Ricky Ford

It's been awhile since I've updated or posted here on my personal blog, but I wanted to take a second to touch in on a subject that a lot of people hear about these days and attempt, but never get very good at. Internet marketing is something that hundreds of thousands of people try and break in to to help supplement their income or even provide themselves with a primary income, but is often not explored in the fullest and broken down into exactly how hard it is to do.

Whether you're doing CPA offers, micro niche websites, social marketing and media, or other things such as lead generation, internet marketing is a very tough nut to crack and an even harder nut to get stable in. I've been in internet marketing for almost six years now, not as a way to quit my job and live vicariously through my wallet, but as a means to make extra income to support me and my family, and it has been a constant struggle since the first day I started. Domain names are becoming harder and harder to match exactly to keywords, keyword research is getting increasingly difficult to maintain, social media marketing is becoming almost impossible to get away with, and e-mail marketing is slowly dying out at the hands of the CAN-SPAM act.

With the recent updates to the Google search engine (Panda and Penguin), internet marketers around the world are feeling the effects of their nest-eggs being buried deep within the search giant's SERPs (search engine ranking pages) and are a tough thing to recover from. The internet marketing world is a highly sophisticated and deeper, darker world than it was 5 years ago, and if you were recently hit by the Google updates, chances are some people out there will never recover.

Many different forums online have had people reporting that they went from thousands of dollars a month in extra income to merely tens of dollars, all with the deep upgrades that Google has made to their search engines. Relying on Google as your primary traffic source is starting to become a rocky ship, and is becoming a highly unreliable form of traffic. Some websites are fluctuating up and down constantly, doing the "Google Dance", and will probably never hold the steady positions they were used to before being hit with Panda or Penguin.

If your money-maker was one that was hit hard with the recent updates, I feel for you. The blackhat schemes that most use to boost their website's search positions are dying out fast and furiously, doing exactly what Google wanted. If you're just breaking in to internet marketing, be prepared to read more than you've probably ever read in your life. To become a successful internet marketer these days could almost be looked at as an experience deep enough to qualify itself as a college degree, and the money you spend tinkering and tweaking your websites is going to rack up into the same category.

My word of advice to anyone looking to get into internet marketing is simple: do what you love and stick with it, and then read, read, and read some more. It's going to take a tremendous amount of knowledge these days to overcome the obstacles Google has thrown at everyone, which is going to thin out the droves internet marketers. Although there are some people out there who have had success from their first day of implementing their money making strategies, those success stories are few and very, very far between. Don't expect to be an overnight success and don't expect to make $1,000 in your first month of internet marketing.

Set your goals accordingly. Shoot to make your first $5.00 per month. After you hit that, rinse and repeat what you did before or improve on the idea that got you to that first $5.00. Google AdSense is a great resource for people looking to make money, but their policies and terms of service put an incredibly tight leash on anyone wanting to place AdSense ads on their websites. Be careful and remember the old adage: don't put all of your eggs into one basket. Doing so will get you hit and hit very hard when the time comes for Google to update their algorithms again, especially if you're relying on only one or two websites to bring in all of your income.

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