Relying on search engines, whether paid or organic, for your income can be risky business. As the cliches go, the rules are always changing, you can get “slapped” at any time, and you can see even a large, long built up income drop to nothing overnight.

It’s also a necessary evil for many online business models, in particular affiliate marketing. So rather than run from the risk, we have to do what we can to mitigate it.

2010 saw Google continue the tightening of it’s restrictions and definitions for quality in both paid and organic search listings. It’s even getting kinda scary.

I’ve had a smart friend get an Adwords campaign slapped simply because of the niche he’s in… (perfect website, high quality score etc, just a niche that Google doesn’t like, so it’s out.)

I’ve heard stories of sites getting knocked out of the organic search listings because (learned after much consulting and high level communication between the parties) Google didn’t like their business model (long sales letter, exit popups, big claims etc)…

And more.

This will only continue in 2011, and we must be prepared.

Google Thugs Stompin' Yo' Ass

So in the spirit of preparation, here are 5 things that we’ll be doing, and 5 that you should be doing to lower the likelihood of having your business negatively affected by a Google beatdown in the coming year.

1. Principle: Quality

The obvious has to come first here. We have to realize that any time Google makes an algorithm change or any search update, they have one thing in mind. They are trying to increase the quality of what’s in their search index. They might have some funny ways of determining what is and what isn’t quality, but that’s always their goal.

So to avoid beatdowns, you have to seek quality with your niche sites. We’re going to look at what quality means more specifically below, but in general it means being a source of value for the searcher. It means being valuable with your content, being valuable with your layout, being valuable with your promotional methods, and so on. It means thinking “what would someone who was trying to game the system do?” and doing the opposite. If you can keep that principle in mind, you’ll be well placed for continued success in the search engines in 2011.

2. Unique Content

Yeah, there’s no “duplicate content” penalty – I’ve written about that as much as anyone. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to the idea that unique content is something the search engines (and real people) want to see. It’s plainly spelled out in the guidelines at Google. And with all the effort that goes into testing things in the search engines, trying to make guesses and estimations about what Google wants, we can too easily overlook what they blatantly tell us they want. Unique content is one of those wants.

This doesn’t mean there’s no place for automating content, but if you’re still putting up sites for affiliate marketing or Adsense that have nothing unique on them, you may as well not even bother. Those golden days are gone and we all need to accept it. You need unique material, valuable to the searchers you’re trying to serve if you want to achieve any success with the search engines OR your readers.

3. Affiliate Links

Google doesn’t hate affiliate marketing, but they do hate what they call “bridge pages”.

If you haven’t heard, Google defines a “bridge page” as a page that’s sole purpose is to direct visitors to another page that they should have landed on originally.

As you can imagine, affiliate “landing pages” can quite easily become exactly this… with their sole function being to direct the visitor to another page: your merchant’s page.

So how do you stop your niche sites from being classified as “bridge sites” and your landing pages from being “bridge pages”? There are a couple of things.

First, if you’re creating unique content, you’re part of the way there. If the landing page, your blog post or whatever it is about the product you’re trying to sell has unique information that gives value to the readers, it’s one tick in the “NOT Bridge Page” column. If there’s something the readers can gain from your page that they won’t gain from the merchant’s sales page, you’re on the right track.

The second thing you need to control is your affiliate links. If you have one blog post (landing page, same thing) with 5 or 10 links to the same URL (affiliate link or not, incidentally) it starts to look like your sole focus is to push people to that URL. It looks unnatural. It’s a bridge page.

So practically, this means not having too many affiliate links/banners in any one post. If you’ve got more than 3, and there’s too many for the amount of content you have, it’s probably too much. You might not get slapped for it, but you’re walking on a tight rope.

Also, and this is one I only learned of recently (and it made me REALLY feel like an idiot)…

This little article was what opened my eyes to the reality that whenever you put an affiliate link on your page, you should make it a no-follow link. That means you should add the code: rel=”nofollow” to your link code so it looks like this:

<a href=”http://andrewhansen.name” rel=”nofollow”>Andrew Hansen</a>

The theory is that if you’re willingly passing page rank to another site via an affiliate link (that is, without using no follow), you are technically accepting “paid links” (that is, paid text links) on your site… which is of course, a no no. A penalty worthy “no no” too.

