Passive Income Unlocked - Avoiding the Google Hammer

Welcome back.

In the last email, I mentioned that on our very first site, as soon as we started gaining some traction, Google promptly stepped in to take it away.

This happens all too often to well-meaning people with relatively good sites. So what’s the problem? Does Google just have it out for us?

Before I tell you what I think, here’s what happened. On that first site, which we call site #1 in all of our income reports, we finally started turning a corner and got it up to over 5,000 pageviews/month.

When this is your first site, that’s a pretty good milestone. This is also the point where I started getting impatient and maybe even a bit greedy.

At the time, our site was only monetized with Amazon affiliate links, and we weren’t making hardly anything from them. I remember thinking to myself, “how can we be making such a small amount of money from this many visitors? 5,000 people is a ton!”

That’s when I took matters into my own hands and added a bunch of buyer-intent content. I also flooded the site with affiliate links on the non-buyer intent content.

All of my efforts were rewarded, but not for very long. Revenue doubled or tripled overnight, but within a matter of days, all of our posts dropped from page 1 to page 2 or 3, some were nowhere to be found.

Google dropped the hammer. And looking back, that was the right thing to do.

Our site was no longer simply providing useful information for our visitors. Instead, our articles were simply a means to get people over to Amazon, so we would get a small commission.

This was an important lesson for me, one that changed and eventually defined our strategy.

Google’s goal is to put the most helpful piece of content in front of people. When you look at it that way, your goal should be the same.

From that point forward, we decided to go away from affiliate marketing and simply produce useful, informational articles. The end goal would be to monetize these articles with display ads.

Even if the perceived return was smaller, at least we wouldn’t have to worry so much about Google. That was our thought then, and to an extent, that is still our thought to this day.

A few months after making that switch, all of our rankings came back. Since the site recovered, it hasn’t stopped growing and now nets over 350,000 pageviews/month.

There are a couple of lessons here:

1. Be patient and stick to your plan. Whenever you get impatient and/or greedy, bad things tend to happen.
2. If you want your articles to rank well in Google Search, produce the type of content that Google wants to show (hint: the ones that are in line with what your visitors are looking for).

In the next email, I’ll show you why you don’t need to chase dollars to make money.

Until then, check out this post I wrote about the importance of being patient. Trust me; To build a successful niche site, you’re going to need it.

Jeff

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