My 5,000th Post - Not What You Expected
- Thread starter eliquid
- Start date
eliquid great post. Lots of "kids" on here that would do well to listen to you. If you have kids you have 18 or so years with them. It doesn't seem like it at first, but the time goes by very fast and you can't get that back. You don't "have" kids, you raise kids, kids with values, kids with smarts, kids with manners, respect and self confidence. Not pansies, sissies and future welfare recipients.
What have you done with your kids lately? Yesterday we took my daughter to lunch, Saturday took the kids to the zoo, last weekend took daughter and friend to beach, week before wife and I just took off in the car, ended up at a wildlife park a couple hours away. It's easier to change your routine than your past.
Hopefully eliquid can regain what he has lost.
What have you done with your kids lately? Yesterday we took my daughter to lunch, Saturday took the kids to the zoo, last weekend took daughter and friend to beach, week before wife and I just took off in the car, ended up at a wildlife park a couple hours away. It's easier to change your routine than your past.
Hopefully eliquid can regain what he has lost.
The wording of your meme suggests that there is also Misdemeanor Murder. That sounds fun, please give more details.
She's totally right. Stop working so much. Your daughters are at an age where they need you, not the stuff you can buy for them.
Here's my suggestion: cut back your working hours by 40%
You'll be more productive, but also, any income you'll lose will be considerably less than the 50% you'll lose when she decided she's had enough and divorces your ass.
Working all the time is fine if you don't have any dependents, but you owe kids your presence.
I did. I put my heart and soul to a site, spent countless hours trying to make it an authority. I manually built about 300 links and participated on multiple sites in my niche. When I say multiple I am talking about 50 of them.
Here is the mistake I made:
News site with 500 updates a week is not possible when you work full time. No I don't watch TV. No I don't waste my time online, I am only online when I am at work. The only thing I do every day is work, gym, online business, oh and eat/sleep. I am a time management expert because of work but its not enough.
In short my grandiose idea flopped not because it was a bad idea, but because it was bad for the amount of time I can dedicate to my site. News sites are a beast to handle, at least for me. Why? Because no one cares about the news of yesterday even if you are in a niche, in my case video gaming. Do you care about Diablo III right now? No, its already launched you care about the next game. So when I fall behind my visits drop like a brick. You know how much it sucks spending 30 hours during the weekend catching up and only getting 5 visits a day for the week because it was two week old content?
If I am coming out as bitching I apologize. I am just frustrated. I have spent two years of my life working 8-15 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week and I have accomplished nothing. That fucking sucks. Granted I have learned a lot, but I am tired of learning from failure. I want to learn from success. Since everyone speaks in code and hides what they do I have no real examples to base my stuff on. These are the tribulations of not making it. I am OK with this, and I am stubborn enough to keep trying over and over again until I get it.
Why am I going with MFAs? Because Lukep is the only person that has come out and actually said what they did and how it works. Everyone else speaks in fucking riddles. I understand why, but it still sucks.
Based on my experience in trying to learn new things I know that right now to you or to other people it might seem obvious. You can build 100 sites and 80 of them will succeed. Based on my experience it looks like a mountain that I keep climbing. Does this make sense?
I understand MFAs have a huge danger zone...actually multiple
1. Its all Google based
2. They can all drop at the same time
3. Multiple sites = multiple pains
Having said that the way I see it is, if I work on 10 MFAs and they totally blow I would have wasted minimum time on them. I can also experiment, put 124321434 links on one site in one day and see what happens. Right now I experiment with the "big" sites I build which is dangerous and a lot more time consuming than a stupid MFA site with 5-10 pages worth of content.
I see MFAs as a gateway to allowing me to stop having a full time job. Then I can work on legit sites. If you have any better ideas I am all ears.
Guerilla, I totally respect your opinion and knowledge. When you had your webinars I came twice on each one of them in case I missed something. It comes down to this, I can have all the knowledge in the world but if everything I do fails I cannot call myself a success. Does that make sense?
Wow. I'm sorry for what you're going through, I could only imagine.. This post has really made me analyze even more (I've already thought about it) the time I'm putting in during the week and weekends which is separating me from my family.
Is there anybody else who works a 9-5 while trying to establish a business? I'd like to develop a plan to be just as productive but gain enough time to spend with my family. My daughter is going to be 3 and want to make it a goal to spend more time with her and my wife.
I need to develop some sort of hybrid plan that allows my productivity to be the same but loosens time for my family as well. That way our business grows and so does our family. Thanks for sharing your story. It's definitely an eye opener.