After I read this we went and changed all our affiliate links to no-follows. I’m not even finished yet, I’m supposed to be doing it instead of writing this post, but it’s extremely boring

4. Build Your Links Properly

At any one time, Google could decide that a bunch of the links you had to your site, no longer hold any weight. This is not to say they will “punish” you for getting a particular link, but if they devalue a link or links that you have, your site drops in link popularity relative to others in the SERPS and your site’s rankings drop too. It may as well be a penalty because that’s the effect it will have.

Theoretically, any kind of link you’ve got coming to your site, Google could decide tomorrow that it’s not worth as much as it was previously, and your rankings could drop. So how do you avoid this? You have lots of different links from lots of different places.

If your link profile is diversified, it’s harder for the slapping of any particular kind of link to affect your rankings. If any particular kind of links (let’s say it’s social bookmarking, or social content sites, or blog comments, etc) suddenly drop in value but only 10% of your link profile is made up by those links, you won’t be as badly affected.

Whatever you do for your link building, just mix it up. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Build links in lots of different ways and you’ll find small algorithm changes to influence your rankings less and less. Which brings us to…

5. Diversify In General

In online business, there are unfortunately few things you can put your faith in. Search engines can change, traffic sources can die, affiliate programs can end, people with a certain interest can move on, etc.

For this reason, and if you’re looking for a long term income from your business, it’s just wise to spread your income sources out. If you’re making ALL your money from paid search and your account gets closed, you’re in trouble. If you have all your sites hosted at one server and that server gets attacked, you’re in trouble. If you’re making all you’re money from your email list and your autoresponder service has some catastrophe and your leads disappear, you’re in trouble.

The point is, we can all take time to diversify things in our business a little. If we do only SEO, we can throw some PPC into the mix. If we usually don’t build lists with our affiliate sites, we could start a couple in case all of our sites one day get slapped. If you normally always build your affiliates sites one way, make some that are slightly different so that if one particular element of a site comes to be not liked by Google, you’re still ok.

Whatever variable you could think of that could, in any situation, come to be a liability, alter that variable in some of your income activities and you’ll insulate yourself from potential problems. It’s not always the most profitable thing to do in the short term, but if (like buying insurance) it means that when worse comes to worst, you don’t lose everything, it’s a worthy investment.

Following these 5 actions will put you far ahead of the curve when it comes to your affiliate marketing and your online business in general. Take the small amount of time necessary to do them now, to avoid the much greater long term pain of a nasty beatdown.

Again, it’s not really with joy that I write this post. I feel like this is all I’ve been talking about lately, but at the same time, I can’t bear to NOT write this. I can’t bear to NOT let you know.

I went out to the World Internet Summit in London yesterday, an IM event that is pretty much bottom of the barrel in terms of pitchy-ness. There’s no content, it’s a high pressure sales environment that preys on people who simply don’t know better yet.

But I wanted to catch up with a friend and hopefully meet some more half decent marketers in London.

There’s 2 groups of people there: The newbies waiting to be sold their hopes and dreams on a platter for $2000 (2000 Pounds actually at this one… more like $3300 or thereabouts) a pop, and then the speakers & their friends, there to meet JVs and talk about how much money they make from ripping off those newbies.

I go to events alot, just to meet interesting people and sometimes learn. But the ones I’d been to more recently were a lot more content based and had a lot more experienced crowds. I quickly got jolted back to what these things were like in IM, and in many ways, what it’s like for someone new to online marketing to be trying to start up from scratch.

I spend most of my time at the bar, which is where the latter of the two groups of people in attendance hang out. I don’t want to listen to the pitches so that’s the only other option.

The conversations you here there are just grotesque.

(All of the following are based on ones I overheard yesterday)

“He gets up, speaks for an hour, sells the crowd a set of 7 PLR sites for $2000… walks away with $100k”

“Hahaha, you wouldn’t believe it, in Malaysia he had a guy during his pitch TRIP OVER running to the back of the room to sign up for his course, hahaha – brilliant!”

“Well we know why he launched it – they knew it wouldn’t work anymore in 3 months time. This way he can add another 100k a month to his business and be done with it”.

And much more…

I put them in the same group: The “speak from stage is all I do” marketers and the “product launches are all I do marketers”. There’s often a revolving door between the two groups. They are both equally as douchey.

