The Perils of Online Publishing
While I’m known for flaunting my successes, often the best lessons we learn are from our failures. So I wanted to tell you this true story so that you are aware of possible misadventures in online entrepreneurship.
Many of you know that I make almost all of my money online through publishing. One of my sites is called Celebrity Cowboy. I purchased the site back in March of 2007 and slowly started building it up. Each month it was making progress, and each month I spent more money, anticipating further growth.
Then November came. And for whatever reason (probably a variety), Google decided to start filtering Celebrity Cowboy out of the search results. They didn’t completely remove Celebrity Cowboy from the search index, but they penalized it enough so that Celebrity Cowboy barely gets a few dozen search referrals each day (whereas it had been getting thousands).
Here’s the problem: I made a business decision in October to increase my investment in Celebrity Cowboy based on the last 6 or so months of growth and projecting that growth into the future. I’m now losing over $1k per month on the site.
The fact of the matter is that if you depend on Google search referrals for your livelihood, you need to take my experience with Celebrity Cowboy to heart and start diversifying. Thankfully, I started diversifying last year. Big time. In fact, I even started diversifying by investing in offline projects.
Because I started diversifying last year, I have the cash flow and assets to subsidize Celebrity Cowboy until it gets back into the good graces of Google. But just imagine if my entire livelihood was dependent on that site?
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