As Google continues to bombard affiliates, SEOs, niche site owners with yet another unhelpful content algorithm update, it’s leaving some people in some pretty bad places. Now, I’m a part of many private forums, I know a lot of people in this game, and I’m hearing about folks on both sides of SEO—the black hat side, the folks kind of going aggressively against Google’s rules to rank quickly, and I’m also hearing about people on the white hat side of things, folks who have been following every rule that Google has put out there. They’re all getting slapped right now, and there are many people who have poured their hearts and their souls into blogs over the last 3, 5, 7 years, and they’re watching their income and their traffic drop by 90% or more. And it’s leaving a lot of people depressed, frustrated, angry, and I get it, I understand.
So this article is really just designed to help you kind of work through this. This is something we’re all going through together. I’ve dealt with these kinds of hero to zero moments in my career, and I will go as far as saying that everyone who creates long-term success in this game deals with these kinds of issues in their business. Now, it’s not always from Google, sometimes it’s the Facebook fan page algorithm updates that change. My first affiliate marketing website went from three grand a month that I needed to live on down to zero overnight because of a change on an early social network called Myspace. It’s just a part of the game, and the truth is, in business and in life, it’s the professionals who earn the top-tier incomes. Those are the folks who bounce back the fastest. And if you look at professional athletes, they often play tired, they play sick, they play hurt, and you’re often seeing times when a player might have a new baby that was born or they may have lost a parent or a loved one, and instead of being at that funeral, they’re playing that game that day because that’s what a multi-million dollar athlete does in those kinds of situations.
Love the marketing game? Don’t let the algorithm win!
And as someone who has made multiple millions of dollars online, I’ve had to bounce back from some pretty dark moments in this game as well. But what can you do? Are you hurting from this right now? Are you dealing with this right now? And the first thing I really encourage you to ask yourself is: Did you lose the love for what you’re working on at this point in time? Because there’s some people who get into this game of making money online, and they look at it as a loophole, they think they found a little exploit in the search engine, and they can go create some niche site about something they don’t actually care about, they don’t actually love, but they think they found that little scheme that will allow them to go create some passive income on the side. And Google’s literally trying to stitch up those loopholes, one after another after another. And Google is known to create tons of collateral damage. You see, the people who are currently working on the Google algorithm, they have no clue how it works. And the sooner you realize this, the freer you’ll get, because there’s a lot of people right now trying to understand why is Google doing this? They’re doing this because they have no effing clue how their algorithm works, because all of the original engineers who built the algorithms, they all had massive stock options, and they’ve all gone on to either start their own startups, to retire, or they’ve just moved on to other projects. There’s a grand total of zero people working at Google right now who are the originators of the algorithm. So what happens is it’s a Franken algorithm that has layer after layer after layer of change being added to it, and every time they make a tweak, they’ll tweak something over here, and all of a sudden, it causes all of these other issues over there.
But they’re dealing with an onslaught of programmable content from AI, they’re dealing with an onslaught of parasite SEO, and they’re dealing with an onslaught of search engine spam that’s written by cheap writers who will just crank out rubbish content for one or two, three pennies per word. And that’s the old-school way of doing it, and now folks just use AI. So the whole game of aggressively attacking Google with search engine spam to drive rankings in order to display ads for revenue, or in order to get affiliate links to earn revenue, that whole game is just, well, it’s coming to an end. And it doesn’t mean it’s going to come to an end for everyone, there’s always going to be outliers and examples of people who are going to maintain their aggressive spam-based approach to maximize revenue from a loophole. But what about you? Is that fulfilling in any way? Is that why you’re here on this planet, to create massive amounts of rubbish content that might rank so you can get ad revenue? I don’t think that’s why you’re here. I think you have a higher calling. I think you’re here on this planet to help other people. I think you are a divine being who is made in the image and the likeness of the creator, and you’re here to create, to create the kind of content that helps other people. And it really gets magical because when you get good at helping enough other people get what they want, you can have anything that you want.
