Diversifying From Paid Traffic – and My SEO Story
I’ve recently come across several posts/PMs asking the same question (and even one member who asked when we met during AWA):
How to hedge volatility in this business?
How to turn affiliate campaigns into long-term assets?
So I thought I’d write a post with my thoughts.
My Early SEO Days
As many of you know, I had my online marketing start in SEO.
SEO was crazy-easy back when I started doing it. Basically all you had to do was build some web pages with the right keywords somewhere on them.
I was even auto-generating 100’s of thousands of pages with scraped/spun content to make money from Adsense – all I did was feed giant lists of keywords into a software.
Then came the EMD (exact-match domain) era. I registered a bunch of domains with the exact keywords in them, did some link spamming, and that was all that was required to get traffic from google.
At one time, I must have owned most of the link-spamming software that was available. Bought a desktop with lots of processors and RAM to run those software. It was fun, and easy.
Then the google animals came – first Panda, then Penguin. (They used to be some of my favorite black-and-white animals – up until that point.) And there were other, more minor updates as well.
Eventually: EMDs no longer worked. Link-spamming no longer worked. Sites that had been bringing in money month after month for many months, kept decreasing in revenue.
My income nearly dropped to zero. That was when I knew I needed to learn new ways to get things going again.
SEO Success Post-Google-Updates
I started reading blogs and taking courses. One of them was the One Man Gang, aka OMG (https://omgmachines.com/). I attended their webinar, and read some reviews.
It sounded like they knew what they were doing, so I signed up to one of their courses.
Not going too much into details – after all I’m not an affiliate promoting them.
Long story short, I ended up buying quite a few of their courses because they worked.
Their trainer/teacher Greg Morrison had a TON of websites generating money, so every time there was any sort of algorithm change, he was able to see patterns of what was still working and what had stopped working.
And he would keep all his students up t ...