From the moment that I first discovered the Internet, I was hooked.

Me and my AOL account were inseparable. For that first year my website must have gone through a complete redesign every two months.

I would spend hours and hours asking other webmasters to link to my site, monitoring my search engine positioning, and trying to find ways to make money from it.

When I was away from my computer all I could think about was getting back to it to check and see how many visitors came through, and how much money I made.

There were many letdowns and many frustrations in getting it off the ground.

If you take what I made with the site last year and divide it by the number of hours I spent, its one heck of an hourly rate!

But if you take what I've made from day one and divide it by the number of hours I put into it, you'll find that I probably could have done better with a part-time job flipping burgers.

And who knows, maybe I could have even spent more time with my family because when I clocked out from my part-time job, I would be off for the evening.

When you are bit by the Internet bug, you'll find yourself watching the sun come up on some days...after an all-nighter!

The sad truth is that the vast majority of the "gurus" out there leave out this part of the story. It doesn't sound quite as awesome to hear someone say they are making money with their website, but they might do better offering "fries with that."

At this point you are probably thinking: "Man! Chuck, what's up with all the gloom and doom?"

I'm trying to set your expectations appropriately. In my last job, one of the most important lessons that I learned was to "set the customer's expectations."

When I went into a job that I knew would probably take 4 hours, it was better to tell the customer that it would take 8.

If I was done in 4 I was a hero. If I ran into major problems and it took 8, then I was right on time.

But if I had told the customer that I should be done in 4 hours and it took me 8....

VERY upset customer!

It is all about perception.

You need to set your own expectations. Don't think that you can "build it and they will come."

Don't think that you can put up a site and instantly put it on auto-pilot.

If you don't use the right approach to your business, you can easily find yourself on the list of "Internet failures."

The bright side to this story? Today, through the "school of hard knocks" I have learned how to get a website up and running in a much shorter time frame, and with far fewer mistakes.

Looking back on it, what would I have done differently?

I would have invested in some training materials so I could learn what others have found to work, and not work.

I would have gotten my own domain name a lot earlier.

I would have invested in a decent log analysis tool instead of spending hours "counting clicks."

And, I would probably have doubled my "expected time to completion" :-)