I did a really dumb thing

There. you just answered it for yourself. Being on the 10th page for anything. You might as well be on the 100th or not there at all. As soon as you really go beyond page 2 for any keyword, pages bounce all over. That's the never - never land part of search results that bounce all over all day long.

You need to start investing in your business. Your internet properties are your business.

If I'm in the growth phase, I will invest at least 50% of profits back into marketing, regardless. I'm a firm believer of taking money and using that money to increase or improve what you have. Some people bank thousands and spend those thousands - and that's fine for them.

I'd prefer to bank a nice sizable monthly check and work on increasing my long-term revenues, through creating new sites, hiring new full-time writers, whatever.

You need something like SERPFOX to track your keyword positions. That's where keyword research comes in. Identify what search terms are going to be profitable for you, and monitor them all. That way, you can base your marketing around keywords which only need smaller pushes to see the traffic coming.

I can tell you're a beginner, and that's cool. But don't get freaked out by dropping rankings because of links from Pinterest. I'd take 5,000 links from Pinterest tomorrow to any of my niche sites due to the social traffic it can bring, which then brings further pins.

The only time you really need to worry about quality is when you're building links. You'll instantly be able to look at something, and just ask yourself, "Is this a high-quality link that I'm building?".

If you're building a site on Weebly with 1 piece of content and a link - that isn't high quality and won't get you anywhere, not even if you repeat the process 500 times.

I've said it here before. I know a guy in my city who build a website based on his passion (fitness & losing weight through challenges). He was a web designer, so very good with photoshop. He made the site, made infographics for every challenge and started to publicize it through social media (pinterest primarily). He had no SEO knowledge, didn't even understand what a link was.

Now, he gets between 500K and 1M pageviews per month, with an Adsense revenue of £25,000/month and however much from paid advertisers like Nike. He has quit his full-time job.

Pinterest fuelled his passion, and turned it into a business. Sometimes, people focus TOO much on the $$$ and TOO little on actually building a decent online resource.