Here’s the worst, scariest thing I heard.

Two guys were talking about a clickbank launch that had just happened. They were talking about how much the product sucked. The launcher was someone you’ve definitely heard of.

One guy asked the other guy to tell me how many sales the launch did.

The answer? 40 000 copies………………………………………………

Think about that number for a second.

To put it in perspective: I’ve been online for quite a while, doing both affiliate marketing and teaching. When I release a new product I’m happy if I sell 500 copies. They do 40 000! 80 times more than me.

If you’re reading this post you’re probably one of the people who are less likely to buy the overhyped clickbank launch type products…

If you’re like me, you probably think that those products are only for those unfortunate newbie souls who are just coming online and getting the inevitable fleecing before they realize how the game works…

BUT NO… no no… it’s not just a small group of newbies who buy this crap. It’s not just a minority of those getting started. It’s MOST people. It’s the MAJORITY. If you’re not in that group and you’re reading this post and you know better… you are in a TINY tiny sub sect. You’re one of the lucky ones!

The guys who do these launches and are the most unethical… make the most money. No one I mentioned on my list of “the wisest and most trustworthy marketers” do anything like the figures these guys do. That pisses me off but I guess that’s life.

Everything I’m about to write here I already knew, but the day that was yesterday just crystalized it in my mind and even took my understanding to a new level of depth regarding how dodgy and disgusting this IM world can really be.

The majority of product launches, ESPECIALLY Clickbank launches, where-ever you see extreme Clickbank screenshots, whenever you get more than 5 emails about the same product (with a rare few exceptions) the following is almost always the case:

1. The “System” they’re selling does not work.

Period. What they do is sit around mastermind meetings thinking of one question: “What would sell?” They think of ideas for things that those poor unfortunate souls would buy and they create products based on them. If there was a list of things needed for a good launch, laid out in priority order, the factor of whether a system works… whether anyone’s actually going to make money from it… would be at the bottom. Great sales copy at the top, bunch of JVs next, perfect upsell third… good product? Who gives a ####. As long as it’s good enough that we don’t get too many refunds, it’s fine.

This is the RULE, not the exception.

2. The “System” they’re selling, is not something they even use.

Doesn’t matter what the income screenshots say, they DON’T use it. They couldn’t use it even if it did work and even if they wanted to use it. Their entire lives are consumed by doing product launches and promoting other people’s junk so they’ll get more JVs when their launch comes around. They say they use it, and they show the income screenshots from their last launch. They DON’T use it.

3. The $67 product never contains the “secret”.

This is what these guys get taught (I’ve heard it being presented myself)

“You have a front end product, $67 or $77, but you don’t give away all the details in here! You don’t teach them all the secrets for $67 – don’t undervalue your products like that! Your front end product is supposed to be a teaser. Your $67 product is supposed to give them just enough so they understand the idea, but can’t apply it without further help”.

I’m not even kidding, I’ve heard those words being spoken from stage. So if you’re looking at one of those clickbank courses where the sales letter says you’re going to learn EVERYTHING… ALL THE SECRETS… for just $67… it’s NEVER true. There’s always an upsell you need in order to implement anything.

4. They work on the principle that most people who buy these products won’t use them.

Will the customer actually be able to make money? Who cares?

I told one guy yesterday that I have a customer support manager for our products (this was the 40 000 copies launch guy) and he was shocked. I told him we have a live support system and he couldn’t believe it.

These guys don’t care whether people implement their methods or not. Once the sale is made it’s “what can I launch next?”.

Ok guys, here’s the deal.

I’ve been writing about this stuff for quite some time and I can’t handle having this be ALL I do about it.

I need your help today.

We have to make some contribution to cutting down the number of people in that early part of their journey who don’t know that this is how things work yet.

This is what you can do.

1. Stop buying this stuff: Please, make a commitment right now that you will stop buying, or at least be EXTREMELY skeptical before you buy any clickbank IM product that shows clickbank screenshots and has a massive launch fanfare. You know they are all the same and there’s no point wasting your money. The above is how those products come about and you don’t need to be involved in that.

2. Tell someone you know: Do you know someone in IM who’s newer than you, just getting started maybe? Send them an email right now and tell them to be careful. Tell them to stop buying these products too.

