After you’ve been doing something for a while, it’s pretty normal to reflect back, pondering “what would I have done differently” sorts of questions. Usually, those things you wish you would have done differently fall into 1 of 2 categories:

1. You didn’t know any better at the time
2. Your goals changed over the years, requiring you to change some things as a result.

As I approach my 8th year in the online marketing, social media and blogging space, there are a few things that I wish I would have done differently when I first got started.

3 Online Marketing Things I Wish I Had Done Differently

• I wish I had taken Facebook Fan Pages more seriously Early on, it was so, so, so much easier to reach your fans and organically grow your fan base, compared to the current state of the Facebook News Feed. Those people who got out ahead, so to speak, have benefitted from doing so. We’re at a point where Facebook advertising is essential, and pages with larger fan bases seem to gain more traction for the same ad spend.
• I wish I used my name for all my usernames Consistency in the online world is helpful in so many ways. I did change my Twitter handle early on to my name. But not all online accounts allow for a change in username once it’s created. Google, for example, makes it next to impossible to consolidate gmail accounts (and accompanying Google+ profiles). Skype, too.
• I wish we had incorporated our blog’s feed with our newsletter provider You can subscribe to receive our new blog posts in your inbox via FeedBurner. And you can subscribe to our newsletter via MailChimp. It would be much better if those were one in the same. We didn’t set it up that way early on because we came from a blogging background where newsletters were secondary (at best). We can roll our RSS feed into our MailChimp feed but haven’t attempted that undertaking yet.

Thankfully, none of my desired online marketing do-overs are issues that can’t be dealt with.

What is something you wish you did differently from the start?