First Page On Google But No Income - The Reality Check
Please note if you’re making any money in IM, click away right now. This tutorial is only designed for newcomers who have finally made it to the first page on Google, but aren’t making any money.
If you’ve spent a lot of money on ebooks, software, and other things hoping to make money on the Internet but haven’t, then this tutorial is for you.
Introduction
There are plenty of ebooks and courses out there that supposedly teach you how to conquer Google and make millions on autopilot. These courses are great for the customers that do manage to make money from them, but what about the customers that don’t? Are they just poor thinkers, slackers, and technofobes? Did they fail to implement some “crucial secret technique”, and that’s why they haven’t made anything?
If you’re one of those people who has tried all of the latest courses and still doesn’t make much (or anything) online, and is also tired of being sold hype - then you’ll find this tutorial useful.
If you’re living comfortably from your online marketing endevours and are quite content with your knowledge, then this tutorial isn’t for you, as you’ll already know everything that’s contained within it.
There is one crowd this tutorial was specifically written for, and that’s those of you who have a site ranked “on the first page of Google” and think that you’re a top SEO expert because of it, but are still puzzled as to why you’re not getting any sales. Perhaps it’s because you haven’t done a Keyword Search to see how many actual searches your term gets a month. If you don’t get many, and no one has ever taught you that ranking on the first page of Google under obscure terms is a waste of time, then I’m afraid you’ve bought into the hype of charlatans, and a lot you’ve learned about Internet marketing is most likely untrue. If you feel this could be you, then this tutorial was written for you especially.
I’m going to be blunt, and to the point about why you’re failing in Internet marketing. I’m not going to tell you that you’re doing well, nor am I going to hype things up and tell you that you’re going to make a lot of money by the end of this tutorial. What you will gain here is one, simple thing - a basic understanding of the psychology behind an Internet marketer. This psychology will be your framework to your future learning and success.
Believe it or not, but the vast majority of people fail at Internet marketing. They buy into hype, it doesn’t work, and then they quit. A simple process, but it goes on all the time, and makes real Internet marketers a lot of money from the hype they sell.
Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of marketers that sell hyped products that are also backed up with good, solid information, that will teach you how to make money if you apply the principles they teach. In fact, hype and a good product should go hand in hand in any form of marketing. The problem is, is that most people who buy these products have no experience in marketing, and therefore fail to grasp why they’re doing what they’re doing, as opposed to just the “how”. Not understanding why you’re doing something is the number one reason you’ll probably fail.
Internet marketing isn’t an easy game when you first start it. It requires time and study, just like any other field of expertise. The word “marketing” in “Internet marketing” actually means that there’s marketing principles involved. Believe it or not, but many “Internet marketers” have no knowledge of marketing fundamentals, and it’s for this reason they lack the ability to recognize untapped niches, how to innovate a new product within the niche, and how to profit from it.
It’s by learning the core basics of Internet marketing that you’ll be able to build up your knowledge and eventually run a successful online business. Until you understand these basics, it’s less likely you’ll become rich from this field.
You’ll find lots of products being sold at various places on the Internet offering training and techniques in order to acquire “first page Google rankings”. The examples the product creators give are of keywords certainly on the first page of Google, however they more often than not (though not always) receive 0 (yes 0) searches a month when checked with the external Google keyword tool. Oddly enough however, people seem to buy these products in the belief that they’re going to be dominating competitive keyword terms that will make them thousands, when even the product creators themselves seem to lack an understanding of what SEO actually is. Never mind not knowing how to find a niche - not knowing how to do a search with the Google Keyword Tool would seem a much more pressing matter.
This isn’t an attack on anyone, or me proclaiming to be better than these product creators, it’s rather just a statement of observable fact which you too can see for yourself.
There are plenty of products that do give examples of genuinely competitive keywords, and these sorts of products are usually created by people who know what they’re talking about, however there are plenty of more products that give examples of ranking under the “first page on Google” for keyword terms that should make people laugh, but for whatever reason make people buy their product instead.
