My SEO Diary

Hello.

Let me introduce myself.

I’m 34 years old.  I’ve been doing Internet marketing for the last 5 years.  Specifically, I’ve been an affiliate marketer.  For the last 4 years I’ve made enough money to quit my well paying job (with benefits) and work from home in my pajamas.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Last year the shit really hit the fan.  The economy started to deteriorate badly, and the beautiful six figure salary that I had achieved started to dwindle fast.  I started to panic and remained in a panicked state for the next 8 months.  Not to mention, I had some personal things going on at the time, the least of which was a messy and very costly divorce.

So here I am.  I survived the downturn, but things are far from back to normal.  At the height of my glory I made about $20k in one month with arbitrage affiliate marketing.  I never created a single landing page.  I simply bought traffic from Google in the form of adwords ads and sent the traffic directly to the merchant’s landing page through the affiliate link.  Basically the “Google Cash” method.  When I handed over my $67, I was certain that I’d be fighting them to get a refund because there was no way this was going to work.  But there was something so simple and beautiful about this idea.  It made so much sense to me.  I gave it a shot.  My life changed.

The first month was not great, but it was good enough to show me the potential of the idea.  Over the next several weeks I got little sleep, staying up late to create new campaigns and look for more promising merchants.  Month two, was quite nice, and I started getting very excited.

I think I got too excited when I quit my job on labor day.  Ironic, huh?

In any case, things started to really go badly for me after attending the Affiliate Summit in Miami in 2007.  I attended a presentationcalled “Secrets of a PPC Super Affiliate” by this clown Amit Mehta, who did his little schtick and showed us all his American Express Black Card.  I kept wondering just how much he was getting paid for this presentation, and why if everything he was saying was true, would he be here divulging his “secrets”.  But stupidly, I bought into his whole “more keywords are better” theory and bought subscriptions to the keyword generating tools he suggested.

Over the next year I completely changed my strategy based on what I had learned.  Guess what?  Everything went to hell.  I went from making $200k a year to $20k.  Now, I know this isn’t all Mehta’s fault.  The economy did change radicaly.  Plus Google upped their minimum bids quite a bit and the affiliate networks and merchants suddenly got wise to all the trademark bidding and search arbitrage that was going on.  Then again, if self-serving speakers like Mehta hadn’t gone from conference to conference spreading their secrets and making networks aware of what was going on just so they could get some measly speakers fee, then things may not have changed quite so radically and I wouldn’t be facing a bankrupcy right now.  Asshole.

In any case, that was then, this is now.  PPC has started to lose its effectiveness.  The future is SEO.  I’m convinced that the only way to go is to have a legitimate product to sell and to focus your efforts on getting organic traffic to that product.  That is what I’m working on now.  This blog will serve as a diary as I continue to learn and adapt to whatever challenges are thrown at me.  It is meant to be educational and somewhat entertaining.  It’s my way of giving a little back to the community, since it has given (and taken) from me.  I hope you will find it useful.  Talk to you soon…