Hi everyone! It’s been SO long since I’ve updated my blog here, and I thank those who sent messages or made comments asking about my whereabouts recently.
There are a variety of reasons for the long absence. But most generally, once my son was out of school for the summer, I found that between camping trips, spending time at the beach and just general life issues, I had almost no time to work on my business.
Well, in all honesty, I probably could have made some time, but I also just needed a break from IM related stuff. This was also probably partially related to a bit of disappointment from seeing many of my websites hurt by the Penguin update. But I also hadn’t taken a real break from the business since I started three years ago – and it was good to take some time to rest and re-evaluate things.
However, my son (now almost 5!) just started Kindergarten this week, and I’m finally climbing on top of work related things once again. I get four whole hours four mornings a week to work now! I haven’t had this long of a break from my son since he has been born, and it is taking some getting used to – but I’ve been putting the hours to good work so far.
In particular, I’ve been looking at traffic stats and experiment results from those sites most hurt by the Penguin update. And I can tell you that there has been very little improvement from any of these sites since April 25th. I have been running a variety of experiments (which I’ve discussed previously over my email list) diversifying my anchor text on Penguin affected sites (which I’m convinced was the problem for most of them). But until there is a Penguin refresh, I won’t know if any of these experiments have worked or not.
Right now, I’m tired of waiting to see what happens (and in all honesty, not too optimistic that they will work once there is one!). But I’m also not giving up. I know that SEO is not nearly as reliable as it once was, but I do still love free traffic from Google. So I’m not giving up on SEO either, although I’m definitely branching out to other projects.
So I have started several new courses of action, and I also recently hired a full time VA (Philippines based) who is working with me (and he’s working out great as well!), Between us we are quite busy and now getting A LOT done.
Right now one of my main focuses is “recreating” some of my previously most profitable sites (pre-Penguin). To do this, I’m having my content from my most profitable sites rewritten (using The Content Authority and writers on oDesk
And so far, I’m seeing very good results from these efforts – and I’m getting quite excited!
One of the best things of this approach, is that by redoing these sites I have an opportunity to make the new sites better than the old ones. Additionally, since the sites I’m recreating are ones that I know are profitable (they converted quite well before Penguin, and many of them still get sales and traffic from Bing and Yahoo), having multiple sites in these niches is a good idea more generally. If any of the older sites do come back later on (after a Penguin refresh), that would be icing on the cake – but I’m not counting on this.
Regarding building backlinks: I know a lot of people have been shy (myself included) about building backlinks – especially if they got slapped hard (like me) from the Penguin update. But I have to say: Building backlinks still works, and is still necessary. You just need to be very smart and extra careful about how you go about doing it. (I might add that I have a few sites that I’ve built over that past months that I’ve done no backlinking to at all – and they are going nowhere in terms of rankings).
The good news is that I’m finding it’s actually easier to rank new sites now than it has been previously . Some of my new sites (less than a month or two in age) are ranking low on page one for keywords with little more effort than some Social Monkee bookmarks and a few relevant niche articles linking back (using my Private Blog Network and occasional Fiverr gigs).
I haven’t got any sites high on page one yet for their main keywords – that may be much harder or take much longer – but it does seems much less effort is needed to get to lower page one results than was needed before. And given that I’m now diversifying my anchor text, I’m getting more long-tail traffic as well than I used to get previously.
My second focus is ramping up my vendor activity and developing my own digital products. I’m now working on another ebook (hobby related, not related to internet marketing at all) that I hope to release (most likely on ClickBank) by the end of the month. I’ve set myself a personal goal of creating one new ebook a month for the remainder of the year.
I’ve also toyed with the idea of publishing Kindle books – but have decided to put this on the back- burner for now, mainly because it seems everyone and their dog is doing this right now and that doesn’t feel sustainable to me (although it is clear many people are doing quite well with this!).
I haven’t updated my income spreadsheets so I don’t yet have my income/expense figures for the summer months (I must do that soon!) but I can say that my earnings continued to decline throughout the summer months, as I did almost nothing in those months. However, just in the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen some increases again – mostly due to my VA efforts and also a general uptick in traffic that happens when summers end. Anyway, once I get those figures updated, I’ll post them here – although the numbers will likely be quite disappointing. In terms of expenses, I had little in terms of expenses for June and July, but I do know I spent over $1000 in August on outsourcing, website purchases and content (August will likely be negative in terms of income to expenses – fortunately I had some supplemental money coming in from another source not related to my business at all).
Anyway, that’s all for now – must get back to work! But I did want to let you all know that I’m still alive, still working and still optimistic about the future! I hope to be active again here as well – most likely on a weekly basis – now that I have all this time on my hands.
And do please leave a comment below and let me know how things are going for you!
- Michelle
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