But in my eagerness to get started, I pressed the "go" button and started driving traffic.

But then, to my horror, I noticed a major problem:

The autoresponder integration, which adds the captured leads to my list, wasn't working properly!

So no subscribers were actually being added to my list.

I estimate that I lost around 20 leads because of my impatience.

Fortunately, I've managed to resolve the situation, and everything is now working smoothly.

But it just goes to show that a lack of patience can get the better of any of us!

Because I really should have known better:

Always test everything, multiple times, from start to finish before you go live!

Better still, get someone else to test your process for you!

A second pair of eyes often spots things that you miss.

Either way, please be smarter that me by not repeating this silly mistake!

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