3. Tell everyone you can: Do you have a blog? A Twitter or Facebook where you are in contact with other marketers particularly newer ones? Make one tweet or update about this. Tell people that they need to know about it.

4. I’ve never asked for something like this before, and I probably never will again, but if you have a blog or a Twitter or Facebook and you can’t do any of the above, send people the link to this blog post to read for themselves. Every person who hears this news and takes it on board is someone who saves themselves $67 or $197 dollars next time. Every person who hears this is another $67 that those bottom feeder launch guru scumbags don’t get.

We can help people here. We won’t change how this industry works, but we can do something.

Until next time, thanks for reading and…

Thanks for being my subscriber even though I’ve never shown you a clickbank screenshot.

It’s true. My fight is over.

They got me too. It was crafty, it was cunning, there was nothing I could do, and they made it seem like my fault.

After where I left you on the last post, here’s what happened, in short:

1. The guy wrote back to me as though he finally understood what was going on. He says to me, (and I paraphrase)

“If you are able to fix up these sites: X, X, X, X, I can submit your account for re-review”

2. I get ecstatic. Particularly so because 8-10 sites he mentioned weren’t any longer active so I didn’t need them, And the other 2 I wanted, but could live without. This is it, I thought, I’ve won!

Simulation Of My Expression While Communicating With Google - And My Orange Juice

I went and simply deleted all the campaigns he mentioned, leaving only my most important ones (that they didn’t have a problem with)

I wrote to him and said “Ok, all the problem sites you mentioned, I have deleted them from my account. Most of them were inactive, I never need to use them again and I won’t ever advertise them on Adwords in future.”

3. He writes back and tells me that deleting the campaigns of those sites isn’t enough. If I want him to submit the sites for re-review, I need to go back through and fix all of them, even though their campaigns are deleted, even though I don’t want to use them or advertise on them ever again. If they are in my account history and still look the way they do, my account won’t get accepted on the re-review.

4. I write back and say “So you’re telling me that I have to go back and change 10 inactive sites, change every page, (some sites had as many as 30 pages of content), based on guidelines that are completely ambiguous, just so you can CONSIDER re-activating my account?”

5. He replies (in more words than this): That’s correct.

Pretty good huh?

Now it seems like I could have gotten the account back if only I wanted to jump through the ridiculous hoops of fire and waste half my life in the process. It’s my fault now, you see.

So that’s it for that Adwords account.

Now here’s what we can learn.

I’m going to paste here what he pasted to me. I believe this information is online somewhere, I just hadn’t seen it before.

Basically, they said that some of my sites were Arbitrage sites, and some were Bridge Pages. The 2 big No-Nos for affiliates. They define these as below. See my notes in bold.

=========================

ARBITRAGE SITE

Google’s position is that high ad quality and landing page quality are important for providing a positive user experience. Therefore, Google AdWords doesn’t permit ads directing to landing pages that were specifically made to show additional ads (a practice known as “arbitrage”). Furthermore, we’re extending the definition of arbitrage to include websites that are primarily occupied by display ads.

The ratio of ads to unique, non-ad content is measured to determine if a landing page violates our arbitrage policy. We measure this ratio by looking at content above the fold (i.e. without scrolling) on a display that measures at least 1024 x 768 pixels with a maximized browser window. A landing page is not considered arbitrage if all of the following conditions are met:

1. 30% of the browser display area consists of unique and relevant content.
This excludes search boxes, headers, navigation links, logos, etc.
Specific, well-organized commercial offers (such as those found on retail sites) may count as unique and relevant content as long as they provide significant user value.

2. The browser display area used for ads cannot exceed the browser display area used for unique and relevant content. For example, if 30% of the display area consists of unique and relevant content, there may be no more than 30% of the display space used for advertising. If 50% of the display area consists of unique and relevant content, up to 50% of the display space may be used for ads.

[ANDREW:] I really don’t know about this, because the site of mine they mentioned doesn’t look like they describe here at all.

But what I took from it, is to be careful with banners that sit above your fold, as you could unnecessarily be setting off filters. That goes for Adsense ads too.

That means, if you have a blog, banners above your first post, banners in your header, or at the top of your sidebar.

