I’ve recently been having a clearout of my bookmarks and struck upon something quite sad.

Over the last couple of years I have collected hundreds of bookmarks (or “favorites”) for lots of different websites.

Mostly these are blogs or new start-up sites where the publisher is new and fresh to internet marketing and is having a real go at making some money and building a business.

In a lot of cases they go from a standing start to creating lots of new and unique content over a couple of weeks. For this reason I bookmark their sites because I want to hear more about their experiences and find out how well they are doing.

The problem is, they put loads of effort in over the first month or so… and then quit!

It’s a real shame (and quite frustrating) because I specifically bookmarked the site or blog so that I could go back time after time to see their progress.

For example, one young lady from London set up a site where she was aiming to pay off £10,000 in just one year.

Her story was that she was sick of being in debt and wanted to do something about it. Her site got press coverage and she even had someone promise to match whatever she made and donate it to charity.

She kept up with it over the whole year and, although she didn’t quite make £10k, she did very well and paid off a large chunk of her debt.

However, the challenge ended on the 15th August 2006 and she wrote in her online diary on the 14th promising:

“I’ll write a lot more in the next couple of days”

But there has been nothing since! Talk about leaving us hanging 🙂

Check out One Girl, One Year at http://www.OneGirlOneYear.co.uk (opens in new window)

A second example is a very interesting blog called “The Internet Marketing Novice”.

This blog had excellent ranking in the search engines for some good IM keywords and was being updated very regularly.

Carl, the blogger behind it, had decided to have a good go at internet marketing and was documenting his progress nicely.

However, one day it just stopped… dead…

After 6 months of excellent, unique content and posts, the blog just stopped.

I keep on going back to see if there has been any change but nothing has been written since July. I even went so far as to email Carl and ask if he was going to update it again but I haven’t had a reply!

Check out The Internet Marketing Novice Blog at http://carlmorgan.blogspot.com/ (opens in new window)

These two examples are two of the best I found on my search engine travels but there were plenty more. Of course, there could be a very valid reason why these people quit or stop posting. It could be personal circumstances which prevent them for carrying on.

Or, it could just be a lack of enthusiasm.

It’s a shame though because a lot of them had the right idea and probably quit just before the big pay-off. It’s called Sod’s Law…