Out of steam - need ideas



FWIW when I started in this game about a year ago, I knew right away when I read something that I could make a lot of money doing it. If you're not really confident you have a great idea/system that can make money with whatever it is you're doing, something is wrong. And like others have said, if you're doing SEO make sure you diversify and have lots of sites. Google can be pretty random sometimes and I've had sites that took 6+ months to come back from penalties. But I had others being built and never gave up on the penalized ones.
 
OP you really need to take a break, to heal your attitude. Without a good attitude, everything is tougher.

I'm succeeding at some of those things you are failing at.

Here is some quick advice on two items you wrote about;

Ranking in Google = Wow what a bitch. This high comp keyword I've been trying to rank for, for months, disapears, comes back at rank 150, gets to low 20's, back to 300, vanishes, repeat. This shit has become a bloody war. All the while I'm spending hundreds for links in various manners.

CJ, Linkshare and so = Better, more quality here, still, dealing with retarded merchants all day long who don't like how you link, how your site looks, or other, bleh. Still tolerate them as I earn most of my income via these types of networks.

You are swimming upstream instead of banking the easy money. Perhaps you enjoy the struggle?

Competitive keywords in Google can be a bitch, and there is often higher ROI in less competitive keywords. Choose carefully, so that you can rank and win.

Change your CJ strategy to give merchants the traffic they want. Choose the right merchants for your websites, change your websites, whatever it takes. If you can get legitimate traffic, you can get clicks. Make it happen.

Get a rest, come back with a brand new approach, you'll do fine.
 
Try taking a break. Come back in a few weeks with a different mindset. If you build sites: definitely build multiple, but not too many to where it gets out of hand. If you are trying to buy traffic: take 1 offer, 1 source of traffic, and work at it until it's profitable.

Nothing could be working for you because your head is all over the place; you're trying to do too many things and once, and not sticking with 1 project at a time. No worries, I get like this sometimes too – I think it's part of the game. But when I strive to focus on 1 thing at a time, my projects turn out great. Try really focusing on something (1 project), and I'm sure something will eventually work out.

Remember to take methodical marches forward.
 
What everyone said. I own 200 domain names, only 3 make 90% of my income. I keep buying even more and starting new seo projects cause guess what google penalyzes some sites at random. I lost a site that used to make 5k a month this summer, its just the way it is
 
I would also add that my first couple of projects were absolute failures .. but for some reason I keep on trying.

My first site, took me a full month to manually research and write 100 articles on the topic. Followed some guru advice to get it ranked. In 3 or 4 months, it was banned from Google. I was making some coin with Yahoo so I was a little more encouraged.

Second site, was in a super hard nice that will not ever rank well (from what I can tell). To this day, it only makes about $100 a year.

Third site, used flawed keyword research (thanks Wordtracker). Spent $500 getting content written (cause I was smart now, not going to waste another month writing). Well, garbage in = garbage out. Bad keywords + poor content = poor results.

After about 6 months of that, I started earning aff commission from 2 web2.0 pages that I made selling physical products. Started promoting them and earnings took off, especially at Xmas.

Around this time, I took my first penalized site, bought a new domain, ripped the content and posted it on the new domain. Started earning some money now with that content. And oddly enough, after about another year (making it roughly 18 - 24 months after being banned), my original site popped back into Google all on its own (duplicate content and all). It is now 3 years later and both are still earning for me.

Something else I will share is that a long time ago, I decided to focus on PIGS - passive income generators.

If a new idea comes along, I will try to determine just how passive it is. For example, adsense or affiliate sites. If you do the work to get ranked, how hard is it to maintain that spot. It has gotten harder in the last year but I have some pages that I have not touched in years that steadily earn. Compare that with CPA or PPC or PPV or media buys. Those can work but they are not passive. For me, if I were to use those, it would be to generate cash to use to build more passive sites.

Anyhoo, you can take this free advice for what it is worth. Passive or not, proper planning and persistent work towards your goals is what is needed.

JC.
 
Take a break. I took and now I'm doing better than ever. All that IM spined my head a lot, and I didn't see my goals clearly...
 
I would also add that my first couple of projects were absolute failures .. but for some reason I keep on trying.

My first site, took me a full month to manually research and write 100 articles on the topic. Followed some guru advice to get it ranked. In 3 or 4 months, it was banned from Google. I was making some coin with Yahoo so I was a little more encouraged.

Second site, was in a super hard nice that will not ever rank well (from what I can tell). To this day, it only makes about $100 a year.

Third site, used flawed keyword research (thanks Wordtracker). Spent $500 getting content written (cause I was smart now, not going to waste another month writing). Well, garbage in = garbage out. Bad keywords + poor content = poor results.

After about 6 months of that, I started earning aff commission from 2 web2.0 pages that I made selling physical products. Started promoting them and earnings took off, especially at Xmas.

Around this time, I took my first penalized site, bought a new domain, ripped the content and posted it on the new domain. Started earning some money now with that content. And oddly enough, after about another year (making it roughly 18 - 24 months after being banned), my original site popped back into Google all on its own (duplicate content and all). It is now 3 years later and both are still earning for me.