People buying into this sort of hype led me to realise that there’s a massive market of would-be Internet marketers who are being unethically misled, and given the perception that Internet marketing must be no more than a scam. Many newcomers to the field will believe almost anything they’re told when it comes to marketing, and will almost trust anyone as well. If you think you’re one of them - don’t worry, all of us were - when the big red font and testimonials of any sales page would almost force us to just get out our credit card “one more time” for the next latest and greatest fad. Sooner or later however, one realises that the key to making money online doesn’t lie in any secret remedy.
But perhaps you don’t even want to make Internet marketing a full time job, and you have more modest goals to only earn a bit of part time cash? Regardless of your ambitions, understanding a few key principles is crucial to succeeding on the Internet.
The Five Pitfalls
During my time in online marketing, I’ve seen and met a number of people who have wanted to get into the field after hearing all the success stories on the news about marketers running their own online businesses and making millions. Some of these people end up making a sale or two, but ultimately give up their efforts because they can’t make enough money to leave their job. It just “wasn’t what they expected”.
From my personal experience when I was starting out in Internet marketing years ago (and failed multiple times), and my observations of others who fail in this field, it seems there are five crucial pitfalls that will almost guarantee failure. All you need to do is fall victim to one of these five pitfalls and your entire Internet marketing endevours could eventually come to a crashing, permanent halt.
You may not even realise that one or more of the following five pitfalls may apply to you, but read over this section carefully, and honestly, as it’s by consciously looking out for and avoiding these common pitfalls that you’ll have the mindset needed to succeed.
1. Lacking an understanding of basic marketing principles and how they apply online
Most people who get into Internet marketing acquire their knowledge from courses, or free Internet forums, where practical “to the point” strategies of how to make money are taught. People will soon learn about SEO, PPC, setting up a squeeze page, building a mailing list, becoming an affiliate, and even how to sell their own products. After making a few sales, the new marketer will typically think “they’ve finally worked it out” and will simply just replicate what they’ve done, to make more and more sales. Some of these people will go on to do quite well for themselves, however most of them will, inevitably, not succeed in the long run, making at the most a few sales a week.
The reason for this is because these people aren’t marketing, or at least, not consciously. They’re simply repeating a set money making formula that will eventually become obsolete. They will remain incapable of improvising, recognizing untapped, profitable niches, and knowing how to target them correctly. For them, they’ll always be “hanging on” for the next great marketing fad that will generate them a little bit more pocket change, be it site flipping, CPA, or whatever it is.
Understanding the basic principles of marketing, and how these same principles apply to the online world, is absolutely fundamental to your success. Instead of being on the Internet marketing bandwagon full of people using other peoples ideas, you’ll be able to innovate, devise your own marketing strategies, and target niches that haven’t been fully exploited.
Later on in this book under the chapter titled ‘Fundamental Online Marketing Knowledge’ - I will be discussing the basic principles of online marketing that you should be familiar with. By understanding the content in that chapter, you’ll be able to avoid this common pitfall. For now, it’s just important to know that this pitfall exists, and that understanding the core fundamentals of marketing is extremely important if you want to run your own online business.
2. Believing everything you hear
We are a social species. We’ve evolved over hundreds and thousands of years due to our ability to cooperate with one another and work together. Our advanced communication through language is what set is apart from all the other animals and allowed us to ultimately reach the level we’re at today. In order for humans to cooperate and help one another, we need to trust each other. This form of “trust” is instinctual to us, and given the philosophy that it’s best to give people “the benefit of the doubt”, it’s quite obvious that we’d rather trust someone than not trust them, even strangers. This is a marvellous thing, however it does have one negative side effect - we’re born gullible.
It’s not until later on in life that we realise that not everyone can be trusted, and we condition ourselves to stop trusting certain types of people that we may have trusted before. We still nevertheless continue to look to others for advice, even complete strangers, and often take their words to heart. Charlatans, frauds and confidence tricksters play upon this innate will of ours to trust strangers.
So what does a modern charlatan look like? Are they flamboyant, charismatic folk who play their harps in order to lure passers by to purchase wares from their street stall, with their various trinkets and snake oil remedies? Well, believe it or not but some charlatans are still like that, however most have evolved with the times and operate much more subtley. In fact, most charlatans today aren’t even aware that they’re charlatans at all. It’s not even a conscious career decision.
