Mindset

1 Year Quit Anniversary – What Has Changed?

It has been one year since I left the day job and pursued my online business activities full time.

I wrote a very in depth post on how I got to the point of quitting my day job – https://websiteincome.com/quit-my-job/

This post is going to cover…

How Have My Results Been Since I Left the Day Job?

I will break the results down into 3 parts…

  1. Have I achieved my 2 main reasons for quitting?
  2. Financial Results since I quit?
  3. Have I successfully mitigated my concerns about quitting?

My Main Reasons for Quitting:

I had 2 MAIN reasons for quitting…

  • See What I Can Do on My Own – Online entrepreneurship has a lot of opportunities I am excited to explore. I may or may not regret this decision but I am 100% certain if I never took a shot at building something on my own I would always regret it! (from my post 1 year ago)
    • Results after 1 year – I am definitely aligning the pieces of my business between projects and people on my team to be able to make a bigger impact. I would say that I haven’t achieved as much here as I would like but believe the combination of building an amazing team and getting heavily involved in some BIG projects has me moving all pieces of my business in the right way to make a big impact.
  • Ski/Bike/Hike With My Family – My oldest child will be 36years old if I were to retire at 65 (3 years older than I am now) and the number of hours I work per day between now and then were not going to go down based on the path I was on. But the main reason is I simply wanted to ski, bike and hike with my family in my hometown! (from my post 1 year ago)

Results after 1 year – I have without a doubt massively increased the amount of time I get to spend with my family since leaving the day job. Now being home routinely between 3:30 & 4:00 vs 6:30 (on good days) we are able to do an outing almost every day depending on the season (beach, hike, bike or skiing). Plus flexibility to take time off for activities whenever it makes sense for the family. I do believe I still work too much to have a proper balance on the health side and see opportunities for improvement here.

Overall both of the main reasons I wanted to leave my day job to pursue my online business full time have been moving in the right direction. I am especially proud of the amount of time I get to spend with my family.

Financial Results:

“enjoying” working online full time is certainly great but how have the businesses results been? They have been solid, hitting my stretch targets (barely) and having a lot of success with a few new projects.

Have I successfully mitigated my concerns about quitting?

I had been working insane hours (80+ combined day and online job) and pushing myself VERY hard in the couple years before I left the day job. I had some concerns that the loosening of my schedule and the loss of a single clear goal would negatively impact my business. Here are my thoughts on the results…

  • Getting Mentally Soft – For the last few years my schedule has been a little bit insane. Approx schedule… wake 6am, leave for work 6:30am, work 7am-5:30/6:00, Home at 6:00/6:30, family time until 7:30/8:00, work from 8pm-11pm(sometimes much later). Following this schedule was TOUGH and it, like training for anything, resulted in me being able to be disciplined about working. Will I now go soft since I won’t be working the same number of hours?
    • Results After Year 1 – I would say I definitely have gotten softer. My crazy dedication to working EVERY night no matter how tired/sick I was has slipped. Now I take nights (even the occasional day) off. Some would say this isn’t a bad thing but I do think I am getting softer as a result!
  • No Single Inspiring/Driving Goal – Achieving my goal of leaving the day job had become an obsession and now my current goals are less tangible… will my business not have a stimulating goal and as a result be directionless?
    • Results After Year 1 – The goals have become a little more project/business specific. There is a central overall goal for myself which I don’t discuss publicly but am working towards. Because of the new focus on building a business I am continually inspired to build something awesome.
  • Playing Not to Lose – For those that play/watch sports we all have experienced/seen a team take the lead and then play not loose vs playing to win. Will I now play not to loose vs take bigger swings?
    • Results After Year 1 – This one I am very happy to say is not a problem. I would say I am becoming less risk adverse and need to have the controls in place to make sure I don’t risk too much. Over the last 8 months I have put more money to work, hired more staff and started more projects.

What have I done?

Here are the major changes I have done over the last year…

  1. Grew my in house team from 0 to 2 full time and 3 summer interns
  2. Started a couple big new projects
    1. ContentRefined.com
    2. One investment vehicle I will talk about more later
  3. Increased my rate of site building
  4. Focused more on education and extending my time horizon from only a few years to much longer

Summary

I can say with certainty that leaving my day job was a great decision for my family and so far 1 year out my pocket book as well.

However, the fears I had around getting soft and not having a crystal clear goal I don’t think I have sufficiently mitigated. But overall I am extremely grateful for the world we live in where running this type of business is possible. The ability to both throw myself at a business and not sacrfice time with my family is pretty amazing I am extremely grateful for that!

If you are working towards a similar goal please know it is possible and can be done faster then it took me 7years to reach. BUT… it is not easy… I want to stress that it took me 7+years from when I first started and ~3 years after I got serious about building my business to hit the numbers I needed to hit.  Good luck to anyone looking to do the same!

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Jon July 11, 2017 12 Comments
Money Site Creation

5 Step Content and SEO Strategy – Case Study Results and Penguin 4 Thoughts

In this post I am going to share some recent results we have had with our off page strategy outlined below and also share my thoughts on Penguin 4.0.

Basic Strategy We Have Been Having Success With:

  1. Identify what the site is already ranking for
  2. Complete additional keyword research
  3. Content Creation (this step can be skipped if the sites content is already awesome)
    1. Build the best content for the given query. Google wants to rank the best #1 so be the best!
  4. Competitor Backlink Analysis
    1. Determine the number of links we need to beat our competition
  5. Build a mix of links to the site to close the gap with the competition
    1. Blog Commenting + Guest Posting
    2. Use My PBN Links
    3. Done For You PBN Links
    4. Editorial Links – Contact me for details on how to get these
    5. Outreach links (anything Brian Dean at Backlinko talks about)

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Case Study Results:

Case Study #1 – Local Criminal Lawyer Serving 1 million person population City/surrounding area

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Step 1: We first found out what the site was already ranking for by using SEMrush.com

Step 2: We then looked to see which keywords were most fitting to the site and were ones worth ranking for. If they are on the 2nd-3rd page that is even better. We Found out which page we're already ranking for those keywords (which was the homepage) and got 5 Use My PBN links pointed to them. The results from getting these links created resulted in substantial ranking improvements.

