From Affiliate Failure to Stardom - Part 2
Hello you all.
In my first post on this 3 part series "How I failed at Affiliate Marketing " I just left off where my site has completely vanished from Google, because I was stupid enough to rebuild my entire site with a NEW structure. So whenever somebody clicked on a existing OLD reference in the search engines, they were taken to a 404 error page.
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The story continues…
I was stunned into complete numbness for a solid 2 weeks. I mean my website was gone. My baby…completely doomed.
I immediately thought screw this I’m uploading my old site again!
Guess what…I somehow during the whole process of redesigning my site, copied and messed around with my previous site’s files which included pictures and audio. So it was basically beyond repair.
If it wasn’t for my hard head and stubborn personality I would have cried like a baby.
I took a week off to get my head straight. It was probably the best thing I could ever do.
I think stress really plays a big part in ones success and failure. The right amount of stress can provide you with the drive you need to succeed, but too much stress can easily break down your focus and creative thinking.
After the initial "resting" period it was back to the drawing board.
I realised that I couldn’t let Google or any of the other bastard search engines control my future! There HAD to be a way that I could somehow, if at least to a minor extent, fade them into the background.
I was introduced to the world of social bookmarking and blogging:
This changed everything. I started with a simple blogger blog, made a informative post with a link pointing to my website. Sometimes I linked straight to an affiliate offer. I used social bookmarking sites like technorati and many others.
Back then I immediately got results. I instantly got traffic and backlinks to my site. I also started to see some income again. So there was hope. My quest was to cancel Google out completely and it started to work. BUT sales were NOT as good as they were from Google traffic.
The traffic from social sites were not at all targeted:
This was a damn big problem. The people over at the social sites and bookmarking sites were all very untargeted traffic. They are all "information seekers" or "gossip readers". Using social bookmarking for commercial purposes are more difficult. So my income was stuck on a low level. I thought…well…I AM making money from untargeted traffic. All I need to do is increase the amount of untargeted traffic to increase my income. My search went on as I tried to find a way to increase my traffic from social bookmarking sites.
I entered the realm of blackhat marketing:
Yeah I know. Yours truly have been in the blackhat industry for quite some time. Let me tell you this before I go into detail about what I did. It was one hell of a roller coaster ride and I met some guys making more money from blackhat than most gurus do. This is the honest truth.
I cannot really remember how I came to learn about blackhat marketing. I just somehow read somewhere about blackhat seo and then I discovered some of the forums. It was a WHOLE different vibe inside the blackhat forums then your normal seo whitehat forums. The people all sounded shady. Like those bastards were swimming in cash, eating pizza and swearing each other’s heads off all day long. They were all like kids playing with dangerous toys. Blackhat toys.
One of these toys I discovered was a mass blog generator. It was a POTENT tool that after 2 years after I stopped using it, I still couldn’t seem to get it out of my head because the results were THAT good. I’m not going to reveal what it was because it’s not actually commercialized. So there’s no buying it.
It generated a incredible amount of blogs from massive keyword lists. I used social bookmarking, pinging, rss submissions etc. Every conceivable trick in the book to get thousands of pages indexed by Google. It worked and it worked GOOD. I made a lot of money quickly from adsense as well as affiliate links. Hell…I did a lot of shady stuff.
Life was good as a blackhatter.
But there was a very big drawback….
I WORKED my ass of for the money. That’s right…back then being a blackhat marketer did bring shocking results, but you had to put in a incredible amount of work. Not to mention the ever ongoing purchases of new domains for new projects.
That was not the only drawback…
A moment ago I said that I still couldn’t forget about the tool after 2 years after I stopped using it. Well about 2 years ago if I remember correctly Google came down really hard on spam blogs. It was bloody intense…they started banning your domains quicker and quicker. Now it’s more difficult than ever to stay indexed, but these blackhat dudes come up with the new ways to outsmart Google every day.
So the problem was that I was working my ass off PLUS I soon came to realise that the blackhat business model had NO stability. It just wasn’t worth it in the long run since I spoke to many whitehat seo-ers and there were guys making very good revenue from doing things the right slooowww way. Google loved them and they were being rewarded day after day while my bloody domains were being penalized week after week or if I were lucky, month after month.
It’s hard work and it made me tired as hell.
It just wasn’t good business sense.
So I was left in the dark again…with no idea where to go.
Stay tuned for Part 3 where I will cover how I went from failure to success!
I’ll even throw in my current earnings so you can see what it’s all about!
Best regards,
Mr Review
P.S - Not that I recommend that you go for blackhat as a business model or full time job, BUT if you were interested in any way by the nature of this money making method then click here.
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