It also matters then how thick your header is, according to this. If you have a thin header, and more of your sidebar and post content are showing above the fold, it might change your ratios.

In general, I don’t use banners above post content anyway. They rarely get as good CTRs as those integrated into content, or at the end of content anyway. And as for top of the sidebar… Maybe we can move our sidebar banners down a little… put them below one other widget, like a calendar, about me, or recent posts? It’s a shame because this is such valuable real estate on your blog, as I’m sure you know. [/ANDREW]

3. The site must have user value other than providing ads. For example, Google provides web search, news sites provide regularly updated original content, and other services.

To check that your website complies with our arbitrage policy:

1. Open the site in a new browser.
2. Expand the browser to a minimum of a 1024 x 768 pixel display.
3. Make sure you have minimal browser menus and your font is set to medium or normal.
4. Scroll to the very top of the page, as evaluation is based on what appears above the fold.
5. The site is considered compliant if the area of ads is less than or equal to the area of content.

Please use the instructions above to evaluate your entire website and, if necessary, bring it into compliance with our arbitrage policy. If you’re not in compliance, you may receive a low landing page quality score, which can negatively affect your Quality Scores, cost-per-clicks, and ad positions.

[ANDREW:] Pretty interesting huh? I never knew THAT was how they analyzed it.[/ANDREW]

BRIDGE PAGE

Google does not permit ads for bridge pages that are solely intended to direct the user to another website with the same or similar information. We’ve found that when a page has multiple ads that to the same site, the results are less relevant and users have a lower-quality experience.

[ANDREW:] See “Multiple ads to the same site” – That is a big one. That doesn’t even say not too many affiliate links it means not too many links to the same URL regardless. That means unlike some people think, that putting up no-follows will make Google ignore your aff links… that might not be the case.

In general it means whatever you’re doing, don’t use too many affiliate links. That means careful with a sidebar banner and an affiliate link in the post going to the same product etc.[/ANDREW]

To comply with our policies, the options below are available:

Option 1: Refine your web page so that it contains a substantial amount of original content.(ANDREW: We pretty much knew that right?) This content should be related to your ad text and should stand independently of the links on your page that redirect users to other sites. (Stand independently – like position wise? Not having affiliate links blended in to your content? It’s hard to tell what that means) This includes any affiliate links on your site. In addition, the site should have an overall unique look and feel.

Examples of original content include, but are not limited to:
- Tips and information for consumers considering the product or service
- Competitor pricing and feature comparisons
- Unique and informative reviews and customer feedback
- Links to relevant articles

This content shouldn’t be derived directly from other sites or a parent site.

Option 2: Redesign your web page to offer multiple, competing offers from different companies for related services. For example, a webpage promoting a specific book could have links to four online bookstores from which one could purchase the book.

[ANDREW:] (So they’ll like you more if you take a review style approach and include information about multiple products… maybe…)[/ANDREW]

Option 3: Link directly to the end site, using the appropriate display URL.

[ANDREW:] They are talking about in YOUR content here. Use the appropriate display URL on your links. This COULD be referring to using affiliate links that are redirects but we don’t exactly know.

As you can see, the frustrating thing is that it’s both more specific, and less specific at the same time.

Finally, here are some points that this brought to my mind, particularly when I think about the sites that they DIDN’T have a problem with based on these guidelines.[/ANDREW]

What I Learned:

1. I think the days of being able to send traffic (free or paid) to a site with just one piece of content, one “landing page” are pretty much over. Alot of sites still do it in the organic listings, but with paid search, it’s over. The more unique content your site has, the better you’re going to be viewed.

2. Too many links to the same place. I’ve even thought about adding in some blended colour links to other websites just to mix up the ratio of affiliate links to other links on my site. I’ll let you know how that goes.

3. Affiliate links: One thing I came near to concluding was that linking to a page on your own site, which is a redirect to an affiliate link (like yourdomain.com/go-now) is better than linking to the aff program direct. It means your page code doesn’t have an affiliate link in it which MAY cause Google to view you less suspiciously. The site that they didn’t have a problem with was using this strategy. BUT, ONE (just 1 of 10) of the sites they listed as bridge pages, had this format too… so I can conclude nothing. In any case this is only for Adwords at the moment but it’s not hard to imagine Google employing these standards to view sites in the organic SERPS at some point in the future.

