Starting Over



From a guy who went from $50k/mo in revenue to nothing basically overnight in Q2 2012 I have two bits of advice. When the shit hits the fan:

1) Never ever ever do any drugs or drink to make yourself feel better. Stay fucking sober until you're at least pulling a profit again.

2) Talk to EVERYone you know in this industry, tell them EVERYthing you know and learned from your losses, don't let pride or fear make you hold back. No matter what the most valuable asset to have in our industry is solid relationships with like-minded people. That's something Goo can't take away from you in any algo update.
 
so most of you are SEO guys. is there many out there still buying paid traffic and sending to offers? doesn't seem that many

CPA affiliate marketing really is kinda dead IMO. of course you still have the sharasale and CJ stuff but that's not what i mean.


....

SEO and paid traffic are both methods of putting your product in front of the end user. And the product can be a CPA offer, CJ offer, or better yet, your own offer. The concept ain't dead.

If you're referring to advertising acai google kit free credit report flogs on adwords, then yea, those are dead. and thank the lord they are. less competition baby.

Also, I've had to start over many times. I've dealt with SEO, PPC, and spam traffic all doing very well and then collapsing. When you fail, you begin to learn what works and what doesn't. You start looking for income stream that are long term instead of exploiting every new idea that comes to your head. As long as you keep going, you become more boss at this game and it becomes harder to fail.
 
Failing and losing everything is by far the best thing that ever happened to me. True failure will change your core being. The fear of knowing you have $3 worth of gas left for the week.

I can so identify with this right now. Things went sour at the beginning of the year and I haven't even been able to find a job in this shitty economy to build my income back up and I've had to go from eating nice meals to eating spaghetti and grilled cheese sandwiches every week to cut down on grocery bills.

It pisses me off that just years ago, I was in the right niche but quit because it was too much work to make it successful. I looked for an "easier way" to get rich and never found it. Now I see that the problem was simply that I was lazy and didn't wanna do the work.

That was an expensive lesson to learn.
 
just when I thought I was out of luck, I read this post.
This is pure motivation to rise up again and PROFIT.





Losing it all and starting over? Hell yeah. 3 or 4 times now.
Welcome to the internet. Sometimes you'll be just a bit to far behind the curve and lose it.
Fuck it. Find the next thing and move forward. Learn to look at your old efforts as a timesuck and a relic preventing you from really looking at new opportunities(it's the truth most of the time) and do it all again.
I've mailed, done SEO, PPC, and landed where I am now. All of them(overall) were successful.
But while mailing I got ripped over for [almost] everything I had more than once. SEO I had entire site networks with hundreds or thousands of domains bite the dust overnight. PPC I had campaigns fail and fail hard.

Restarting and rebuilding is what we do. We're internet entrepreneurs: It's like traditional business, but 10x as fast. What happens once in 30 years to someone else will happen every few years to us. Them's the ropes.
 
3. Yep - Diversify. There's no single product that will make you a millionaire. But 50 of them each selling $1k-5k per month? It will stack up.

Have to disagree on this one. I've made over a million profit from a single product, 3 separate times. Diversify your traffic sure. But you absolutely can become a millionaire with 1 site/product/service. People are doing it every day. I personally know at least 5 or 6. Shit just look at most of the top selling clickbank crap. Most if not all of the top selling clickbank products make at least a million or more. Trust me on this.
 
"There's no single product that will make you a millionaire."

Acai Berry 500 did for a bunch of guys

and African Mango, then raspberry ketone, then green coffee extract, now garcinia.. It's like there's a trend here.
 
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Bump, things are going pretty well. I am close to making what I was in Dec before I got hit. One of my biggest sites recovered and my PPC campaigns are doing really good. I also found a few new traffic sources.
 
Restarting and rebuilding is what we do. We're internet entrepreneurs: It's like traditional business, but 10x as fast. What happens once in 30 years to someone else will happen every few years to us.



That sure puts things in perspective. I like this environment better. Mistakes may seem amplified in some sense, but I can only imagine what kind of torture it would be to run a failing business for 5 years. Or like you say, a 30 year boom/bust cycle. I always try to remember that if the entire internet disappeared tomorrow, I'm way better off than I would have been otherwise.



For those who shut down in a crisis, its not because they can't handle it. We're wired differently. We need to focus on the solution to a problem and actively work to solve it, not talk about it or listen to someone explain again how everything is falling apart. For us every crisis is like losing control of a car on an icy road, if you obsess about not hitting the tree, you hit the tree. If you focus on where you need to be going, you regain control. If we obsess over the problems, we only see the problems. If we obsess over finding a solution, we retain our creativity and we find solutions.


Yes. Very well put. Some traumatic shit goes down, and some people will run in circles, freeze in place, etc. Sudden moves, over-correcting, shitting in pants... hitting a tree...
 
Happened here bro. Had a constant full time living coming in for a few years and had managed to escape all the major algo filters. Had a few bumps at times such as when BMR got wiped, but always had backup sites on the go making money.

Then back in late September, got hit with manual penalties. My biggest money site lost most of its traffic and others were wiped out clean. My main site was scaled too much to repair. Having to replace the articles would have took months on end and so thought it would be better to start from scratch and do things much better.

It has taken several months, but coming back and the stats are finally getting exciting to wake up to. I have rebuilt my sites in a manner that they couldn't be hit with such penalties now. Creating higher quality content, adding more content per page, having lower keyword density etc has helped, but also constantly looking at ways I can create that branded look.

This is all my fault of course. If you don't treat your work as a business and everything revolves around Google then you are destined to run into problems. Time is another major obstacle. I would never go back to full time work so it's all or nothing for me. Rise or fall. Good luck to those in a similar position.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXxw-zXRqOs]The Dark Knight Rises - The Climb [HD] - YouTube[/ame]
 
I've started over many times and I'm in the middle of doing it again. After either failing or hating what I was doing, several times, I think I have a much better vision of where I am headed. And this time the restart was by choice, so I have been able to still grow during the rebrand. I do different stuff than most people here, but when you boil it down its all the same.
 
I've lost it all and said, "Fuck it". I do not advise such an approach. Years of poverty ensued.

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Bump, things are going pretty well. I am close to making what I was in Dec before I got hit. One of my biggest sites recovered and my PPC campaigns are doing really good. I also found a few new traffic sources.

In other words: disregard anything in this thread that ain't jiggling.