Something else I will share is that a long time ago, I decided to focus on PIGS - passive income generators.

If a new idea comes along, I will try to determine just how passive it is. For example, adsense or affiliate sites. If you do the work to get ranked, how hard is it to maintain that spot. It has gotten harder in the last year but I have some pages that I have not touched in years that steadily earn. Compare that with CPA or PPC or PPV or media buys. Those can work but they are not passive. For me, if I were to use those, it would be to generate cash to use to build more passive sites.

Anyhoo, you can take this free advice for what it is worth. Passive or not, proper planning and persistent work towards your goals is what is needed.

JC.

So your site was fully de indexed by google and it came back 2 years later? I thought bans were permanent.


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I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.727481,-73.991959
 
Only good thing about adwords is getting proper impression data for a keyword by putting up a fugly ad no one will click on = free accurate research.

There's my tip to the forum.
 
Get to the top of the food chain.
You have no stability because you have no control.

Create your own product or service.
 
Ranking in Google = Wow what a bitch. This high comp keyword I've been trying to rank for, for months, disapears, comes back at rank 150, gets to low 20's, back to 300, vanishes, repeat. This shit has become a bloody war. All the while I'm spending hundreds for links in various manners.

Out of steam and needing some inspiration and ideas


Looks to me like you are trying to put the cart before the horse. You don't know how google works so you can not rank a site properly. Here is my idea of how i would handle this situation.

#1 - Stop trying to make money.
#2 - Spend the next 6 months on doing nothing but research on Google's algo.
#3 - Once you think you have Google figured out build 10 test sites on 10 different subjects to see if you have it. If not more research.
#4 - Do the same steps for Bing/Yahoo

If your keywords are jumping all over the place then you just need to stop and rethink what you are doing. Sounds to me like you are constantly tripping spam filters and making a mess of things. Slow down, do your research and making money will be easy.
 
#1 - Stop trying to make money.
#2 - Spend the next 6 months on doing nothing but research on Google's algo.
#3 - Once you think you have Google figured out build 10 test sites on 10 different subjects to see if you have it. If not more research.
#4 - Do the same steps for Bing/Yahoo

This is a good idea but I would make a few changes:

I spent my first 3-4 months doing nothing but research, it sucks big time.. it's just a waste of time. The more you do it, the more demoralizing it gets. So should just cut the research part and make sites to test. You can always research during the time you are bored with your sites, since you probably wont be working on it 24/7 anyway.

If new, one to two sites is more than enough, because you can target different keywords for different pages on one site. Maybe you can target two terms, a 5k exact term and maybe a less competitive one like around 1k or less and see what works.

Once you know what sticks, the hardest part comes in IMO.. and that is finding good offers, high converting ones yet with medium to little competition.
 
I'll check out that video in a while cheers. You are right I probably am a little bitter.

Regarding any passionate subjects, um, not really I guess, I'm an IT guy with a shittone of web coding xp so have a semi-interest in IT. I'm coding some nice desktop backup software that I hope will be long term but thats not gonna do much for the next few months.

To me the internet is a thousand ways to "peck at" money.

Need some strategies and ideas anything and everything

People are paying $100.00 to have their wordpress installation scripts run for them. If you have coding skills, you shouldn't have a problem
 
Looks to me like you are trying to put the cart before the horse. You don't know how google works so you can not rank a site properly. Here is my idea of how i would handle this situation.

#1 - Stop trying to make money.
#2 - Spend the next 6 months on doing nothing but research on Google's algo.
#3 - Once you think you have Google figured out build 10 test sites on 10 different subjects to see if you have it. If not more research.
#4 - Do the same steps for Bing/Yahoo

If your keywords are jumping all over the place then you just need to stop and rethink what you are doing. Sounds to me like you are constantly tripping spam filters and making a mess of things. Slow down, do your research and making money will be easy.

terrible advice. experience and experiments trump theory every time. he's not trying to get in to law school.
 
People are paying $100.00 to have their wordpress installation scripts run for them. If you have coding skills, you shouldn't have a problem

Lol you don't even need coding skills to install wordpress and edit simple themes, one click install with cpanel and fantastico FTW

not sure why people are willing to pay so much for such things :eek:
 
Lol you don't even need coding skills to install wordpress and edit simple themes, one click install with cpanel and fantastico FTW

not sure why people are willing to pay so much for such things :eek:

Because they lack the knowledge to do it themselves. No matter how easy it gets to obtain information, there will always be a class of people who, for whatever reason, refuse to obtain it for themselves.

And this is a good thing.
 
I wish I could find the blog post, it was probably someone on here who wrote it, probably a couple years ago....

Anyway, what it said basically is that all you have to do is look. It's all there in front of you. Watch what ads are running, where, through who, for how long. Take a good study of it. Then do it yourself in a similar location. Not a simple task, but one more stacked in your favor.