4. Longer articles: Considering that G tells us that they are analyzing the ratios of content to advertising on your page, it seems to say that, at least if you’re an affiliate and using affiliate link, up to a certain point a longer article is better.

This is important for conversion too. A longer article with more of the information that the prospective buyer wants, the better you’ll usually convert. I think the days of slapping up 300 word articles on your affiliate site and hoping for conversions are pretty well over.

Anyway, that turned into a bit of a “think out loud” ramble, but I hope it’s given you some food for thought.

I’d love to hear if any of you have experience with any of these factors and can tell us how they influenced your campaigns, traffic or conversions.

I always love hearing more about the personal lives of the people who’s opinions I care about. Not presuming that you care about my opinion or anything But I want to know what drives them, how they came to be where they are, how they go about their day, and more.

So I thought I’d share a little about my life, for anyone who’s interested – my story, my failures, my goals for the future, and more  – the good and the bad.

Here goes:

I’m 24 years old, born and raised in QLD Australia, engaged to be married to the beautiful kiwi Elysia Brooker, and I expect to die without ever having had a “proper” job.

Because looking back, I have always had a problem with authority.

Early Years

In my schooling years I was the naughty kid. Right up until the last 2 years of it, I was constantly being sent to the principal, being kicked out of class, told to pick up rubbish and even at one stage, suspended from school for a few days! Luckily I was smart, so I always did well at school – but I hated it.

I remember being 12 years old and having conversations with teachers like this:

Teacher: “Put your hat on when you’re outside!”
Andrew: “I’m not even in the sun… why does it matter?”
Teacher: “Because those are the rules!”
Andrew: “Why do I have to follow a rule just because it’s a rule?? The rule has to make sense!”
Teacher: “Alright – you can go and tell that to the principal”

Turns out that became a bit of a theme for my life.

Fortunately my parents did for me what I think is the best thing you can do for a child on top of loving it unconditionally. They constantly told me:

“You could do anything you want with your life. You have the world at your feet.”

I took what they said seriously.

Personal Development

I read my first personal development book when I was 15 years old and it changed my life forever. It was (believe it or not) Dr. Phil’s “Life Matters” (this is before he went mainstream – when he had interesting things to say) and I still remember some of the lessons I took from it…

It was where I first heard the principle of “accountability”, and remember doing the exercise of looking back at your life and thinking about the things that had gone wrong, and thinking honestly about how in fact, you are accountable for what happened, and you could have either changed it, or change how it affects you today.

Because when it’s your responsibility, YOU can change it. If everything and everyone else is responsible, it’s out of your control.

Money Issues

Our family was never poor growing up, but looking back, money often seemed to be an issue. As kids we had everything we needed and more, but only thanks to my parents working their asses off and sacrificing for us more than we understood at the time.

I saw how hard my Dad worked for our money in particular and I remember making a decision early on that I was never going to let money be an issue in my life.

I decided I needed to be “rich” or there was going to be trouble.

My “Career”

My first adult job out of school was something I’ll always remember.

I wanted money and bad, so I basically took the first job I came across.

For about 6 months I worked 9-5 at a factory that made hats. I was a cog in the machine, a member of a production line. Every day for 6 months I did this one task over and over again – folding the top of this particular hat down. Standing up, in the one spot, no music allowed, talking permitted but only until it affected concentration, for 8 hours a day.

At lunch I used to sit at the table with a calculator I’d found, adding up how many weeks it was going to take me to save enough money to buy this particular car I wanted. I’ll never forget being mocked by another factory worker, maybe mid 40′s:

“Working out how long it’ll take you to retire mate?” He said with a sneer. Like aspiring to something more than slaving away at this sh**hole was such a childish idea.

That year I actually worked 4 different jobs at the same time to save up as much money as possible. Shortly after I wasted all the money I’d saved, but I learned some important lessons about work and money that were more and more valuable as time went on.

University (College)

I am a proud college dropout. I lasted 2 weeks.

I walked in – realized that these people weren’t going where I wanted to go, and left.

Best decision I ever made.

Business – And Failure

After my stint at university, I realized that if I wasn’t going to get “an education” – I needed another way to make money. I started attending those “wealth creation” seminars to learn everything I could about making money. I remember hearing some statistic like:

“92% of the richest people in Australia are business owners”

WHAT?? I thought. Why did no one tell me THAT in school?! I need me a business!