You may be surprised to know that charlatanism isn’t specific to alternative medicine and the field of new age psychic readings. It exists in just about every field of business, including online marketing. You’ve tried those courses which promise to make you tens of thousands over night. You’ve seen those acai berry products supposedly endorsed by non existent experts, with fake testimonials. You’ve heard of those marketers who have made millions from selling useless weight loss tablets who managed to avoid the FTC. Would any of them consider themselves charlatans? Quite the contrary, they’d consider themselves good Internet marketers.
The shocking truth is, is that many successful Internet marketers are only after your money. I’m not here to guru bash, as most gurus are respectable, however this statement shouldn’t come as any real surprise. I know - the loving, positive atmosphere that you’ll find when you hand over your money for the next greatest product is quite therepeutic, however that’s often all it is.
“But I’m an Internet marketer too, surely they’d be honest with their own kind?” - most marketers are honest, just like any other person, however this is the business of making money after all, and increasing one’s brand recognition and reputation leads to more sales. This is a marketer’s main motivation, and many lie, or give advice in areas they know nothing about, in order to maintain their reputation. Teaching you how to really make millions isn’t a motivation for them.
So what does a marketer have to gain by telling you lies as opposed to just being honest? The answer is, is that they often don’t know enough about a certain field in order to be honest. In fact, they most probably don’t even know that they’re even lieing. Perhaps ‘misinformation’ is a better word, as a lie normally involves deception.
Some marketers will often parrot what they’ve heard elsewhere in order to do something as simple as create content for a blog. They probably don’t have any intention of misleading you, it’s rather just a side effect.
Let’s look at some of the common, widely accepted facts in SEO that… well, aren’t really facts -
Supposed Fact: Building backlinks too quickly to your website will result in a penalization.
The Truth: Penalization is a big word, the worst case scenario is often simply link devaluation, not penalization.
Supposed Fact: All new sites in competitive niches can’t be ranked for at least 6 months.
The Truth: New sites in competitive niches often fail to rank quickly due to the niche being competitive, and Google requiring extra trust for new sites that target competitive niches. This is counteracted by building site authority.
Supposed Fact: The Google ‘Sandbox’ definitely exists.
The Truth: The notion of whether a ‘sandbox’ actually exists or not is under debate, and it most likely doesn’t exist. The sandbox is a convenient way to explain to the masses much more advanced Google algorithms.
Supposed Fact: Backlinks from spammy sites will get your site deindexed/penalized
The Truth: The most that will happen is that these links will be ignored, nothing more.
So, if the “Supposed Facts” are mainstream knowledge, what does that have to say about the vast majority of Internet marketers? Obviously, that they’re misinformed.
I’ve created a list below to look at how, and why, people would spread misinformation such as this. It’s divided into two columns “Avenue” and “Benefit”. “Avenue” lists the way the misinformation spreads, and “Benefit” lists how the person spreading the misinformation benefits.
| Avenue | Benefit |
| 1. Blog post giving misinformation (unintentional) | Creates blog content |
| 2. Blog post giving misinformation (intentional) | Creates linkbait generating traffic |
| 3. Reply to question on forum post with wrong answer | Increases post count / Advertising |
| 4. Sell consultancy services giving bad advice | Generates money |
| 5. Create information products with misinformation | Generates money |
| 7. Endorse others who give misinformation | Increase exposure & Reciprocation |
These are just some of the many avenues that misinformation spreads, and some of the benefits for the people that spread it. Once again, it’s important to realise that misinformation doesn’t necessarily spread because of any malicious intent, rather it’s more like a virus of incorrect advice (most likely originating from a blog post creating link bait) that continues to spread from one newcomer to the next due to ignorance.
So in short, to avoid this pitfall, quite simply: don’t believe everything you hear.
3. Failing to test things
This pitfall is an extension from the previous one of “believing everything you hear”. It’s all well and good to now be cautious about what people say, however how do you know who’s telling the truth, and who isn’t? Welcome to the wonderful world of science.
The scientific method is a process whereby you can test things for yourself to acquire new knowledge, or confirm (or show evidence against) existing knowledge. Finding out the truth about things is the goal of science, and we’re going to be using these same principles in Internet marketing to find out what works, and what doesn’t.