You see, my first 10 years in this game online, I was always trying to get money from the internet. I knew there was a multi-billion if not trillion-dollar ecosystem out there online, the worldwide web. I was addicted from a very, very early age, I knew that this internet thing was going to be a big deal, even when economists like Paul Krugman said that the internet is going to go the way of the fax machine. And I knew at an early age that there was something here and I was going to be a part of it. So I looked for exploits, I looked for hacks, I looked for schemes, I looked for get-rich-quick scams. I participated in MLMs and network marketing schemes, all kinds of different stuff I’ve done over the years. And every single time I was working on some sort of a scheme that was designed to help me manipulate a platform in order to drive traffic and earn revenue, that scheme eventually went to zero. But today, my wife and I work on a couple of brands, our life is very simple, and we stay focused on helping groups of people who are looking for help get those things they’re looking for. And over the years, we have had to adapt our strategies many, many, many times.
But the truth behind all of it is that we love what we do. I love this game of marketing. I don’t care if YouTube stops showing my blog, I’m going to keep showing up and talking about marketing. I don’t care if Amazon shuts down my books, I’m going to keep writing books to help people get better at email marketing, at choosing a niche, at making money online as an affiliate, because this has absolutely revolutionized my life. This isn’t some exploit, this isn’t some me-too marketing scheme where I saw somebody else promoting something and they said I could promote that thing they’re promoting if I pay them and I can make the money. Nope, none of that. This is the real deal. This has changed my life. I’ve made millions playing this game, and I really, really do love it. And I also believe that I have a very unique outlook on the right way to play this game, to find that thing inside of you that wants to come out, to help you find that group of people who you’re ready to dedicate your life to helping.
Because the truth is, when you figure that out, and Google slaps your blog, who cares? It’s time to get back to work, to be like a professional. We play hurt in this game, those of us who play at the highest level. So where’s that pivot? Where’s that adaptation going to go? Organic social media, Facebook fan page, start doing actual social networking where you go into groups and you actually help people. Twitter, or X, TikTok vertical video, YouTube video, horizontal video, Instagram Reels. I don’t care. But the truth is, you’re going to pivot, and I have done for years now, throughout all of this.
The Solution: Grow Your Email List!
And one of the main themes I’ve come back to on this blog over and over and over again is to grow your email list because that’s the only asset that you own and that you control. And even if Google shuts down your blog, or at least shuts down your blog’s ability to rank on Google and drive organic traffic, right? Because you could still run your blog, you can still drive traffic from Pinterest to your blog, you could drive traffic from Facebook to your blog. But if you get severed from your search engine optimization organic content from Google to your blog, now you just pivot. And if you’ve got an email list, you can still go cut an email out, send an email to your blog, and voila, you could make money right there.
You know, this past week, after getting back from Egypt, my wife and I did a little experiment. We got together on Wednesday and we recorded a little microinfo product. It took us a couple of hours to put together. It’s an MP3 file, essentially is what it is. And then we took a day off. Was going to work on the sales letter on Friday, but instead, I helped a friend out with something who I met on that Egypt tour that I was on, and I wanted to get out and hike because we had good sunny weather with rain on the way. Friday morning, I get up and I write a sales letter based on one of my templates, and I launched that out to the world, put that sales letter on a blog post, by the way, we sent an email to it, and we’ve had about 150 sales, totaling over $5,000 in revenue in the first 24 hours. Now, this is me making 5 grand in 24 hours from a blog that I don’t care what Google thinks of the blog. I don’t care if Google’s giving me more traffic or less traffic with the blog.
What a blog actually is?
You see, a blog is simply somewhere that I and you can go publish content, so where we can share our ideas, our stories, our insights, our tutorials, our reviews, we could share it all with the world. And nobody who starts a blog has a right to traffic, deserves traffic from Google in no way, shape, or form. Sometimes we can earn it if you want to play by their rules. But a lot of people are learning right now something I learned many years ago, which is that Google changes the rules all of the time, and Google has no clue what it’s doing. It’s putting out unhelpful content updates that end up really putting some rubbish content above some well-written stuff by some well-mentioned people, and that could be really difficult to deal with, could be depressing, it can make you angry, it’s going to knock some people out of this game completely. They’re going to give up, they’re going to go get a day job. And honestly, if you don’t love what you’re doing, that might be the best route for you. But if you feel that spark inside of you, that thing that says, man, even though Google cut me off, I am here for this audience of people. I don’t care if it’s knitting, racing simulators, Minecraft, how to farm NFT coins, whatever it is that you’re so into that you’re going to keep doing regardless whether Google drives you traffic or not, that’s the real magic place.