That was also the first time I heard about selling ebooks on the internet. That was my start in IM.

As I’ve written elsewhere, my early years online were just one failure after another. I tried various things that ALMOST worked, but didn’t quite. But I never once entertained the possibility that maybe this wouldn’t work out. I had too many people to prove wrong. Too much pride on the line. I got by with the money from my day jobs at that time and just kept working at it.

I worked my ass off back then. I still do in some ways.

I remember hanging out with friends in the evening, finishing at 10pm, then driving out to a friends place (who had this computer software I needed) to work there from like 11pm til 4am… go home to sleep for a few hours, then waking up at 8am to go back to my 9-5. Man, I was hungry.

Overnight Success

After a few years I had my “overnight success”.

There came a point where I had more money in the bank than I knew what to do with. It was a very strange feeling.

I went crazy, I bought everything I wanted, I started to travel and then I hit an even stranger point.

“What next”?

I had no desires left. There was nothing else I wanted. I didn’t need any more “stuff”.

I remember thinking “Is this all there is? Is this what having money is?” I thought there had to be more to do than this. There had to be bigger fish to fry – things more meaningful than just accumulating.

Teaching & Sharing

In the period after that I got by on the motivation for helping others, sharing what I’d learned, improving other people’s lives by sharing with them how they too could make money from home.

I got, and still do get a lot of fulfillment from this, but after time, that started to wear thin too.

I saw that, particularly teaching IM, there are so many people who, it doesn’t matter what you give them or what you do, they don’t want to be helped – you can’t do anything for them. And of course there are those amazing folk who take one email you send them and create whole businesses out of it… but those people are rare… and most often they are so committed that they will usually make it whether you help them or not.

I was, and in ways, still am, a bit jaded by teaching IM. Not to mention the endless swarms of scam artists, liars, cheats and unsavory people who abound in a profession that sits right on the cusp of fraud and legitimacy.

That brings me about up to today – that’s it – those are my current feelings about teaching IM.

Today I’m (kind of a secret too) trying to get away from IM. I have some outside interests that I want to commit more time too and I’m trying to scale down the teaching side of my business to have more time for them.

Outside Work

Besides travel and my guilty pleasure MMA (mixed martial arts) I have very few hobbies. Pretty much 24 hours a day I’m working, reading, or sleeping. I read ALOT. Parts of this year my amount of work, and reading have been almost equal. And you want to know a secret?

This year I’ve read almost no books on marketing. And no personal development.

I read history, politics, science, literature – almost everything is interesting to me at the moment. If my early years were learning about and understanding myself, I feel like now I’m learning about and understanding the world.

This year I’ve read (and loved) Tolstoy’s War and Peace; I don’t know any copywriter who can paint an image in your head like Charles Dickens can; My life won’t be the same when linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky dies; And my favorite non fiction author at the moment is George Orwell.

But what I am most interested in today is finding a way that I can serve people more meaningfully. The more I read and travel the more I realize that there are so many people in the world with such great suffering that can be so easily diminished, that I can’t bare to commit my life only to me. Not because I’m religious, not because I’m “spiritual” – just because I can’t see any better way to live.

I can’t stand that poverty exists. I feel tight in the chest when I contemplate the reality of war. And while I know I won’t ever stop these things, I feel like the least I can do is give it a shot. A friend of mine has a quote on their facebook page that says:

“It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little – do what you can.” ~ Sydney Smith

That’s about where I’m at in life right now.

Future

As I’ve mentioned before, my soon to be wife and I live in a new country each year, so it’s possible that I’ll end up in your neighborhood some time in the next 5 years.

And if you live in the UK, it will be much sooner than that. I’ll be living in London by this time next week!

I’m getting married on a beach in Thailand in 2012. It’s going to be amazing.

I want to keep sharing what I know about making money without a “job” with anyone who is committed to applying it, and I will never email you about something that isn’t true, doesn’t work, or that I don’t believe in.

That’s me, friends.

When you open those emails in your inbox – that’s who you’re listening to. If you read this far, we’re buddies now

This post is about a little truth that every day becomes more real and more important in my life. My hope is that when you understand it, it will do the same for you.

