I am WORN OUT and tired of SEO

It strikes me that you are experiencing what many offline businesses are experiencing: margins are getting tighter. People have to do more and usually earn less as thanks.

A question: are your backlinks getting you quality traffic? As mentioned elsewhere, Google has stated that their aim is to provide quality answers to their searcher's questions. That goes for your sites too. In terms of backlinking, good quality traffic means people who come to your site and stay around. Oh, and buy too.

What are your thoughts on this?

There's defiantly more to life than SEO, SEO is a single source of traffic. You said you did the forum thing, not sure what you did but there's money in forum traffic (not talking IM forums). You said your in the employment niche, what does that mean, is your traffic looking for an employer because that would probably never be able to get repeat traffic. Usually when someone has a 9-5 job they stick with it until forced to look for another job, not the ideal traffic source IMO.

Whoa. Careful of generalizing. Your lack of success does not translate to anyone other than you.

It's important to blame yourself for your failure. When you assume it's part of a worldwide trend - you're letting yourself off the hook.

The bottom line is it takes more effort than ever to make money online. I blame it on the recession. As more people lost money offline they turned to the Web to make ends meet. Most of these people learned the same 'IM tricks' that were making all of us easy money.

That means it's time to adjust.

You're running a business online. Businesses advertise. Forget 'pure SEO' and build a profitable sales funnel that uses multiple traffic sources - including paid ones - to make money.

As to your question about whether people still make money. Yes, my 'pure SEO efforts' still bring $60K yearly - down from a 2007 high of $230k.

You can build a site with 5 great articles, fact remains that it's still a very thin affiliate site, no matter what quality of the content, not sure if that's the case but sure to consider.

Besides that I miss quality links in your back link profile. Ranking based on some video submisison, blog comments, bookmarking and forum posting won't get you far. And the guest post sites that you used, we need numbers to say anything usefull about that. If you just did 2 guest posts at PR1 sites that get spammed all day long cause they are in some guest post network then it still equals close to nothing.

First of all cross check the activities done for your website related to offsite for which you have to cross check your webmaster tools of your account, list out keywords in the notepad and upload it in disallow option of webmaster tool. At the same time, you need to cross check for content in your website and review title, description and keywords for website and thoroughly work on onsite changes.

Actually, it has always been that a very, very small percentage of IM'ers are actually making a living online. That has never changed.

I would recommend out sourcing your SEO to a local company near you, a company with a building and employees - that way you will know that your site is at least in good hands and you should see some improvement

A lot of sites got hit because of poor seo, too much focus on anchor keywords and less focus on natural looking profiles

Its easy to get sucked into a sales page on these forums. Promises of hitting page one in a few months. Your niche is pretty competitive and will need constant, high quality work.

You could always try looking to setting up a different domain it may be easier to rank than your current one, however this is something to discuss with your SEO company

Good luck, stay positive

How are your social media efforts? Are you engaging users on Facebook and Twitter?

No job will ever guarantee you stability, ever. Businesses fire people all the time, and industries shift just the same.

Never put all your eggs in one basket, utilize multiple forms of traffic. Do some research on targeted media buys...

And just and FYI, SEO still works amazingly well. You just have to read past the white noise everyone spews out there. The same methods to rank have remained the same year after year. You need HIGH PR DO-FOLLOW links with diverse anchor text. Everything I know I learned from spending countless hours researching. If you want to build anything in life you must invest time and effort.


Never make fear based decisions. If you do, you'll never succeed in life.

what are your revenue streams? Ads? Affiliate income? Selling your own stuff?

Also, you say you have 150-350 quality articles. How is the internal link structure? Are you focusing way too much on getting backlinks and not enough on internal link structure?

Also, have you ever tried analyzing the quality of the incoming traffic?

I have the answer that you are looking for. The program get your articles ready with SEO and help you get on the first page of the search engines. Go to my traffic website and read the article On-Page SEO to learn how the plugin works.

I agree don't be consumed in fear.

Instead, become consumed in anger. Thats what I typically do.
A week ago I made a thread about how I was getting tired with SEO and was close to giving up.

But then I got angry (like usual) and that anger always keeps me motivated.

For instance. The top competitor in my niche is a scam artist. He has ripped off hundreds of clients in my industry, has a terrible reputation, has had cops called on him just to get him out of peoples houses, but has 2 different sites ranking on page 1 of google. One in position 1 for various keywords, another in position 3.