First of all, science relies on the forming of a hypothesis. A hypothesis is quite simply a proposed explanation for some phenomenon. It isn’t necessarily true, and it isn’t necessarily false either, it’s just a possible explanation.
An example of a phenomenon may be your site suddenly dropping from its first place ranking in Google after two years. This phenomenon no doubt has an explanation, and you may recall that you built a large amount of inbound links to your site over the last week. Thus, you may form a hypothesis that your ranking drop was due to you building too many backlinks in a short period of time. And thus, the hypothesis would be that building too many links too quickly will harm your rankings.
Where most people now go wrong is they would accept such a hypothesis as factual, simply because it’s a possibility. Furthermore they’ll seek confirmation bias by finding other Internet marketers that agree this is the reason they lost their rankings. This represents a gross misunderstanding of logic and reason, and is what leads to hypotheses such as this becoming widespread in the Internet marketing industry.
In order for a hypothesis to have any validity, it needs empirical evidence to back it up. The keyword here is empirical. By only demonstrating that you had a site which had a number 1 ranking for two years, which suddenly dropped once you started building links to it, you’re not presenting any form of empirical evidence.
You see, there could be a whole range of possible explanations as to why your site’s ranking dropped. First of all, consider the possibility that eventually any site will have its ranking drop at some point in time. Whether it’s one month, ten years, or fifty years. The first thing you must consider is whether or not there’s a possibility that your backlink building coinciding with your site dropping in rank was merely a coincidence. If it is a possibility, then you cannot say for certain that building too many links too quickly will harm your ranking, as you haven’t yet ruled out coincidence.
The next thing you must ask yourself is how often you checked your rankings over this two year period? Was it every day? If not every day, then do you have a chart showing the exact position your site ranked every single week over this two year period? If not, then is it a possibility that your sites ranking has dropped & fluctuated many times previously, however you just never checked? If all of your traffic comes from SEO, then perhaps you could check your traffic history over a two year period to see whether or not there were any other large dips in traffic, which could possibly signify previous ranking drops. If such dips in traffic suggest that you may have lost ranking before without you being aware of it, then your hypothesis that “building too many links too quickly will harm your rankings” starts to lose credibility.
Perhaps at the time you lost your rankings you also did some other things to your site, besides link building. After all, if you suddenly decided to pay so much attention to your website by building links to it, surely you must have done some on-site optimization as well? Perhaps you edited the site content, the title tags, created some new pages, linked to another site, restructed it, changed the theme, did something to it? If you did, then editing some part of your site would be another hypothesis for your ranking drop.
If you consider that Google will often reevaluate a sites ranking when parts of it have changed, then your on-site optimization could be a far more likely explanation for your ranking drop than your off-site link building.
But what if you didn’t make any changes to your site, you only built backlinks to it, and nothing else whatsoever could have led to the ranking drop? Well, there’s still coincidence, and in order to confirm that it was definitely the link building that made it drop, you need to replicate the same result, many times, and be able to rule out all other possible explanations.
Furthermore, Google changes its ranking algorithms on a near daily basis, making pinpointing an exact action that caused a ranking fluctuation difficult.
Let’s say you had another site that was also 2 years old, in a similar niche, and you decided to build the exact same types of backlinks to that site. If that sites ranking suddenly dropped as well, then that is some evidence to support your hypothesis. It makes coincidence less likely.
The problem however, is that very, very rarely, does the typical Internet marketer test hypotheses. Instead, they’ll jump to a conclusion based off a one off encounter, or based on the research of another person before attempting to replicate the results themselves. Remember the previous pitfall titled - “believing everything you hear”. Don’t believe that just because some SEO expert says something such as “if you don’t vary your anchor text 50% of the time you will be penalized” that it’s necessarily true. It could be true, but how do you know? Test it and confirm it for yourself. Definitely use the information from their studies, but certainly try to replicate the results for yourself before you take their word as gospel.