Many of you will have started 2010 much like you started 2009 and 2008… thinking about what you can do to make THIS year YOUR year. What you can do to make this is finally the year you break through, work out that one thing you’ve been missing, and have the enormous success you’ve been waitin for for so long. But how are you going to do that?

First it’s worth clarifying what I believe to be a truism, and that is that really, for the most part, there ARE no big breakthroughs. It’s rare that one day something just changes and your business and your income are never the same. It’s rare that you learn one thing that’s powerful and suddenly your business changes. It’s rare that you suddenly reach a goal that you had and think “wow, this is it, it finally happened”.

What happens more often is something like this:

1. You read something that you think might make a difference in your business. You get a “big idea” of a change that needs to be made.

2. Next you work out a plan of how you can implement this idea.

3. Next you begin to implement this idea.

4. Next, the idea begins to have an affect and you see a small success.

5. Next you work out how you can make this affect from this idea continue to happen, so you make it into a system… you do something every day, you expand upon your plan and you scale things up.

6. Next your level of success from this idea grows, and if you are persistent and work hard enough, overcoming the inevitable problems that show up along the way, maybe after months or years, you reach a level of revenue or income that when you first had the idea, you dreamed of.

This process could take months or years to complete but the reality is, it HAS to happen this way.

It’s for this reason that I say that success is nothing more than accumulation. I don’t mean accumulation of money, but accumulation of effort, accumulation of work, accumulation of knowledge, an accumulation of implemented ideas, an accumulation of overcome obstacles.

If you’re like most of us “big dreamers”, this notion is both upsetting and, if you let it be, empowering.

What it means is that there’s nothing big you can achieve in a single day. In other words, there’s no such thing as an overnight success. The “breakthrough” you’re waiting for, the big goal you’ve been waiting to achieve, it’s not just going to pop out and surprise you if only you do the right thing this week or this month.

If you want to reach any goal, all you can do today is take one small step. You can step towards your goal today, and then you can take another step in the same direction tomorrow. Having an idea, that’s one step, that’s all you can do today. Making a plan to put the idea into practice, that’s one step, that’s all you can do the next day. And so the process goes.

The empowering part is this:

You don’t HAVE to worry about doing something miraculous this week or this month that will get you to your goal. All you have to do is choose the right path and do SOMETHING every day. You do something consistently each day, and eventually all the little something’s that seem like nothing will add up to… SOMETHING!

And when I say “do SOMETHING” each day, that doesn’t mean “do anything”. You have to be taking steps every day in the SAME direction. You have to pick your path and stick to it, keep walking down it! You might be stepping every day but changing your direction so you’re effectively walking round in a circle. If you’ve ever said to yourself “But I DO work on my business EVERY DAY and I’m still not making progress!”, then there’s only one possible reason.

So if you really want to make 2010 your year you’ll commit to a journey. You’ll pick a path that you know will lead toward your goal and you’ll walk that road until you reach your destination. Find the tasks you need to do to achieve your outcome and set up a system for doing them continually every day until the outcome is a reality. Every day that goes by your results will accumulate and without even knowing it you’ll have reached your goals with seemingly no friction.

Success is as simple as that.

Yep, it’s ma birthday today!

It’s my birthday… but the presents are for YOU!

It’s ma birthday, I’m off on an adventure tomorrow (more about that tomorrow) and I’m feelin good!

So good in fact, that I prepared this for you…

Below are the links to a 6 part video series I finished recording this weekend.

The series is about how to achieve perfect on page search optimization for all the content you ever write for your wordpress blog.

There’s over an hour’s worth of valuable info here, all free – no opt in, nothing.

It also marks my first foray into Youtube, so I’d really love to hear your feedback, and I’d love it even more if you could rate the videos at youtube based on how valuable you found them.

The first one is here and then the links to the others are below.

Enjoy!

P.S. When you’re done, go over to here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/AndrewHansenDotName

And hit subscribe to keep up with all the new videos I’ll be posting in the coming months.

Here we go…

Part 1: Perfect Permalinks

Part 2: Blog Post Titles And Keywords

Part 3: Avoiding Duplicate Content

Part 4: Achieving Perfect LSI Relevance

Part 5: Working With SEO Plugins

Part 6: SEO Plugins Part 2