When I started on my internet journey about four years ago, my goal was to help. I wanted to help people looking for my services find me online and contact me easily. I also wanted to provide my English students with quality content and resources for learning English . My goal wasn't to make money at all.
Of course my students found the site useful and they gave me feedback on it as well including topics they wanted to learn more about so I spent extra time (unpaid) to add that content. Although they were enjoying the site and using it for taking tests I was worried since it was a big expense for me. You may not think about $10-20 dollars a month for hosting is much, but it adds up fast when you don't have a formal job and what about when they cancel classes? How will I maintain the site then?
That's about the point I got sidetracked. I added Adsense, saw my traffic increase as I added original content, and saw about 5 or 6 dollars at the end of the first complete month. I was excited, but I wondered what I could do to actually earn enough to make it worth enhancing the site with more material. Just meeting the hosting and perhaps the domain renewal costs didn't seem like enough since I was spending a couple hours a day researching each topic before writing since they were mostly English grammar and vocabulary pages.
I started experimenting with different ad systems some of which don't even exist today. Then I learned about affiliate marketing and learned how to program in PHP with to set up datafeeds of related products. When Sales started to roll in on my product pages I was excited. No it wasn't a huge amount, but it was enough to get excited.
It wasn't much later that Google revised its ranking system to reduce in ranking affiliate sites that used product datafeeds so all that time spent on learning how to add feeds to my sites was wasted and sites with feeds (normally as a page link in the menu bar) dropped in ranking including all the original content. I admit I got depressed and frustrated and gave it a break for about a year and a half. The only thing I did was drop many of my experimental sites as their domain registration came up for renewal. I knew content should be my focus, but I've always been afraid of writing. I really am a little embarrassed by my writing quality so I was always hesitant.
When I had created those experimental niche sites I was planning on using my income from the sales to pay experts to write articles on those topics, but since everything dropped, I was almost ready to give up.
A few months ago I started re-evaluating my online activities and my goals. What do I want to do with my websites? What is their purpose? Do I want to be a sales person or do I want to help others? I realized that a big part of why I stopped working on my sites for a few months is that I wasn't helping with the changes and my original reason was to help my students.
What about you? Are you helping others with the content on your websites or are you just pushing and pre-selling products? Sure, selling is creative and great, but I'll now leave product catalogs to the merchants and the affiliates who are lucky enough to have "authority sites" or who want to rewrite all the product descriptions one by one.
The new changes in search engine rankings come at the right time for me. Now I have a chance to start ranking for keywords that were dominated by the content farms. Think about the change as an opportunity to express and share your passions.
What about me? I'm going back to my passion for teaching English (on and off-line), sharing my mistakes, and what I learn about online business. I also take breaks from that to work on my visual artwork which I sell online at Zazzle and other sites because I love creating art. it is my other passion.
What's your focus selling or helping others?
No comments:
Post a Comment