Is there anybody else who works a 9-5 while trying to establish a business? I'd like to develop a plan to be just as productive but gain enough time to spend with my family. My daughter is going to be 3 and want to make it a goal to spend more time with her and my wife.
I need to develop some sort of hybrid plan that allows my productivity to be the same but loosens time for my family as well. That way our business grows and so does our family. Thanks for sharing your story. It's definitely an eye opener.
I made similar mistake as well with my first online venture. I didn't calculate how annoying it was to keep putting up streaming links to anime once a site takes them down.
The thing is, you're in the online world where if you realize that you don't have enough manhours in the day and are doing a repetitive task (in your case, finding news), then you automate it.
Tie into the RSS feeds of other gaming sites, game manufacturers, etc. Anything relating to a category on your site, toss it in there if it has a few keywords. There's a lot of WP plugins that will automate posting based on RSS feeds. Such as WPRobot.
Good 5K post dude. +rep.
For all of the married guys on here, and especially the ones with kids, this is extremely important. I have been fortunate to have a very understanding wife who supports my entrepreneurial mindset and work - but I have also always tried to find a good balance between family and business so I think/hope that has saved some peace as well.
Like you said - all the money in the world ain't worth shit if you end up losing priceless time with the people who matter the most to you. I'd rather be 60 and broke knowing that I spent quality time with my kids when they were little - than be a sad, rich old bastard with bitter thoughts questioning myself why I didn't do more when I could. They only grow up once.
For all of the married guys on here, and especially the ones with kids, this is extremely important. I have been fortunate to have a very understanding wife who supports my entrepreneurial mindset and work - but I have also always tried to find a good balance between family and business so I think/hope that has saved some peace as well.
Like you said - all the money in the world ain't worth shit if you end up losing priceless time with the people who matter the most to you. I'd rather be 60 and broke knowing that I spent quality time with my kids when they were little - than be a sad, rich old bastard with bitter thoughts questioning myself why I didn't do more when I could. They only grow up once.
There are plenty of real examples of success out there to learn from. Here are 2 with hundreds of profitable sites you can study and get ideas:
Flippa > Advanced Search > Net Profit $1000+/month
And
Latona's Website Brokerage - Established Websites for Sale
It's all about persistence. If you keep working hard at a site, keep building content, keep working on links, keep going back and optimising for SEO, keep analysing your stats, keep reaching out to people in your niche, eventually you'll get that one piece of luck that transforms your website overnight.
In depth: How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner (and what's next) (Wired UK)
Is an example of Angrybirds. They made 51 games before Angry Birds became an overnight success.
Your perception of success is skewed by the media, because you only hear of the site going from 1 visitor to 1 million overnight and so forth. You don't hear about the years of hard work before it, because it's just not newsworthy.
It applies to virtually all businesses, most people just don't have the persistence to pull it off, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with having a job or anything else. Being successful working for yourself takes a ton of work and self discipline over years to get much anywhere. If you want to make a success of a site you shouldn't just give up at 300 links, or anything else. You work week for week, and at the end of each week you need to be able to say "my website is better than it was a week ago". Eventually, providing you're in a monetisable niche, you'll get there.
Taking a week off work and heading out tomorrow for a week with my Wife and Daughter to visit the Grandparents.
Very glad to be going especially after this post, thanks!
Your attitude sucks. You have learned a lot. You didn't reach your goals, but you're much more capable of doing it now than you were two years ago.
People don't like to pay their dues, but that's part of the game. The last thing I worked on, everybody started thinking they were a rockstar, and they didn't have to put in the sweat anymore. And things fell apart.
The most successful people in the world work very hard every day. They aren't coasting.
Failure is not doing or trying hard enough. Working hard and coming up short is an opportunity to learn and grow.
I think you believe it's easy for everyone to make it, and that success is linear. It isn't. I don't think most people get how much work it takes to make something great, and how rare a big break is. And conversely, how many people here barely make $50k a year.
I was up until 3.00 AM screenshotting competitor sites and making notes about each screenshot. 5 months in. On a Sunday night. Do I know my next project will be fantastically successful? Hell no. It might flop horribly. But I refuse to give up. I'll pivot it, which is what you should have done with your news site as soon as you recognized the flaw in your model.
I'll say it one more time. There is no one who is great who doesn't work and has worked very hard at it. They didn't give up, they didn't feel sorry for themselves (as you are) and they didn't throw in the towel and do something futile.
You're welcome to do the MFA thing. But if you're looking for something low impact so you can fail small, you're doing it all wrong.
Get your head straight. Find your nuts. Be determined. Fuck everybody else.
Or you can be a slave to your self-defeating attitude.
It's your life.
Great post eliquid!