The reason I’ve emphasized this point so much is because I’ve seen plenty of so called “SEO experiments” that fail to rule out other possible explanations. When I’ve gone ahead and conducted the same experiments myself, I’ve arrived at entirely different, unexpected results. If I had never gone ahead and tested what I read, or what people said, I’d be superstitious about duplicate content, about building links too fast, about the Google sandbox, and about a whole range of other things. I used to be years ago, however this changes once you do independent testing to arrive at your own conclusions as to what works and what doesn’t. I can read and discuss other people’s conclusions, and listen to what they have to say, but I will always test what anyone says and verify that it’s true before I believe it. This is what you must do as well if you ever hope to acquire a good understanding of SEO, or any other field in Internet marketing.
This pitfall is one of the main things that seems to hold marketers back from achieving good SEO rankings. There are many posts on forums from people saying how they’re “always cautious not to build links too quickly” but that they’re “still not achieving good rankings”. The thing they don’t understand, is that their cautiousness is precisely the reason that they’re not achieving good rankings. The problem is that they’ve never tried building a massive amount of links just to even so much as test whether or not Google does apply a penalty for mass link building. Even if they are penalized on a test site, at least they’ve confirmed the results for themselves.
You should conduct the same testing for yourself. Sacrifice one website of yours as a “guinea pig” and build as many good quality links to it as you possibly can, and just see if there’s any penalty. Confirm for yourself whether or not “building too many links too quickly will result in a penalty” is nothing more than a widespread SEO myth.
You should do this same thing for other things such as duplicate content. Try submitting a duplicate article to the same article directories instead of rewriting it, and check whether or not the incoming links are still being indexed or not.
It doesn’t end there, test everything that you hear. I cannot emphasize the importance of this enough. Even if your site does end up getting banned, or deindexed for something you’ve done, then surely the education that you’ve acquired is well worth the penalty. I’d much rather sacrifice one site and use it for testing, and build up twenty other websites by the fastest possible means based upon what works, rather than be slow, cautious, and superstitious with 21 websites, not taking any risks in fear of having them all banned.
Testing Doesn’t Have To Only Revolve Around What Others Say
You don’t just have to test things that other people have said. You can come up with your own SEO theories and test them as well. It’s good to innovate and try new things, it’s part of marketing and is what will separate you from the masses who only play SEO by the standards set by others.
Take for example one commonly held belief that acquiring too many links from blog posts or forums will result in them being filtered (devalued). At first this would seem a very real possibility, since it is possible that external links are devalued or filtered (don’t confuse this with penalization).
I tested this and found out that the reason these sorts of links became devalued was because the authority of the websites the links were placed on was very low. It wasn’t due to the links being posted on a blog, or a forum, but rather due to the site the link was placed in being full of other spam, having little authority, and therefore passing little value. When Google did check the neighbourhoods that these links were coming from, they of course found them to be spammy, and would therefore naturally devalue all the outgoing links.
Over a period of one year, I started finding high PR forums and high PR blog posts from trusted authority sites and began placing my links on them. These links were never filtered or devalued, and my rankings soared in some rather competitive niches. I was waiting, and waiting for the links to be devalued, but they never were, and I made a nice income from it.
Had I gone off one commonly held belief that lots of incoming links from forums are bad, then I would never have discovered for myself just how incredibly effective they actually are when they come from high authority sites.
I’m not saying that forum links alone will rank you in competitive niches, but rather they can help complement a broader SEO strategy. Keep in mind that the algorithms are always changing in SEO, and what may have worked last month won’t necessarily work tomorrow.
To summarize this pitfall, I know people mean well when they give bad advice, but sometimes it’s advice that can indirectly end your business. So, to avoid this pitfall, it’s important that you test everything you hear, and that you also devise new online marketing strategies, and test whether they work. If they don’t work, you have nothing to lose, if they do, you have lots to potentially gain.
4. Looking for the easy way out
It’s human nature to find the easiest way to do things. Whether it be making money, completing a task, or even seducing someone we’re attracted to, we’ll typically put in the minimal effort required in order to reap the greatest rewards. There’s nothing wrong with this in itself, as doing more work than is necessary is pointless, however there comes a time when our short sightedness can hinder our long term goals, particularly in Internet marketing.
A common thing that millions of people fall for each year are pyramid schemes. The potential of making a lot of money from other people, with hardly any effort required, appeals to our most basic of instincts. It’s for this reason that pyramid schemes continue to flourish, despite them being shown to be of no profit to anyone but those based at the top of the pyramid. Pyramid schemes have grown to a level where governments have been forced to regulate against them and make most of these types of schemes illegal.
