2,5 years in IM, lessons learned

Hey folks,

I just thought that I would give something back to the community since you have helped me a lot.

So before I tell you what I've learned, I give you a brief overview about my background.

It all started 2,5 years ago when I went to university. I was much of a nolifer. I didn't want to work for anyone, all the money I had came from my parents. However, I spent a lot of time online, I was playing different games, hanging on FB and at some point I realized that I should invest my time more wisely.

I started to look for techniques/strategies how to make money online and my first project were SEO & Clickbank.

I did all the stuff manually, I'm not native speaker & my "review" articles were biased and not well written. My links were complete junk. However, I managed to set up few niche sites and I even managed to rank them on Google. I did get some sales here and there and eventually I sold my first site for $2000 on flippa.

It was my first money ever made online and I felt that this is EXACTLY what I want to do. I quickly become addicted to WF (but didn't register at that time) and kept lurking for more information. At this point I didn't bought any WSO and I only used Google, WF and few other blogs to gain information.

As you might know, there were quite a few google "updates" in the past year so basically everything that I did failed. I was pretty much devastated about it and decided to quit for 2-3 months.

Right after I came back to IM, I tried to make Adsense sites, I tried to make money through PPC (bing/7search). I even tried to sell my own products, but nothing seemed to work very well. After I had failed for another 3-4 months I decided to get back to SEO again. It was like my first love, I was still extremely passionate about it, but I didn't want to get hurt by getting penalized by Google again.

When I realized that I got nothing to lose, I made my first "authority site". All my content was useful/relevant & valuable. I completely forgot the SEO packages, fiverr and other similar crap and started to build links & content extremely carefully.

All my SEO work was done manually (sent e-mails, made relationships with another bloggers, hold contests, generated social shares etc). I didn't build any "fake" links like I used to.

After 3-4 months of being laser-targeted and 100% focused on my site I started to generate sales. And this site is still generating me around $4k+ per month. Considering it's a tonload of money for a university kid without not much previous success, I think it's still pretty good.

After that I made 2 more similar sites and at some point I was generating over $10k per/month. I felt like I'm in heaven. Seriously.

However, 70% of my traffic was generated by Google (still is btw). I quickly realized that this isn't a safe business model and I sold one of my sites for $50k.

I quickly invested some of the money for learning PPC. I think I burned around 10k for testing, learning, failing, testing etc. Eventually I started to make $$$ with PPC as well and my ROI's were starting to increase.

Now my eggs are not in the same basket. I'm making money through PPC & SEO, but I still believe this is not the safest way. I'm still learning PPC although I would like to move on start learning something new to build a really stable and consistent online business.

What I have learned during those 2 years:

• I never bought any WSOs. Just keep reading reputable blogs and sites and eventually you will know what works and what doesn't. There's no point of wasting your money on products. Simply save this money to improve you own sites/strategies.

• Always be LASER-TARGETED. Never jump from one strategy to another unless you have fully mastered it. As I told above, I tried PPC and MFA sites. I failed hard because I wasn't 100% focused. Always take one site/strategy at time.

• There are no shortcuts. You can't make $100 per day starting from tomorrow. Failing and hard work is a real part of making money online.

• Always provide useful content/information. Don't just build sites to make money and to please Google. Make sites for REAL people. You'll be amazed of how many e-mails & social shares you'll start receiving if you are really putting effort in your content.

• Never give up. I've failed, no doubts about it. But failing means learning. Learning means success.

• Quality beats quantity

• You don't need to build list to make over 10k per month. Many people here advise that listbuilding is one of the safest and long-term strategies. It might be true, but there's nothing bad when you don't build list. Even when you decide to build list then be different. I delete 99% of "list" e-mails that I'm receiving.

What else? If you have questions then feel free to ask. I'm not going to reveal much about my sites/strategies. FYI I'm not selling my OWN products (I just don't have them) but I think that people can call me "super affiliate".

Can I make money with the same strategies after 2-3 years? Maybe, I don't know. I just have to keep learning, reading case-studies and that's basically it. I'm far away from knowing everything. I'm still 22.