So this is actually an opportunity for a large swath of the current generation of affiliate marketers and internet marketers, this generation who grew up thinking that this game is all about going and exploiting some loophole on Google, even if it’s a niche they don’t give a about, it might be their moment to realize that they’re either going to get in alignment with something that’s in their heart and they’re going to start sharing something that they really care about, and they’re going to go all in on helping people come hell or high water, regardless of the platform that they publish on, because when you get there and one door closes, you just go look for the next door. And that next day might look and your traffic might be down 90%, you’re like, all right, well, that game is up. And if you look through the history of all of the niche site gurus, all of those marketers that you probably watch here on YouTube, any of them who have been in this game for five years, ten years, they’ve all survived major ups and downs on their path. They’ve all had to pivot their strategy repeatedly. Is what we do. But it’s also why I’ve always recommended that you grow your email list, that you learn how to be a direct response marketer because bulk publishing rubbish content in hopes that it ranks so you can display an ad is just a tiny sliver of potential of you and your life force energy and it’s a really, really easy target for Google to go shut down because Google would rather reward their current and future partners. If you notice, Google has just signed a deal with Reddit recently where they’re going to be paying Reddit to allow Reddit to help them train their AI. Oh, look at that, Google and Reddit are in bed. Guess what kind of content ranks above the hard work of niche site creators and bloggers these days? It’s Reddit because there are these backdoor deals that happen at the level of business all day, and we indie creators, we don’t have a seat at that table.
So what can we do?
We can keep showing up and helping people. We have to get better at helping people. We have to meet our people on multiple platforms where they are. We have to build a series of steps based on content to assist those folks in getting what they want. I often call these sales funnels. It’s all about being a direct response marketer. And really, I think the big key that a lot of folks are going to wake up to here is the power of advertising.
When you unlock the ability to spend $100 in advertisements and you can drive $110 in sales in that same day, you’ve unlocked the ability to create cash flow on demand. And when those folks who click on your advertisements go through an opt-in page first and they join your email list first and you still earn that $110 on that same day, you are now growing an email list while profiting, meaning you’re growing a giant list of people who are interested in getting help with what you help people with, and you’re getting paid to grow that list.
What’s the actual Game?
This is the actual game that my wife and I stumbled on many years ago that we’ve been all in on since about 2005. Here’s a quick story for you: I really learned about this game at a WordPress event called WordCamp in San Francisco, I believe it was back in 2012, 2013. And I was there bragging about how much traffic we were driving from SEO to a guy I had met in Bend, Oregon, and he ran ads on Google, usually spending his minimum, customers were about $50,000 per month in advertising. And he was like, “Miles, you’re on the wrong side of optimization.” He’s like, “This SEO, search engine optimization, is fine. Yeah, you’re getting free traffic, but traffic is the easy part of the equation. The challenging part is coming up with an offer that converts. But once you have an offer that converts, you can go get traffic from anywhere. And there are billions of clicks available each and every day from advertising platforms as a media buyer.”
And that’s why I shifted my focus hard right then and there. I heard what he said. I didn’t wait to get punched in the face by Google before I started building my life raft. Did I give up all my blog in that day? No, our main blog is still driving over a million clicks per year right now in this current age of all the Google BS that we’re all dealing with. It’s down from about 8 million visits per year, but I’m doing all right in the traffic on that side of the game.
Focus on building new Pathways
But I’ve been focusing on building pathways. It started with running pop-ups over top of all my blog posts that are getting traffic to offer people the opportunity to get something in exchange for their email address to grow my email list. And once that started working, I started dabbling, reinvesting my profits into Facebook ads to drive Facebook ads to my opt-in pages, into sales funnels. And this led me down the path of ultimately becoming a direct response marketer and a copywriter who is in 100% control of his income right here and now, no matter what Google does, no matter what Facebook does. Facebook turns me off or turns my ad platform off, I can go over to Pinterest, start running traffic there. I can go over to YouTube, start running traffic there. And clearly, as we’ve connected here in this moment, here on YouTube, I’m still leveraging some organic content, but I know at any point in time that if I say the wrong thing here on YouTube talking about what they did to our society four years ago, forcing people to stay put, the great shutdown as some of us have come to call it, we question that too much here on this platform, they’ll shut my channel down. That’s all right, I got an email list, got advertising skills, got copywriting skills. I know how to craft an offer to get people to say yes, to get them on my list, to get them on my customer list. And those skills I can bring with me anywhere.