It should be obvious to anyone that you can’t have something for nothing, however every day people continue to waste their time and money on endevours that even they though know are cons. There seems to be a part of our psychology that is drawn to the prospect of instant reward for no effort, and no matter how much we try and reason that this sort of thing isn’t possible, we still fall victim to it.
If people weren’t constantly trying to find ways to make a lot of money without putting in any effort, then Nigerian scams, pyramid schemes, confidence tricksters, and even the gambling industry itself wouldn’t be in business. The fact that these sorts of industries are as big as they are shows that mankind isn’t as smart as we’d like to think.
I believe that this pitfall - “looking for the easy way out” is the one that effects prospective Internet marketers the most. Many people are lured into the industry with promises of making overnight fortunes. If faced between a choice of purchasing a course that genuinely teaches online marketing, and another that promises ten thousand dollars a day with only a month’s work, then people will unfortunately choose the ten thousand dollar a day course more often than not.
The fact people buy into this hype shapes the Internet marketing industry, and encourages charlatanism. Why would anyone go out of their way to spend months creating a genuine product that will teach you how to setup an online business, when someone can just sell a small guide titled “how to make a million dollars overnight” and make more sales? There’s little incentive for honesty when consumers drive the market by encouraging dishonesty.
So the reason I’m telling you all this is because, quite simply, there is no quick fix to make a full time living online. You don’t need a special course, or a special ebook, in order to learn how to setup and run a successful online marketing business. You need to desensitize yourself to hype, and realise that hype is what you should be generating as the marketer with your products.
There are of course some great Internet marketing products out there, and some may save you a lot of time in finding out information that would normally have taken you a lot longer to learn by yourself, however as a general rule, the thing which will bring you success isn’t reading blog posts, or any ebook, but taking action. In short, there’s no quick fix to making millions, and any product promising an easy path to do is is most likely a con, or won’t work.
5. Not taking any risk
Risk is a necessary part of any business, and minimising risk whilst still creating the greatest potential outcome is a part of risk management. In online marketing, our desired outcome is profit, and recurring profit at that.
Without taking any risk with your business, you wouldn’t be making any profit. Even the most conservative online marketers still take risk, even if it’s small risk. Take for example registering a domain name and paying for hosting. There’s a risk that the site won’t generate any profit at all, and the money you paid for the domain name and the hosting, will go to waste. Nevertheless, you’re willing to take the risk, because you believe that you have a plan to make more money from the website than what you’re paying in hosting fees (at least I hope so).
Risk extends beyond this, in many ways that aren’t apparently obvious. Companies can risk their brand name by conducting less desirable practices, such as spamming. They can also risk penalties if what they’re doing goes against regulations. If you created a website filled with cloaked text, there’s a risk that Google will deindex the site, costing you money from the domain registration fee and the time you spent working on it. Everyone is susceptible to risk, and everyone must take risk, whatever business endevour they may conduct.
Part of conducting successful business is to be aware of all your risks, and have appropriate plans to minimize those risks. You must also be willing to take risks if the potential benefits of the risk are great, and the penalties are minimal.
One pitfall that many new Internet marketers fall into is that they’ll do everything by the book. By the “book”, I’m referring to a set of so called online marketing principles set forth by random ebooks, myths, and of course, some truth. Not building too many links to your site too quickly in fear of harming it may be considered “playing by the book”, yet as we found out in the section on “Failing To Test Things”, this fear is mostly based on myth.
The thing is, is that there is no set, proper way to do things in Internet marketing. Obviously complying with the law is a necessity, and adhering to all the conditions of any website you visit is another necessity. But outside of that, it’s pretty much innovation that evolves our field, and no innovation would ever take place without risk.
Here is a typical scenario that new Internet marketers experience, from the persona of “James”.
James has read all the ebooks about setting up an online marketing business selling digital products as an affiliate, and is keen to get started.
He’s found a good long-tail keyword to target, so he sets up a review site, conducts good on-site optimization with his keyword, writes articles pointing back to his website, submits his site to the social bookmarking sites, and then waits.
