How I wasted 10 years in my internet marketing carrier spinning my wheels.
So all this time has flown by quickly. Years, many years. Yet, I’m still standing in the same place and this place is sinking. It’s even taking me down lower. How could I get even lower that I was years back? How did all this time pass by without me accomplishing what I hoped to “in the next 5 years”? Now I cant get that time back and will have to start right away or risk losing even more time.
In my intro that you can read on this website, I mention starting my Internet marketing carier in affiliate marketing. It was just the simplest way to make money online without too much investment. To be more specific on the branch of affilate marketing I chose, it was the tactic of “launch jacking”. Launch jacking refers to targeting products that are about to or just recently launched in a way as to rank on google for those terms when the launch hype was at its highest. People being bombarded with emails from all the usual GURUs go on to google to search for reviews for these products. If you could make it in time on to the SERPs, you’ll get large amounts of traffic which you could then try to funnel through your affiliate link on to the product sales page.
The very nature of this type of highly targeted traffic meant that it wasn’t unusual to convert into a sale 1-3 people out of every 100 visitors to your site. Affiliate commissions on clickbank were 10s of dollars, not the cents thrown at us by amazon. So with 100-300 visitors per day, I was making 40-100 USDs per day. That was a great sum of money to make and it allowed me to employ virtual assistants to write for my review site. We were pumping out 2 reviews per day 5 days a week and the money was pouring in. My VA was earning good money and I was travelling all over. I remember very vividly a scene where I am sitting on a bus going to the airport in Bergamo and I look on my phone to see how much I made that day. It was around 150usd. Life was good.
Obviously, products didn’t launch every week but I has to find work for my VA to do everyday. Slowly but surely, the qiality of posts started to dwindle as quantity overtook it as the priority. This combined with my aggressive backlinking strategies culmulated in me getting penalized by google panda, the first major google penalty.
To this day, I have not been able to replicate the success of that site, but I have learnt a great lesson.
So how did I waste 10 years of online carrier?
Well, my biggest mistake was focusing so much on the short-term gaind brought by these launch jacking/product reviews. See, that period was me running on a threadmill. I was running fast but not actually going anywhere. As soon as a product lanched and the hype died down, so did the traffic. It was a never ending circle of traffic going up then down then up then down. Lik trying to fetch water with a basket.
If only I spent that time building up solid content targeting evergreen keywords, I would have build up and proably sold a massive site. Hind-sight is 20-10 so its’s easy to say now. At that time, creating reviews was bringing in money and I felt there was no need to change anything.
So today, here I am still writing reviews. Looks like you really cant teach an old dog new tricks. I must force myself to diversify away from this type of content and finally start building content that will still be relevant in time and with a constantly growing traffic potential.
These are the sites that get bought up for big money. Looking at it closely, it’s actually not too hard to creat content around a keyword like “how to fix your broken blender” compared to “blender x review”. While blender x may become discontinued, an article for how to fix a blender will continue to remain relevant for much longer.
So are you currently spending all of your time on short-term stuff? Try as much as possible to divert some of your time, effort and resources to building something that will continue to repay your efforts years down the line.
After wasting so many years online chasing short term reward, I’m throwing myselve head first into this. They say the next best time to plant a tree is now. Follow my journey on this blog or on my youtube channel. Let’s go!!!
I wish you the best in your endeavours.
Roby