I thought this way at one time too. The difference is I only build quality sites. I think even my lowest quality site is higher quality than the average MFA. I'm not saying this to be arrogant. I just want to point out that Adsense isn't a good strategy even when you have high quality sites.
I thought I would be able to leverage the income from these sites to invest in a more long-term, stable business. I had 10-15 sites lose 90% or more of their traffic after Penguin. Luckily, another site started making enough to replace the income from the other sites. However, I have learned my lesson from losing rankings on so many sites at once. I'm refocusing my efforts on two sites that won't rely on Google as much. One is a membership site. The other is a content site. The content site is currently monetized with Adsense and traffic is from SEO, but I'm working on building a mailing list and the topic has a lot of related affiliate products. It will take a few years to build up the site to its full potential, but I've seen what a site in this niche can earn so it will be worth it.
I'm less successful than many on here, so you may want to take my advice with a grain of salt. I do make a full-time living online, but I was kind of forced into it after being laid off a few years ago. If you want to build content sites, I recommend finding an evergreen topic instead of something time sensitive. Alternatively, find a way to make your existing project more evergreen. This should allow you to focus your efforts on things that get you more traffic instead of just trying to keep up to date with news. I don't think it's bad to use Adsense in the beginning, but try to find a niche that can be monetized in other ways too (affiliate, direct ads, digital products, etc.).
I don't know how much time you invested in building links, but you might be able to get traffic more easily by focusing on content and onpage SEO. If you find something broad enough, there should be a huge number of longtail keywords. Create high quality content to target as many of these phrases as you can. Focus on getting your on-page optimization perfect. You need to spend a lot of time on keyword research to do this right. My experience has been that anything below 35 CI in serpIQ is generally easy to rank with just on-page (in my niches anyway). You won't rank #1 most of the time, but you will often rank on the first page. This is enough to start getting some traffic without spending much time or money on link buildng. You should still build links, but try comparing the results of doing content and on-page SEO alone and then with some link building added.
I have no idea if this strategy will work for you, but I've been seeing faster increases in traffic from good content plus on-page optimization than I ever did when I outsourced or did my own link building. The content site I mentioned above has had no links built to it other than posts I've made on Twitter, Google+, and other social sites. I'm currently getting decent traffic even though the site is only about a month old. This obviously won't work as well in a niche that is too small or competitive.
I thought this way at one time too. The difference is I only build quality sites. I think even my lowest quality site is higher quality than the average MFA. I'm not saying this to be arrogant. I just want to point out that Adsense isn't a good strategy even when you have high quality sites.
I thought I would be able to leverage the income from these sites to invest in a more long-term, stable business. I had 10-15 sites lose 90% or more of their traffic after Penguin. Luckily, another site started making enough to replace the income from the other sites. However, I have learned my lesson from losing rankings on so many sites at once. I'm refocusing my efforts on two sites that won't rely on Google as much. One is a membership site. The other is a content site. The content site is currently monetized with Adsense and traffic is from SEO, but I'm working on building a mailing list and the topic has a lot of related affiliate products. It will take a few years to build up the site to its full potential, but I've seen what a site in this niche can earn so it will be worth it.
I'm less successful than many on here, so you may want to take my advice with a grain of salt. I do make a full-time living online, but I was kind of forced into it after being laid off a few years ago. If you want to build content sites, I recommend finding an evergreen topic instead of something time sensitive. Alternatively, find a way to make your existing project more evergreen. This should allow you to focus your efforts on things that get you more traffic instead of just trying to keep up to date with news. I don't think it's bad to use Adsense in the beginning, but try to find a niche that can be monetized in other ways too (affiliate, direct ads, digital products, etc.).
I don't know how much time you invested in building links, but you might be able to get traffic more easily by focusing on content and onpage SEO. If you find something broad enough, there should be a huge number of longtail keywords. Create high quality content to target as many of these phrases as you can. Focus on getting your on-page optimization perfect. You need to spend a lot of time on keyword research to do this right. My experience has been that anything below 35 CI in serpIQ is generally easy to rank with just on-page (in my niches anyway). You won't rank #1 most of the time, but you will often rank on the first page. This is enough to start getting some traffic without spending much time or money on link buildng. You should still build links, but try comparing the results of doing content and on-page SEO alone and then with some link building added.
I have no idea if this strategy will work for you, but I've been seeing faster increases in traffic from good content plus on-page optimization than I ever did when I outsourced or did my own link building. The content site I mentioned above has had no links built to it other than posts I've made on Twitter, Google+, and other social sites. I'm currently getting decent traffic even though the site is only about a month old. This obviously won't work as well in a niche that is too small or competitive.