James ranks for his long-tail keyword and ends up making one sale every month, giving him about $300 profit a year. At first he’s ecstatic by this, and can’t believe that he’s actually making sales. James repeats what he’s done with lots of other sites, thinking that he’ll be able to duplicate his success.
Sure enough, he can, and after almost a year’s worth of work, James creates 10 sites that also end up generating the same profit, giving him a total of $3000 a year. James then realises that he’d need to make another 100 sites generating the same profit to break just $30,000 a year. He’s been in Internet marketing for a year at this stage and only created 10 sites, and feels he could have made more money with just a regular job given the hours he’s put into creating his sites. James decides to move to more competitive keywords with a greater search volume, a very smart move.
In doing so, of course, James doesn’t rank under these more competitive keywords using the SEO strategies he used to rank under the less competitive ones , so he seeks advice from other marketers on how to rank his website. He’s told “lots of original, unique content is the key, and make the site human friendly, so that people will want to link to it naturally, and good on-site optimization is also very important”. James follows this advice but still isn’t ranking under his competitive keywords, nor is anyone linking to his site naturally. After reading a whole range of horror stories of sites being deindexed due to shady SEO tactics, James doesn’t take any risk with aggressive link building, and instead settles for his $30,000 a year on his less competitive keywords.
The thing is, is that James will never make much money in Internet marketing. He’ll make a little, enough to support his hosting costs and make some pocket change, but because he’s too afraid to even experiment (this was covered in the third section) or take any risk, he’s not going to ever gain anything substantial.
Out of the small percentage of Internet marketers that do end up making money, most of them won’t make anything much at all, probably less than $30,000 a year. One of the main reasons for this is due to a lack of willingness to take risk. Failing to take risk is not exactly a pitfall to failure, but it’s not a road to great financial success either.
Without realising it, many people will avoid risk, even if the risk is low and has potentially great gains, with very little loss if things go wrong. Being able to recognize when risk and potential loss is low, and potential gains are high, is one of the key aspects to managing risk. Failing to do so is like having money you could have made falling into a bottomless well instead of your bank account.
For example, if there was a gambling game that guaranteed an average return on investment of 150%, would you play it? If such a game existed, then the sensible thing would be to play it, no matter what your views of gambling were, even if the short term variance worked against you. If you kept to a strict bankroll, played smartly, and didn’t vary your stakes, then over time you would profit, it’s simple probability.
Unfortunately a gambling game with such odds doesn’t exist, as if it did it would send casinos bankrupt, however what we can do is look for this type of smart gambling in business scenarios by identifying risk where our return on investment is more likely than not to pay off. This is what I like to call “smart risk”.
Risk
There are three aspects of risk that we will now cover - Assessing Risk, Reducing Risk, and Accepting Losses. Understanding each of these concepts is important.
Assessing Risk
You must be able to identify a risk and make an appropriate assessment of it before you can decide how to handle it.
There are three main things that we want to determine in risk assessment - the likelihood of the risk occuring, the potential gain from taking the risk, and the potential loss from taking the risk.
An ideal situation would be one where the likelihood of risk occuring was low, the gains from taking the risk were great, and the potential loss from taking the risk was non existent. Of course, this ideal scenario isn’t common, but the closer your assessment of a risk is to this scenario, the more willing you should be to take the risk.
Let’s say that you want to setup and create your own digital product in a new niche you’ve discovered - “how to make a baby acquire perfect pitch in music”.
You’re enthusiastic as there doesn’t seem to be too much competition through the advertising medium you wish to use (let’s say SEO). You decide to do a risk assessment on creating such an ebook and marketing it.
Your risk assessment should consist of answering questions such as the following -
1, How much time and money would it take to create an ebook teaching parents how to give their baby perfect pitch?
2. How detrimental would it be to my business if my idea doesn’t work? Can I afford for the ebook to not be successful?
3. Are there any competing products also targeting my niche? If so, how successful are they, and what are my chances of breaking into their share of the market?
4. What are my chances of ranking under converting keywords related to this niche? What will happen if I fail to rank under these keywords? How much money should I expect to make in sales if I do rank under these keywords?
These are just a few examples of questions you should be asking yourself before creating any product, or breaking into any niche, and identifying and assessing its risks.
