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by system2 2139 days ago
When will people learn? From the article:

"partly my fault for building my business around organic search and failing to diversify over the years"

Build real businesses, solve real business problems and stop depending on search engine SEO niche sites. One way or another either the competition eats you and write all your content with more links or search engine drops you or blacklist you then you are dead.

This is NOT a good business model and should never be the main source of income.
1 comments
tgb 2139 days ago
What's the alternative for content like this?
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adventured 2139 days ago
A newsletter format perhaps, meant to eventually make the website merely a side bonus. Depending on how they're done, newsletters can be wildly lucrative, far more so than a site like PainScience.

I scanned his site, I see no newsletter. I think that's an extraordinary mistake, to not have been leveraging all that free Google traffic all those years to build up something like that. You use the free Google traffic to make Google unnecessary to your business, that should always be your focus (of what to utilize the Google traffic for) while the freebie traffic is still flowing.

100% this guy would have been better off building a wholly independent newsletter type service that had zero dependence on Google and could be built out via other means (once it's cash flowing you can legitimately advertise it to build subscribers up, it becomes free-standing and self-building as a real business, Google is almost entirely cut out of the situation then, and anything you get from Google traffic is a bonus). The beauty of a newsletter, again if it's applicable to what you're doing, is it's a free agent, you're not going to be dependent on a singular traffic source, you can take advantage of all of them without much fear of losing your business because one traffic source vanishes.

He still has some search traffic, I'd put all of my effort into building a newsletter on the back of what's left, there might still be time to unlock from Google this way while using Google's remaining search traffic to kick free.

As a bonus he can also still sell/promo his books via a newsletter.

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