And it turns out people will pay me $5,000 or $10,000 to leverage those skills if I apply them to their business. So I recommend that you look at what you’ve gone through at this point as a skill-building process. And it maybe was an expensive seminar for you. You maybe just learned a hard life lesson that you can’t really be all in on other people’s platforms because that gives them the power to pull the rug out from under you, and then they can negatively affect your traffic, your cash flow, and your lifestyle. But the real question is, what are you going to do about it from here? And if you love it, if you love your audience, and you love what you do, you’re just going to keep going. You’re going to get up right now, dust yourself off, and figure out what that next best plan is for you, and then go execute. Some folks, they’re going to get knocked down by this, and they’re never getting up from this one. They’re going to complain, they’re going to stomp their feet, they’re going to whine about this on social media, and they’re never going to recover.
Then there’s this other category of people. They’re going to get slapped. It’s going to hurt, it’s going to sting, and they’re going to realize they’ve been just trying to exploit a loophole. They haven’t really actually been adding value into the lives of other human beings. And they’re going to make a change. They’re going to choose that niche, that thing that they’ve been hearing about, their soul, they’ve been hearing the whisper in their ear, go, go do this, do that knitting site, do that sim racing site, do that little thing that you love because it would be fun. And if Google slaps you around when you’re doing something fun, you just start playing in a different sandbox. Go play with that fun thing on Facebook, go play with that fun thing on Pinterest, go run some ads, grow a list about that fun thing. Talk about that fun thing every damn day on your email list. You make a lot more money playing that game, I can tell you that 100% for sure, as someone who’s made multiple, multiple millions of dollars online.
And I know it’s not easy to hear this. I know it’s not an easy time. This is depressing, it’s frustrating. But it happens, and sometimes we’ve got to pull up our big boy pants and move on. So if this has been helpful, let me know in the comments, give it a thumbs up. I hope it’s been helpful. We needed to take a moment to clear the air around this and maybe go take a walk in nature, go have a little “me” time, check in with yourself. Have you just been trying to exploit something to go get money from the internet? Because if so, then you got what you deserved. Or are you all in, and you really were helping people en masse and you created the most helpful content that these people have ever seen? Well, if so, go put that into a Kindle book and go launch that thing on Amazon this week. It’s easy, easy. There are people on Upwork, there are people on Fiverr who can format the book, they could do the book cover for you if you wrote the best damn content the world has ever seen to help those people, and you’re just sulking right now, get over it and build something with that content you created.
Then start a YouTube channel about that content, go read every one of those blog posts out, find somebody on Upwork or Fiverr who can make you some b-roll based AI video content that you can publish, and go start your faceless channel. If you are too scared to sit there in front of a camera and talk, just keep going. That’s all that matters. And when you realize that everyone you look up to in this game has been slapped around harder than you realize, we’ve dealt with stuff that you couldn’t imagine, and we kept showing up. And that fact that we’ve kept showing up is why we are all still successful today. And if you want to join us in these upper echelons of success, you know what you need to do: find that niche, that audience that you are ready to go be of service to no matter what, go find that hill you’re ready to die on, and then keep publishing.
And if you want to say, “Google, I’m right there with you,” I made that declaration in my life years ago, and my life’s been better for it. Now, some people are having a very hard realization with this, I honor that. But it is really truly time to just pick yourself back up, figure out what that next best step is, and take another step forward. Then take another step forward, then take another step forward. Diversify what you do, stay all in on helping people. The more you realize how you can give to this world, the better off you’ll do. And when you get really, really good at helping other people get what they want, you can help them get what they want through Pinterest, through Facebook, through Instagram, through TikTok, through YouTube, through ads, through media buying, through magazines, through print direct mail. It’s easy once you get playing the right game.
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