PPC is much more my niche as you may already know but recently I decided to test the waters of SEO and bum marketing to try and increase my affiliate income. I make the most from PPC campaign management and a small portion from affiliate marketing, but lately I have been wanting to increase the affiliate side of things because as it seems to me, once your on top of the search results, you kind of stay there unless another SEO buff comes in and swipes your spot. Even then your still on the first page of results and still getting traffic and conversions.
So I decided to dive into SEO, learning everything I can from as many sources as possible. Since then I have developed several campaigns trying to tackle the SERP in google. Many without any luck, but I am getting better at it. My recent success is getting to position #3 for my latest campaign.There is not much traffic behind the targeted keyword, but it has resulted in a couple sales reaching just under $100 in commission.
The point of this thread is that SEO is much harder then you think. I though it would be something I can tackle really quickly, but the thing with SEO is that there is lots of waiting… waiting for pages to get indexed, waiting for backlinks to get discovered, waiting for Google to update, waiting for my rankings to climb. All this waiting for things to happen makes it really slow to test ideas and figure out what works and what doesn’t. Unlike PPC I can have test results within hour or a day at max. With SEO it seems I need about a week to see if any changes are going to take effect.
I am still determined to master this, but I have to admit at this point its harder than some people make it out to be. I have put about 3 months or so into it, created about 20 or 30 different campaigns and resulted in 3 current campaigns making money, but not much money, its under $1,000 per month in revenue. Only the recent most campaigns are making any money as well, because I just screwed up the first projects and then just left them for dead.
What makes SEO so hard? Ranking mostly. Every time I put something new up I end up between position 20 and 100, and if you have any experience with search results anything past the first page gets no action what so ever. The hard part is climbing the ranks in the search engines where people can see find you. The biggest problem is there are some many people willing to give advice on how to do SEO and how to get on the top of google, but I dont think those giving advice have any idea what they are talking about. Those who I have found that are on the top of the search results always keep their mouth shut and wont give you an ounce of advice.
Its a secret and a mystery on how to climb the ranks which nobody is willing to share. I guess they have plans on taking over the internet one keyword at a time. I guess thats my plan as well, but first got to figure out how to master climbing the ranks.