If you work out that you’ll need to invest $500 in outsourcing the creation of the ebook, or invest 2 months in writing it, then this can be thought of as a ‘cost’. There’s a risk that you’ll have to cover this cost without making any profit.
What’s the worst identifiable outcome?
That you’ll lose $500, the cost of the domain name, hosting fees, and any other expenses, along with the time and effort that you put into targeting the niche that you could have spent elsewhere. This is the “worst identifiable outcome”, or, the potential loss involved in taking the risk of breaking into the niche with your own product.
Now, what about the best identifiable outcome? What do you have to gain from taking the risk? If you’ve done your keyword & market research correctly (all of which is explained throughout this website) then you should have a rough estimate of what you should be expecting to make in sales if everything goes well. Let’s say you work out that ranking #1 under a specific keyword term should generate you at least 10 sales a week, giving you $400 in sales a week if the ebook sells for $40.
After identifying the worst possible outcome, and the best possible outcome, what are the respective probabilities of each occurring?
To answer this question you’ll need to analyze your competition, your modes of advertising, the likelihood of your sales letter converting, and anything else that’s part of the sales process.
If you’re relying on your sales to come from organic Google rankings, then you’ll need to be confident that you can outrank competing sites for your desired keywords.
Let’s say you believe there’s a high chance that you’ll outrank the top sites under the keyword terms you’re hoping to target. You know this because you have some experience with SEO and ranking under keywords of similar competition. The risk assessment would then look as follows -
Potential to be gained from taking risk: $400 a week
Potential loss from taking risk: Waste of $500 investment and 200 hours of effort.
Probability of risk: Low, since you’re confident you will rank under the keyword terms that will make the $400 a week in sales.
Based on your risk assessment, the smart decision would be to take the risk, and go ahead and create the product. This is of course considering that your risk assessment is accurate, and you’d have to be pretty confident with SEO to be able to predict how well you’ll do in the future.
I’d be writing an entire book if I ventured into risk theory too much. All that’s important that you know about risk assessment at this stage is identifying those three things - potential from gain, potential from loss, and the possibility of the risk occurring.
Reducing Risk
Now that you’ve identified the probability of a risk, how would you go about reducing it, to make its occurence less likely?
The easiest way to avoid any financial loss is to avoid risk entirely. The only problem with this, as explained earlier, is that you won’t make any money either.
There’s a risk when you drive that you’ll be involved in a car accident, a risk that you weigh up, and one you’re probably willing to take before getting into your vehicle and decide to turn on the engine. Why are you willing to take this risk? Well, if you didn’t drive, you wouldn’t be able to get to work in more rural locations, you wouldn’t be able to travel as much, and you’d have to rely on public transport which still would carry risks in itself (buses, trains, aeroplanes, and ferries are also involved in accidents).
What the best thing to do of course , is reduce the likelihood of risk occuring. Using the example given previously of ranking under keywords related to a niche I made up such as teaching a baby how to acquire perfect music pitch.
Surely avoiding risk entirely wouldn’t be practical, or even possible.
Accepting Losses
If you conduct business in constant fear that even the slightest loss would be a major blow to not just your time and budget, but your self esteem, then odds are you won’t get very far. Failure, in one form or another, is common in just about every form of life, and it’s something that you should expect to come across during your adventures in business.
Accepting losses is another important part of Internet marketing that you will need to deal with. Provided you made the right choices, you should have no regrets of the decisions you’ve made, even if they didn’t turn in your favour. If however you took risks where the potential gain was low, and the risk and loss high (which you will undoubtedly do too at times) then these are experiences you can learn from.
Conclusion
This tutorial was designed to take you from the mindset of someone who finally achieved a first page Google ranking, however was curious why they weren’t making any money as a result. Throughout it we’ve covered a multitude of reasons that people new to Internet marketing fail, and what you can do to overcome these failures. You were also introduced to risk and its necessity in the right conditions.
Hopefully now you should be ready to strive forward and educate yourself on real Internet marketing principles that can make money, as well as innovate your own new and unique ideas to bring forth to the industry. It’s now recommended you head on over to the Heron Academy Forum to test, hear, and share these ideas.
