How to go from $0 to $7000 per month and back to $0 again

A couple of years ago I decided to stop targeting niche affiliate revenue streams and went after one of the biggest money terms on the web with a brand new site. This was December 2005.

Straight away I used all sorts of SEO methods to compete with the major sites and used some of the most aggressive tactics available. I’m a firm believer that unless you have tried every SEO technique you can never know how to use them to your full advantage, it is hugely important to know where the line is with SEO and to make sure any important sites stop pushing before they get to it. How can you stop a site getting banned if you don’t know where the line is?

My tactic was to get top organic rankings quickly in MSN and Yahoo and hope that these held until Google followed up a couple of years later. As you can see from the income report below by April 2006 things were picking up nicely and by June the site was making a nice income. These figures are for the previous month so the income for June was paid on 17th July. Some payment codes have been deleted from my screenshot, this is all from organic traffic so no PPC costs.

Ranking number 1 for a search term like this (I won’t tell you what the site was but it is in the finance industry) was great and for a few months the site did very well. Then the income and traffic started to tail off. First the site was banned from MSN (it was reinstated a couple of months later but didn’t ever rank as well) and then Yahoo decided to use the sites Yahoo Directory title as the title tag and traffic nosedived.

Even after these issues had been resolved the site was still not ranking in Google due to the aggressive link building strategies I had been using so the income was totally reliant on MSN and Yahoo. Of course the last few years have seen such a large downturn in the UK market share of Yahoo and MSN that the traffic is now pretty much zero even though the site still ranks in the top 10 for most of the major search terms. The amount of ads showing on Yahoo and MSN means that traffic below the 5th result is pretty much non-existent.

This reduction in traffic combined with more competition in the marketplace (some merchants using PPC are paying a cost per acquisition of more than twice my affiliate commission) makes it almost impossible to compete.

The net result is that this site has made $0 so far in 2008. Luckily I don’t rely on this money for my income but it just goes to show how the internet marketing landscape doesn’t just make you rich quick it can make you poor quickly as well if you only have one income stream.

Here are some things I learnt from this:

• Google is like an elephant, it never forgets
• Diversify your income
• Diversify your traffic
• Don’t upset a search engine with 90% market share
• Don’t be afraid of targeting competitive search queries

This is my entry to Daniels blog tutorial project so please vote for it!

Categories: Making Money Online

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