How many years have you been working in IM and what's been the biggest change?

By changes - what do you mean. For example: started as SEO marketer and end up as SMM? Or what do you mean by changes?
If we are talking about certain niche (for example SEO) that did change. What people did 10 years ago and what they do now are 2 different sets of actions I think.

I have been in this industry for 8 years now.

What changed on the Internet? Back then, it was so easy to rank a website for a keyword. Now, there are so many competitors and the focus is now on quality.

What changed inside me? Well, I got used to failure. Yes. It took me 8 years to learn the ropes and figure things out. I lost money. There was even a point where I lost everything. But now, my mind is clear and I know where to go and what to do.

If I can give an advice, I would suggest to focus on action. Don't overthink stuff and just do it. If it turns out to be wrong, you can always go back and tweak things until you get it right. The people who get ahead are those who act. It is better than just staying up reading things. Act on every guide. And don't be afraid to fail.

pre 2006 was a cake walk compared to now.

the world is built on debt. After 2008 crisis that dried up and had a huge knock on effect into every business.Corporate got hit big, banks got hit, retail got hit.

Pre 2005 you could rank a squeeze page in a couple of days, build a list and make sales right away.

"Glory days.."

Your customers are now your competitors.

Going on almost 10 years now.

I think when I started the thing was the backlink spamming. It was huge and there were many businesses in here promoting it...forum backlink spamming, blog spamming, social media spamming.

It still remains around to a certain extent and a few make some money out of peddling their crap services but it is nothing like it once was



- Robert Andrew

I started six years ago. The biggest change for me is that most of my clients now come through Facebook.

Rose

I can talk in overall view about the industry. And because the industry's changed, the techniques have changed.

Back then, there were a few IM guys making money selling IM stuff and everybody else was trying to use that knowledge to build their own legitimate business. Nowadays everyone is trying to use their IM knowledge to sell IM stuff to other IM newbies/wannabes.

There's way less people building legitimate business nowadays. Just a bunch of "affiliates" passing around the same stuff and trying to get a bite of the commission, because that's much easier than building a completely new service/product.

I've been online for more than 10 years trying to make money. A few successes along the way but a shit load of failures along the way. The biggest change for me. I'm starting to make money. Not much but I'm making money. The only way now is up.

-Paul.

The biggest change in the last few years, I would say it's the fact that you can longer rank crappy websites in Google with a couple of backlinks...

Or possibly you can, but it doesn't last long (maybe a few weeks?) and then you're gone. However, up until probably around 2012, you could buy an EMD, build some contextual backlinks to it and assuming you didn't go for any crazy keywords, you could expect to rank within 2-3 weeks and you would hold your positions steady without bouncing up and down all the time.

Today, it's a totally different story with ranking in Google....With DA, PA and all that stuff, plus penalties for "over optimization", a complete joke.

The biggest challenge is finding converting traffic at a positive return on investment.

I've been doing SEO for a long time now the thing is that when it comes to offpage optimization there are only few techniques left for us to do. But this few things are the ones that we need to work hard on, because they are not just for link building it is much more, it needs to be quality and relevant. Gone are the days that quantity over quality, its the other way around now.

I would say that Quality wins now.

It is harder to come up with short term strategies to make money now.

Just take the example of Google. I have a lot of friends that used to be able to rank any websites and make money from term in a short period of time. Now it is much harder because Google changed their Algorithm. To get good rankings now you really need to create high quality content. People that focused on the short therm got wiped out almost completely.

Basically, it is much harder to try to cheat the system to make money now, which is really great news for those that focus on creating high quality content!

And in the future it will be more and more like this.

Hi BlossMart...

Some changes I have noticed over the years.We are more aware of scams, there as more great tools to use, it's easier to build a website to promote our business...
Plus the internet is faster, with more devices to promote our businesses on...

Have a great week...

Almost 29 years. Started posting classified ads on AOL in 1988 for my mailorder business. Business friend/associate built a website for me on Compuserve (anyone here old enough to remember them?) and went full website presence in 1998 after purchasing Corey Rudl's (may he RIP) Internet Marketing Course.

So much has changed - my greatest successes were from 1998 thru 2006. I did not use any black hat, grey hat or any hat for that matter and could create a web page for the products and services I offered in HTML and have it ranked for the main and often secondary keywords on page one position 1 thru 3 within 3 days of uploading.

In addition to the tremendous amount of changes that have taken place over the years since 1998 and the entire change of my business model due to suppliers retiring and need for their products being eliminated due to the Internet, I am now mostly retired with just a fraction of a web presence that I will probably be selling within the next year as I move into full retirement mode.

I still have a great interest in what the Internet offers and the many different options available to those who wish to pursue it's use for a living and that is why I lurk around WF and offer to review certain WSO's that peak my interest.

Suffice it to say, so much has changed as I reached my 'older' age that I know longer have the will or energy to keep up with it all but enjoy reading about those who have embraced the changed and succeeded.

Budgets come and go and companies do too.