Leaving The Day Job

Archive for the ‘motivation’ Category

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I’ve been working on my bandwagon-jumping discount code site this evening. One of the main incentives for doing this kind of site is the opportunity to get a lot of traffic purely through organic search. PPC affiliates have long been banned from brand name bidding but there’s not a lot merchants can do to stop affiliates optimising for their brand name.

So I’ve been working on the usual kind of things : slapping the merchant name all over the page, giving “helpful” hints about how the visitor might have misspelt the brand name, sticking in various permutations of the brand name and various synonyms for “discount”.

Crossing the line

It’s all making me wonder whether I’ve crossed the line from optimisation into keyword stuffing. Let’s face it the distinction is fairly small. It’s kind of like the distinction between “tax avoidance” and “tax evasion” : one is a legitimate way of using the rules to your advantage; the other is advantageously ignoring the rules. Either way the aim is the same but it’s hard to put your finger on where the line is crossed.

So it is with search engine optimisation. Where do you stop legitimately optimising and where do you start stuffing keywords? I’ll assume that dodgy old tricks like white-on-white text are too obviously dumb to even warrant discussion.

Learning to read

One way to distinguish is to try reading your own copy as if you were a regular visitor to the site. Chances are that it’s going to sound a bit stilted with all your keywords shoe-horned in there but if it still makes sense and doesn’t scream out “I’m a shopping list of keywords” then you’re probably still on the right side of optimisation.

Another favoured technique is to use software to analyse the keyword density of your pages. This technique is particularly favoured by the producers of keyword analysis software!

Most serious SEO experts would caution against relying too heavily on this kind of software. After all, how do the people who make the software know precisely what the search engines are looking for? They can only use trial and error research the same as the rest of us. Search engine algorithms are being tweaked all the time. Trying to second guess which change on the page lead to which change in the rankings is pretty much guaranteed to introduce a large margin of error.

If a piece of software really was able to guarantee a rise in search engine position it would sell like hotcakes. Everyone would end up using the same techniques and any advantage would soon disappear as all your rivals will be producing almost identical pages to your own.

The way forward

Which leaves us with guesswork, patience and skill. In my quest to leave the day job I’ve thought that I could read up on everything I needed to know about affiliate marketing, apply it and be successful. I’m realising now that it’s not just knowledge that’s required but skill as well and skill is something you can’t be taught, you need to practice until you can do it without thinking. It’s depressing because there’s no short cut, no easy win, no get-rich-quick. But it’s inspiring too precisely because it’s tough - anything that’s worth doing is going to be hard work and the sense of satisfaction at succeeding is going to be all the greater.

It was June of last year when I set up this blog and, at the time, “Leaving The Day Job” seemed like an achievable goal. I was hoping that by the end of the year I’d be free from the 9 to 5 yoke.

Yet here I am, eight months later, still working in the same day job with no sign of ever making it into even part-time self-employment let alone taking the plunge full-time.

So what went wrong?

Well, it turns out to be harder than I might have imagined to make money online. I had a bit of luck initially and made about 50% of my monthly salary in my first month as an affiliate. And I thought that was it. I thought I was a genius. Of course, it turned out that what I was doing (advertising gambling on Google) was a bit naughty and the big G caught up with me and cut off that lucrative revenue stream.

After that I tried numerous other ideas but they all had one thing in common. I wasn’t doing anything original. The usual suspects: dry, me-too, feed-driven sites; Adwords landing pages; gambling; insurance; mobile phones. And I wasn’t doing any of them particularly well.

Most of the time I was recycling retailers’ copy from their product feeds or when I did write my own copy I did it with little to no regard for SEO or indeed coherency to the reader. I wasn’t writing salesy copy, I wasn’t pre-selling the product, I wasn’t adding any value.

Of course, I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong. It just seemed too hard. I knew I was getting it wrong but nothing I tried seemed to work. Despondency kicked in.

I don’t take well to failure. I don’t like not being able to do something. If I can’t do something right first time I tend to give up and sulk. Needless to say this isn’t a very helpful attitude when you’re trying to be self-employed. There’s no one there to tell you to get on with it. If you give up, the whole enterprise falls.

Meanwhile, at the day job, things weren’t going well. The company’s doing poorly but not so poorly that there’s any immediate threat of redundancy. So I’m feeling dragged down but without the fear of unemployment that might give me a kick up the arse to get on with my own thing.

Christmas came and I had some success with Facebook Ads, doing direct to merchant for one particular merchant. I closed out December with a profit of several hundred pounds. Better than nothing but nowhere near as good as I had hoped.

January was cold and barren. Motivation at an all time low. This is the point at which I could have given up.

Then something happened. Spring sprung. The world started to wake up a little. The mornings and the evenings were a little lighter every day. I started to see where I was going wrong. I had been looking for the quick win. Looking for a get rich quick scheme then running off after another idea when the first one didn’t start to deliver in time. I realised no one else was going to do this for me. Friends were starting to say that they didn’t think I had it in me to succeed in this business. That did it. If there’s one thing I hate more than failure it’s people telling me I can’t do something.

So I have renewed enthusiasm and a new strategy. It’s all about the content. My goal is at least one new posting on one (preferably more) of my sites every day. Every day do one thing that will add value to one of my sites.I’ve got a new site which is soft-launching at the moment. I’ll blog about it in a few days when things should hopefully have started rolling a bit more.

I think the theme of this blog will be shifting a bit as well. I’ve got away from telling the story of my efforts to leave the day job and been blogging more general affiliate stuff recently. I’m intending to go back to my roots and talk more about the ups and downs of getting started. Expect more coverage of motivation, organisation and fitting self employed work in around fulltime employment and the demands of friends, family and household chores.

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My affiliate activities have been having a big sleep in a cave with a hibernating bear since some time in mid-December. I’ve found it nigh on impossible to get myself motivated again. My motivation has been at a low and my self-doubts have been on a high. With that in mind I’ve been finding some blog postings that relight my fire and thought I’d share them here for the benefit of anyone else hitting the winter slump.

Some Day Never Comes - John Chow. John tackles the topic of deadlines. If you don’t set deadlines on your projects they just drift and you never get round to turning them into realities.

Do You Think Like A Winner - Alan Johnson. Guest posting on John’s blog, Alan tells us how winners differ from losers and how to make your blog or website stand out from all the other also-rans.

Want to succeed? Get off your ass and work - Shoemoney. A guest post at Shoemoney.com tells it like it is - and like us procrastinators hate to hear because we know it’s right

You Will Not Make Money Online - 45n5.com. In this videoblog Mark tells us in his usual fast-talking, straight-to-the-point style why we’re all going to fail at this internet money making lark. 99% of people who try are going to fail, you need to really work hard to be in the other 1% and if you’re not prepared to put that work in you’re going to stay with the 99s.

Those certainly worked for me as I’ve started work on my first new website of the year. It’s very nearly February and 2008 has finally got started!