Step 3: We wanted to find other keywords related to this niche so we took some of the keywords the site was ranking for as well as a few other relevant keywords and inputted them into LongTailPro. This will help us find a lot more relevant keywords as well as check the competition for each. We try to look for keyword competition under 30 as they are easier to rank for.

Step 4: We sent the keywords that we thought were relevant to the customer to get articles created around them (we usually create the articles but due to the niche it was better for the client to create them). Once they are completed they will send them to us and we will get more Use my PBN links pointed towards them to help boost their rankings.

Conclusion:

A little up front analysis identified some great opportunities for easy wins. This has resulted in the client looking like a hero to her client!

Want Me & My Team to Help Execute This Plan for You?

If you are looking for help to execute this plan we have a couple options...

You can either do the majority of the analysis yourself and use my teams services to get links built... or if you are looking for a complete analysis, strategy creation plus execution we offer some higher touch SEO consulting/strategy execution as well.

  • Done For You Offering: (follow this strategy yourself and use my team to help with links)
    • Use My PBN (get links from my personal PBN)
    Use My PBN
    • Done For You PBN Creation (let my team build you an exclusive PBN)
    PBN Building Service
  • Full Support: Want a full-service solution with my team doing the analysis, content creation and backlink creation? Fill out the form here
Have Me and My Team Create and Execute an SEO Strategy for You

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Case Study #2 – 7 Figure Affiliate Marketer Very Happy With Results in a Competitive Niche

This case study is a summary of what we did for one of our bigger clients who is having A LOT of success online generating millions of dollars a year through organic traffic and affiliate sites.

Step 1: We first found out what the site was already ranking for by using SEMrush.com

Step 2: We looked at the keywords the site was ranking for and also talked with the client to see which keywords they are most interested in ranking for so that we can concentrate on getting them to rank better. We then got…

  • 10 Use My PBN links and split them up amongst those keywords to give them some ‘juice’ along with a
  • 3 editorial links (Huffington post etc) – Contact me for more info about how to get these links

Step 3: We also did some keyword research using LongTailPro and sent suggested article titles to the client and asked if they were okay. Once we got the go ahead we got the articles completed and the client posted them to their site. Next month we will be able to target these URLs to help push them up in the rankings.

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Penguin 4.0 Thoughts – Overhyped?

Penguin 4.0 has rolled out live and I have received a few emails about what the impact has been for me and my clients sites.

Like most updates from Google I believe there is usually a hype fuelled hysteria followed by a more rationale approach. Penguin 4.0 is no different.

Changes to Consider:

  • Backlink cleanup should be able to be measured faster
  • Penalties are applied to a specific page vs the entire domain (the implications of this are interesting!)

So I think the bottom line is that we will see changes to rankings occurring faster when sketchy links are being built and when they have been removed sites should recover faster.

Although Sep according to Moz had the most fluctuations since they started tracking SERP position movement we have seen very little

From - https://moz.com/blog/penguin-4-was-it-worth-the-wait

Impact on Mine & Client Sites

Despite all the movement we have seen no sites penalized and across the board there has been a solid increase for a hand full of sites. What is interesting is most of those ranking movements occurred at the start of Sep and not as a result of Penguin 4.0.

It will continue to be interesting to watch and I, as a fan of being able to test things, will certainly like the faster feedback on link cleanup efforts and when a site has crossed the threshold with Google into the un-natural link profile territory it will be apparent faster and easier to limit the damage.

Overall I am happy to see no negative movement and some positive movement while at the same time I think these changes are definitely a move in the right direction.

Unfortunately, Penguin has not been so kind to everyone, I received this email yesterday and I know how much losing your hard earned efforts overnight can hurt! So if you have been affected I certainly feel for you!

PBN Guide being referred to above is here

Have you experienced much negative movement with your site in Sep? If so I would love the opportunity to have a quick review of your site to both learn and ideally provide some insights.

Want Me & My Team to Help Execute This Plan for You?

If you are looking for help to execute this plan we have a couple options...

You can either do the majority of the analysis yourself and use my teams services to get links built... or if you are looking for a complete analysis, strategy creation plus execution we offer some higher touch SEO consulting/strategy execution as well.

  • Done For You Offering: (follow this strategy yourself and use my team to help with links)
    • Use My PBN (get links from my personal PBN)
    Use My PBN
    • Done For You PBN Creation (let my team build you an exclusive PBN)
    PBN Building Service
  • Full Support: Want a full-service solution with my team doing the analysis, content creation and backlink creation? Fill out the form here
Have Me and My Team Create and Execute an SEO Strategy for You

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Jon September 27, 2016 2 Comments
Link Building

How effective is a Private Blog Network – Actual Results Revealed


For all my talk about the effectiveness of expired domains and private blog networks there is little in the way of quantifiable proof showing just how effective it is.

Not just if it is effective but by how much can a private blog network improve your search engine rankings?

I will break this post into 2 parts…

  • Part 1 – By the numbers – We will deep dive looking at the search ranking movement of 13 sites who all had quality private blog networks built linking to them using this service. (more…)

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Jon January 6, 2014 40 Comments