It makes me laughably angry to see this type of crap.

We own a solid business, have a great reputation, and have to compete with dirt bags like this because google doesn't give a damn. He started SEO 3 years ago and that was a smart decision on his part, regardless of how much I hate his business practices.

But it is stuff like that which really motivates me to keep going. It motivates me to get better backlinks, and do everything in my power that he skipped when he started SEO years ago.

The fact is, I can outrank him, and I will. It will take a lot of time, but in the mean time we have other ways of keeping business rolling in.

With that said, this is what I truely believe is most important.
And that would be 100%, without a doubt, 2 things.

1) The niche you're in.
2) Your own personal definition of "working smart".

Regardless of how strained the economy is, there are still niches that are highly profitable, and not very competitive. And I knew when coming into this I would have some serious disadvantages considering I was a newbie to seo/online marketing in general.

So I knew how important it would be to pick a great niche, that I could monetize really well. And even till this day I can say that has helped me more than anything else I can think of. My marketing works, because there's just not a lot of people targeting this niche. I make decent money, because I'm not competing with too many people.

Don't get me wrong, I'd still love to rank #1 in google for a dozen or so keywords, but for now, I'm able to survive on other abilities. And that is whats really the most important.

Here's a quick story -

My brothers friend lost his business 4 years ago (was in a rare home improvement niche) and wound up getting a divorce with his wife. He started drinking, complaining about how things were getting tougher, how it was so hard to run a business, how the economy sucked etc etc.

Well for 2 years he didn't do much of anything, except drink and complain, and it was really sad to watch his life spiral downward. But he had learned a lot by failing so terribly. For one, he told himself he would never bother with SEO again. Even though that wasn't the main reason his business failed, he just didn't want to touch SEO ever again. What really happened was people were stealing from inside his company, and this was going on for a solid year.

When he found out what was going on, it completely dissolved his entire company.

Long story short, he started a new business in the same exact niche, because he KNEW the niche was a good one, but he never really leveraged his strengths the way he needed. He always thought it was important to become better at things he sucked at, rather than focus entirely on things he was good at. But when he made that 1 simple change, he was able to double the size of his business in only 2 years.

Last year, he took home $250,000, which thoroughly impressed me. And he did all of this without relying one bit on SEO.

His entire sales funnel became:

PPC
Local Search
Direct Mail

Now he's got 5 guys working under him, which has really motivated me to take full control over my own life.

And seeing all this happen, has really made me realize, that if you are failing at ANYTHING in life, that doesn't mean its the end of the world. It probably just means you need to work smarter. As vague as a lesson that is, its probably the most important thing any person can get through their heads.

Myself included.

Sure its tough out there... but what does that mean? Has life ever really been easy?
When things change, you adapt, you work smarter, you become the exception, or you spend the rest of your life complaining about what could have been, what you should have done... if only..

-Red

There are ways to get your SEO done for you so you can do some of the things mentioned here like :

--> building a sales funnel and sending paid traffic
--> check out CPV marketing
--> give up and work a dead end job forever

Unfortunately, if you do option c you'll never get anywhere. Just don't give up, it's tough but if it wasn't everyone would be rich. Innovate, test, keep moving forward... Good luck!

How do you JV SEO?

OP I agree. It angers me seeing people ask you about quality links, etc. IT DOESN'T MATTER. WHEN GOOGLE DECIDES YOUR SITE ISN'T WORTHY OF TRAFFIC, THAT'S IT.

I'm going through the same thing. I'm running around trying to get "bad" links removed, hired a staff writer, and still post at least one unique article per day myself. For some reason Google penalized me from ranking #3 to unranked and everything has stopped. I don't wish this on my worst enemy.

Just take it easy OP, and realize it might be time to move to a different time in your life. Google seems to only be wanting to rank brands and running behind "penguin" and "pandas" to wipe out the little guys. Quite frankly it makes me sick.

Look at the WSO sellers. Emulate them and take advantage of newbies. That's how ppl earn $$$ online these days. Either hire someone to write a program for you or release a "ground breaking" eBook.

Hey Jordan, me and you have talked before, I don't think you should give up at all.

You are targeting an extremely competitive niche, which is good in one way, because that means that there is money to be made.

It's tough taking a hit, especially when your sites drop, and your income goes with it. I would suggest starting out small, target long tail keywords with your seo, and target forums advertising your website.

