Come January 2007, I began exploring the world of making money online. I religiously followed the popular MMO bloggers of the day, taking most of their advice to my detriment. I finally started to get burned out on blogging over the summer of 2007 and the site went dormant from September 2007 to April 2008. It didn’t take long before I started getting burned out again. I was in it for all the wrong reasons. Anyone who has started a blog and stuck with it knows that you really have to be interested in what you are talking about to stick with it. I have no doubt that 95% of long-term bloggers do it because they love it, not because of the income that their site may generate. After my initial burnout in 2007, I was only in it for the income.

Because of that, I decided to go a different route and try my hand at affiliate marketing. I did a post in July 2008 showing off my results. I got extremely lucky with a direct linking PPC campaign to an e-mail submit CPA offer. I never posted the results of my best month:

Market Leverage Earnings from 2008 (click to enlarge)

Pretty good, eh?

Over the rest of the year I grossed just north of $50k between Market Leverage and Azoogle.

2008 CPA Earnings (click to enlarge)

I can’t remember what I spent on PPC that year, but it was somewhere around $20k. So my first 6 months doing affiliate marketing, I netted about $30k. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

The problem is, I just got lucky.

In 2009, nearly every single campaign I tried flopped. It was around this time that Google really started cracking down on its AdWords policies. I either couldn’t get new campaigns approved, or the ones I did get approved weren’t profitable.

I continued to try PPC for the next several months, but finally gave up around June 2009.

I decided from that point on, I would learn SEO and try to build income from free traffic. That’s the road I was on when I made the last post on this blog nearly 2 years ago.

In the time since, I have been learning the ins and outs of SEO. I have built dozens of niche sites and a few authority sites. My primary monitization method has been AdSense:

AdSense Earnings (click to enlarge)

$3,613.37 in earnings. Again, not too bad. You can see towards the right side of the graph that I was just starting to have some decent days. In fact, the last day on that chart shows $23 and some change.

“was” starting to have some decent days was the key operative in that sentence. Why is that in the past tense? That leads me to my next point.

What Inspired Me to Start Blogging Again?

2 days ago, my main earner, a blog in the health niche got slapped hard:

Google Hates Me (click to enlarge)

The site was really starting to take off. Google seemed to love me. With each Panda update, my traffic would climb. I was actually really excited about the site. The niche was interesting, my content was good and earnings were just starting to take off. Then Monday, June 27th, I got hit with the -950 penalty.

If you’ve never heard of the -950 penalty, it’s about the worst you can get outside of your entire site being de-indexed. Every single one of the keywords I was previously ranking for is now on the very last page of the SERPs. From what I understand, this is a manually applied penalty. One of Google’s minions likely reviewed my site and gave it the thumbs down for some reason. It’s also possible that I triggered some kind of automatic filter, but I don’t think that this is the case since I haven’t changed anything on this site nor done any link building for several months.

Something like this is a big blow. It isn’t so much about the income lost. I have no doubt that I can start a new site from scratch and replicate the success of this site. It’s more of a blow to my confidence. I felt like I really knew what I was doing now. I had a plan, I executed on the plan and I was seeing the results that I expected.

Now a monkey wrench has been thrown into the works. Now I have doubts. Sure I can build a site just like this one, but what if it get’s slapped too? What did I do get penalized in the first place. I wasn’t doing anything blackhat. Heck, I wasn’t even doing anything whitehat. I was just publishing content.

Nevertheless, I press on. Maybe this was a wake up call. Maybe this will be the impetus that leads to greater things.

So What Are My Plans for This Site Now?

Like I said above, I am over the whole MMO blog. I think the vast majority of those are full of worthless junk. I don’t care if a single person outside of myself ever visits this site. I don’t care if Google banishes it into oblivion.

My entire purpose for this site is that is will be a place to organize my thoughts. A place where I can put my plans to (electronic) paper. A way to keep me focused on the goal. A place to share my thoughts on personal finance and other topics that relate to financial and time freedom.

The goal is to build sustainable passive income.

That means I whatever avenues I pursue will be to build something that can sustain itself with minimal maintenance.

It doesn’t even have to be what is considered a traditional online revenue model. I am open to anything (well anything that’s not immoral or illegal.)

This is the start of a journey. Welcome to my journey. Welcome to WallerBlog 2.0.

Unknown source. Found via Digg

In celebration of this momentus occassion, I present the Corsair Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates:

If you have a Facebook account, you can now change your language to English (Pirate)…

Finally, you can’t celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day without a good pirate joke:

A pirate walks into a bar wearing a paper towel on his head. He sits down at the bar and orders some dirty rum.

The bartender asks, “Why are you wearing a paper towel?”

“Arrrrrrr I’ve got a bounty on me head!”

Dear John,

I’ve been saving my Entrecard credits for some time now and have finally horded enough to place my humble card on your (pricy) Entrecard widget for a day. Since you’re probably new to my blog, I’d like to first say welcome, and second, show you around a bit. So kick off your sneakers and come on in!

My name is Jeremy Waller. I’ve been blogging now for about a year and a half. I’m a bit of a finance nerd, tech junkie and entrepreneur. After you subscribe to my RSS feed, you’ll get approximately 3 posts per week on these topics (or whatever else I decide to blog about. It’s my blog. I make the rules) freshly picked from the ripe fields of my mind. I’m a part-time blogger and just don’t have the time to be a posting machine like you are, but the posts I do put out are mighty tasty (Dot Com Dump anyone?)

Go check out some of my ramblings and, before heading out, why don’t you join MyBlogLog Community and become one of my followers on twitter (Just in case you were wondering, I’m one of your followers.) I’m giving some link love to anyone who follows me.

Thanks again for stopping by!

Sincerely,
Jeremy Waller