My kids absolutely love the movie Finding Nemo. Even though the forgetful fish Dory seems like she may not be the smartest fish in the ocean, she has some really great advice that I now relate to my business and the world of Internet marketing.
“Just keep swimming, just keep swimming…”
For the past almost 5 years that I have been making money online there have been quite a few obstacles and shakeups that have happened. When I was freelance writing it would be the loss of a good client because they no longer had money or were going in a different direction or a site that paid revenue shares for your articles shutting down and that monthly payment stopped.
For the past almost 3 years that I have been focusing on building my business with my own websites, there have been quite a few shakeups. The most popular one was the Panda update, but now the Penguin update has become even larger (for me at least).
With this last update Google was supposedly targeting webspam and over optimization but there have been quite a few sites that were definitely not spam that have been hit and several spammy sites that actually gained from this update.
This is really the first time that almost all my sites have been hit and my income has dramatically dropped. The site that I was basing my case study off of was hit. My EMD that I knew wasn’t going to last much longer but was making me decent money was hit. My larger site that didn’t have more than 10 backlinks built to it and was all original content was hit and so on and son.
From what I have been reading there really doesn’t appear to be a clear cut rhyme or reason why some sites got hit and why some other spammy sites are sitting on the first page.
In fact I was researching a new possible site that I wanted to create that wouldn’t be based off SEO alone but would me a lot more social and what I found got me quite frustrated.
The keyword that I searched for in Google was a very popular keyword that gets over 40,000 exact searches a month. Sitting on the front page were 2 “mommy blogs” that had tons of sponsored posts from Social Spark. In fact the one that was ranked #7 for this very popular keyword had 10 posts on the front page of the site and 8 of them were sponsored posts, which means the blog owner got money for writing the post and including a link to a product or company in the post. To me, this is the ultimate spam and since the posts had nothing to do with the main theme of the site it was even worse.
Now, why would a site that gets paid to blog about products and companies be sitting at #7 for a widely searched term if Google was trying to get rid of spam?
What Are You Going to Do About It?
For the past 2 months or so I have been in this funk where I have been completely unmotivated to work. My earnings were stagnant and I just wasn’t “feeling” it anymore.
Then came along the big old Penguin and it really got me thinking. I have read forums and several blogs about the latest algorithm update and at first it was depressing. Seeing my earnings go from anywhere from $50-$80 a day to $5-$15 a day is still depressing, but this time I’m not sitting around on my butt moping.
Instead I am going to take massive action and just start working. I am going to mix things up and make some smaller sites and really large sites. I am going to get backlinks different ways and even not get backlinks at all. I’m just going to try different things and see what works.
Right now I am building a site for a Clickbank product and plan on backlinking the site using a few different methods. I want to see where this site can go as I have never fully focused on Clickbank before. I also plan on building a site in a niche that I know very well and plan on being social and not building any unnatural links except a blog comment to get to know other bloggers.
I’m just going to “keep swimming” and see what happens. Fortunately I have the luxury of being able to experiment as we are not dependent on my income to pay the bills right now. I know others may not have that opportunity which is why I plan on sharing what I find from these different methods with all of you here on this blog.
For the next weeks and months I plan on busting butt and working like I have never worked before. Publishing more words than I have ever before and simply working more than I have ever before. For me it sort of seems like “do or die” and I am not going to be one of those that “die” right now. Instead I will work, dabble in a few different things and find something that will make me the money I want to be making.
Stay tuned and in the mean time…
Just Keep Swimming!
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It’s either that or give in right? And that ain’t gonna happen!
p.s I love Finding Nemo too