The great thing about having a webpage is that it costs next to nothing to keep it going. So you don't have to worry too much about the upkeep.

I promise man, that you can start pulling in a good income, it just takes some patience and hard work. Keep trying, stick at your one project, unless you find it impossible, then change to something else, and stick to it.

SEO isn't easy, it's constantly changing, what I would suggest is try to make some income right now (off of forum advertising and things) and then hire some help with the backlinks or SEO.

Just take it one bite at a time, you'll be fine in the end

People do make money from SEO and IM man. I think you are giving up too early. SEO is something you have to constantly keep updated with. The industry can change overnight and what worked yesterday may not work tommorrow.

Start from the basics, analyse your website, on-page optimization, website structure, page load times, landing pages quality, the aesthetic look of the website, conversion rate etc.

Analyse the backlink profile. Where are you getting your links from? It is important these are from relevant sources. Don't do anything stupid like using automated software for your money site. It is better to source web masters who are looking for unique content. Write something engaging for the reader and you should see an increase in traffic which can affect your rankings. You can almost always get a link for these blog posts.

Again go for quality over quantity.

SEO is not the be all end all. Have you look in social media? Create your facebook, twitter, pinterest profile. Get your Google + page profile.

Use analytics. I have found that creating unique content for pages that have high visitors AND HIGH BOUNCE RATE can greatly increase rankings.

Just some things for you to think about. Start from SEO 101.

If you are sick of SEO< then don't do it. I declared on my site a few months ago I was through with it. I now focus on social media. It's bringing more traffic and it's more rewarding to actually connect with other people.

Jordan,

I am in a moderately competitive niche where the main keywords are around 100,000 competition in market samurai. I've managed to rank really well but I've spent money roughly 19k over the last 9 months in press release packages and different tools and articles. I feel a lot of people hit a wall because they don't invest or are afraid to drop some money into their business. You have to invest some to play with the big boys of your niche, at least I had to.

Not to come off as a jerk but I smile when I read threads like this.

Since Penguin I've noticed MUCH less competition.

And as many people pointed out here, SEO still works (how could it not...there are still 10 spots on the SERPs).

You really need to pivot and roll with the punches. If you give up every time Google changes the algo you're in the wrong business.

Me too. It is the most unpredictable of IM things. If it can be of some help I can show you what is helping me now. I am in no ways to sell you anything or give you aff links just ask me and will show you what is getting me some sales almost passively.

I agree!!

I am also tired of SEO for now, that's why I think RicanAdFunds for giving me another online business, at first it's an extra for me but now it became massive income.

again thanks RAF

I would agree that the niche might be too competitive. All great advice here.

Diverse, non-spam link sources + High PR, incontext, relevant backlinks + Social signals

If the above backlink formula can't help then I don't think there is more to it.

Here's something to motivate you. This is THE conversation from the Movie "National Treasure"

Ben: You know, Thomas Edison tried and failed nearly 2,000 times to develop the carbonized cotton-thread filament for the incandescent light bulb.
Riley: Edison?
Ben: And when asked about it, he said "I didn't fail; I found out 2,000 ways how not to make a light bulb," but he only needed one way to make it work. [sets down a book in front of Riley] The Preservation Room. Enjoy. Go ahead. Do you know what the preservation room is for?
Riley: Delicious jams and jellies?
Ben: No, that's where they clean, repair, and maintain all the documents and their storage housings when they are not on display of in the vault. Now, when the case needs work, they take it out of the vault and directly across the hall and into the Preservation Room. The best time for us or Ian to steal it would be during the gala this weekend, when the guards are distracted by the VIPs upstairs; but we'll make our way to the Preservation Room, where there is much less security.
Riley: Well...uh...Ian...Preservation, hmmmm. Well, this might be possible.
Ben: It might.

I hope this will cheer you up... Besides there are few words in here that can be of use in online business, seo, IM, CPA etc..

Good luck to your decision man.

keep your head up dude. You just haven't found your scheme yet. You're like a rock band in the 60's right now, you know you have to stick to it.

sounds like you have a "kitchen nitemares" situation, if you don't watch or know the show, celebrated chef (his food isn't that good btw, i've paid hundreds for a soso meal in his ny restaurant, never again) goes to distressed restaurants and fixes them. The problem is most of the owners "stick to their old ways of working" "it worked before why not now?" is usually the problem.