Don't Spread Yourself Too Thinly, Plus Some Personal History

byMarcus1978

4.1K followers

Updated 7 years ago

Today I want to talk to you about how you decide where and how to spend your time. But first, a little bit of history about my own journey here...

As you may or may not know, this is not my first attempt at internet marketing. I've been a member of WA in the past, but that's only part of my internet marketing story:

1. In 2008 I came across Travis Sago's Bum Marketing Method. This is what first got me into "article marketing", and I played around with USFreeAds, Ezine Articles and Squidoo. I found a bunch of other guides and information relating to it too.
2. In February 2009 I joined Wealthy Affiliate. I set up a website that promoted Travis's The Magic of Making Up. It never quite worked out though, and I think by 2010 I had left WA.
3. In June 2009 I bought PotPieGirl's One Week Marketing. Very good guide, but I never quite achieved the success I'd hoped for.
4. In November 2009 I bought Google Sniper. What a big load of overblown rubbish that turned out to be. George Brown is a scam artist.
5. In December 2009 I created yeast-free-dietsDOTcom (I no longer own that website). I had a bunch of recipe ideas on there and I promoted a Clickbank ebook. I steadily made a small amount of money from this, because my content was genuinely helpful and the book was pretty good. After a few years I closed the website down though because it just didn't quite seem worth the effort.
6. In February 2010 I joined the Warrior Forum. I learned quite a lot there actually, mostly about what scams to avoid, but also about tools and back-links. It's a bit like a free version of WA, but where you're more likely to pursuaded to buy other peoples make money online guides. Which leads me onto:
7. In March 2010 I bought the Profitzon course (created by a Warrior Forum member), which taught me how to create niche product review websites selling Amazon products.
8. In April-August 2010 I spent time putting the Profitzon course into action and created a whole bunch of niche websites. I put a lot of effort into these websites, but my mistake was setting up too many in a short period. However, I did make sales, but just not enough to justify the time and money I spent doing it.
9. In September 2010 I bought the Amazonian Profit Plan course, which was just a variation on the same theme, but pushing it to a higher level focusing on higher priced products. I did actually have a few high commissions resulting from this.
10. In October 2010 I learned more about back-linking. For several months I had a pretty solid routine where I would create a lot of manual back-links for my niche websites by writing content for Squidoo, Ezine Articles, etc. It worked quite well.
11. In 2011 things got a bit dodgy. I started getting into automated back-linking tools. This included SENukeX and ScrapeBox. However, the SENukeX I was using was cracked. The crack site turned into a full internet marketing community full of cracked internet marketing tools, so suddenly a whole bunch of us were part of this dangerous community of evil internet marketers. Not only were we using these controversial automated tools, but we were using cracked versions of them! I used loads of different tools. It was the internet marketing equivalent of being in a kid in a warehouse full of stolen sweets (=candy in American English). But it never quite worked out. Eventually, the site got closed down because the cracker guy running the site got into trouble with the law. Seriously. The whole thing suddenly died just as swiftly as it had been born. But before it did come to an end:
12. In 2012 I got a part time job doing SEO for an internet company. At first it went very well, but then suddenly it all went bad. This was partly due to the changes Google made which made all our customers' websites suddenly drop in the ranking. But it was also partly because I didn't like the people I worked with. I wasn't the only person who left there. One guy walked out without giving any notice, another one got sacked, and another one later left to set up his own web design business.
13. Later in 2012 I gave up internet marketing, kind of. Instead, I set up a health website, because that's one of my interests. In hindsight, the niche was too broad. But at least it was something I was interested in.
14. In 2013 I got offered a part-time job as a Website Administrator for an educational charity. My experience with websites had finally paid off. They particularly liked my health website. I spend most of my time running a Moodle-based Virtual Learning Environment. I also look after their WordPress website and blog as well as their social media accounts.
15. In 2014 I started to get frustrated with only being part-time, and started to consider my options for what could fill the rest of my week.
16. In January 2015 I rejoined Wealthy Affiliate. One of the best decisions I've ever made. I can't tell you how far WA has come since 2009.

So what's the moral of this story?

My story is an example of just how much time and energy (and money) can be put into only partially succeeding (and sometimes completely failing). If I was to condense what I have learned into a few key lessons, it would be this:

• Don't spread yourself too thinly - my biggest mistake was setting up too many websites and trying too many different techniques and methods. When I was doing the Amazon niche websites, I set up a lot in different websites, but I never really took a lot of time and care over each individual website.
• Dedicate yourself to making 1 or 2 things work really well before you move onto other things. Pick a course of action that you know you can put a lot into, and stick at it. I think this might even be true with social media sites. For example, I dislike Facebook and Twitter, but I love Pinterest and YouTube. So maybe I'll focus on being really good at what I like, rather than mediocre at everything.
• Quality and genuineness go a long way - provide high quality content to your readers. Set out to genuinely help or inform them. People want genuinely good content, and therefore so does Google. This will never change. Unless Google decides it wants to provide trips to the moon instead of a search engine. That might happen, if they get so big they buy Virgin or NASA. But until then...
• Sneaky tricks soon stop working - many of the techniques I learned in the guides I bought and the advice I read, they were often based on "loopholes" or tricks that involved bending (or breaking) rules and getting away with it. The same is true with software like SENukeX and ScrapeBox. Google has always eventually caught up to all these tricks.
• Wealthy Affiliate has everything you need - this place seriously kicks the butt of everything else I have tried. In all honesty, that wasn't perhaps quite so true back in 2009 when WA had only been going for 4 years. But fast forward to 2015, and Kyle & Carson have really got their sh*t together. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was good back in 2009, but now it is SUPERB!

So please don't go chasing after every latest shiny thing. Just stick to the training and take it steady with one website to begin with. You're only one person.