A Must Read article by Rand Fishkin

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What most people don't realize is that we are living in a golden age of business.

This is not the norm. At almost any point in history it's been incredibly difficult for people to create their own wealth from scratch.

It's always do-able if you really have the grit and determination though. At almost any point in history.

But the point we live now where you get people going online and a year later they're making $1 mil per year isn't something that will be around forever.

Even now, it's becoming harder and harder. 10 years ago you could get started in SEO with $100. 5 years ago you could get up to $10k/mo pretty easily with only $1k-$2k to spend. Now if you've got anything less than $5k it's going to be extremely hard to make money in SEO unless you get lucky with your niche.

You can see the same across all sectors. The people who were disciplined and smart and used those first few millions to grow and dominate are now eating up all the space. Big corporations are jumping in too.

There used to be a great little niche in the "best gifts for X year old Y", "best gifts for 1 year old boys", 2, 3, 4, boys and girls. You could make a fortune from those keywords. 3 years ago there was zero competition across a combined search volume of a million searches a month. Now.. Let's see

I'll pick 1, "best gifts for 3 year old boys"

We have goodhousekeeping.com, gearhungry.com, johnlewis.com, nymag.com, independent.co.uk and thespruce.com all targeting the keyword. Goodhousekeeping are literally just doing it affiliate style. Review article with their affiliate links to amazon. They're a mega-corp. (Hearst media) Good luck beating them.

Time is running out.

I'd say you don't have more than 10 years. Anyone who's not made much money in the next 5 years is going to be out the game unless they're the sort of person that can build a business in any environment. But the days of the average person coming online and making easy money is ending fast.
 
Don't think that's anything new. It's been heading in that direction for a while. I think some smaller sites (retailers) are doing a better job of customer retention than that of the bigger rivals / competitors / industry heavy weights as they understand the need to get and keep customers.

Being placed on page 1 is not always possible I think it's those now who are adapting different traffic sources, retaining users / audiences are the ones that will continue to push through these changes and thrive where as you will see larger brand names fail and become forgotten.

Just like the high street know, big brands get complacent and are not willing to change because they never had to before. The time they wake up and get young blood in, it's all too late. The internet in it's current form and evolving form is no different.



If you ask me. The way it's all heading with mobile first and as more generations adapt to a smart phone / smart device first the internet as we know it will just become "app" based.

If you want to know something open google app and it just tells you, like it does now.

You want to shop to go amazon app, or other retailer app or supermarket app.

Google knows this and that's how its adapting it's self. I figure that's the next trend in 10-20 years is to build dedicated shopping / website apps where you need to open them to view that site no more browser.
 
splishsplash said:
What most people don't realize is that we are living in a golden age of business.

This is not the norm. At almost any point in history it's been incredibly difficult for people to create their own wealth from scratch.

It's always do-able if you really have the grit and determination though. At almost any point in history.

But the point we live now where you get people going online and a year later they're making $1 mil per year isn't something that will be around forever.

Even now, it's becoming harder and harder. 10 years ago you could get started in SEO with $100. 5 years ago you could get up to $10k/mo pretty easily with only $1k-$2k to spend. Now if you've got anything less than $5k it's going to be extremely hard to make money in SEO unless you get lucky with your niche.

You can see the same across all sectors. The people who were disciplined and smart and used those first few millions to grow and dominate are now eating up all the space. Big corporations are jumping in too.

There used to be a great little niche in the "best gifts for X year old Y", "best gifts for 1 year old boys", 2, 3, 4, boys and girls. You could make a fortune from those keywords. 3 years ago there was zero competition across a combined search volume of a million searches a month. Now.. Let's see

I'll pick 1, "best gifts for 3 year old boys"

We have goodhousekeeping.com, gearhungry.com, johnlewis.com, nymag.com, independent.co.uk and thespruce.com all targeting the keyword. Goodhousekeeping are literally just doing it affiliate style. Review article with their affiliate links to amazon. They're a mega-corp. (Hearst media) Good luck beating them.

Time is running out.

I'd say you don't have more than 10 years. Anyone who's not made much money in the next 5 years is going to be out the game unless they're the sort of person that can build a business in any environment. But the days of the average person coming online and making easy money is ending fast.
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This is good, but completely unrelated to the article :D
 
davids355 said:
What’s the TLDR? ;)
Click to expand...

Basically, zero click searches are growing with Google's control over SERPs (with their own properties), featured snippets, definition boxes, etc... Therefore, we have to find better ways of capturing those zero click searches with better branding, editorials, and other methods.
 
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Do you guys really believe that guy with horrible mustaches?
 
I believe it as well; even from personal experience I am often searching on google and finding the answer direct from the results.

I guess it’s only a small number of queries though (in the scheme of things) seeing as it’s more applicable to simple queries with short answers and not suitable if you’re researching a topic in detail, doing buyer research or any other complex gathering of information.
 
Google always wanted to answer questions and queries. They are scraping content from other websites and when their AI improves more they will be doing that right on their page without having to send any ref traffic to 3rd party websites. I've been talking about that for years.
 
davids355 said:
I believe it as well; even from personal experience I am often searching on google and finding the answer direct from the results.

I guess it’s only a small number of queries though (in the scheme of things) seeing as it’s more applicable to simple queries with short answers and not suitable if you’re researching a topic in detail, doing buyer research or any other complex gathering of information.
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Agree, these searches are a small percentage of overall search queries. I'm always a fan of capturing as much of the traffic as possible, regardless of quality, but most of this type of traffic is garbage from an ROI standpoint. Business as usual over here:)
 
how this article can help for do better seo
 
Jeepy said:
This is good, but completely unrelated to the article :D
Click to expand...

It's related :)

I'm just highlighting the bigger picture and the reality.

That as time goes on, companies suck up more and more. Google are attempting to suck up more and more of their own search traffic and keep it within their own properties. This is the cycle of business. New easy opportunities arise, and then a few come out and dominate.

Imagine it like the warcraft 3 arena games.. Everyone starts off on equal footing, and there's battles. Then a few start to get strong and if you run into them on the battlefield they they roll over you and you're then trying to get the scraps leftover to try and grow a bit. They continue to clean up, getting stronger and stronger, until eventually 1 or 2 guys are just ridiculously strong and no one can compete. This is what business is like. So what I'm pointing out is that there's more danger than people see. It's not just Google, it's the whole digital marketing space. It just doesn't happen too fast online because it's a big big arena and a lot of people don't go all out to dominate. They get distracted by the luxury life and plateau.
 
splishsplash said:
What most people don't realize is that we are living in a golden age of business.

This is not the norm. At almost any point in history it's been incredibly difficult for people to create their own wealth from scratch.

It's always do-able if you really have the grit and determination though. At almost any point in history.

But the point we live now where you get people going online and a year later they're making $1 mil per year isn't something that will be around forever.

Even now, it's becoming harder and harder. 10 years ago you could get started in SEO with $100. 5 years ago you could get up to $10k/mo pretty easily with only $1k-$2k to spend. Now if you've got anything less than $5k it's going to be extremely hard to make money in SEO unless you get lucky with your niche.

You can see the same across all sectors. The people who were disciplined and smart and used those first few millions to grow and dominate are now eating up all the space. Big corporations are jumping in too.

There used to be a great little niche in the "best gifts for X year old Y", "best gifts for 1 year old boys", 2, 3, 4, boys and girls. You could make a fortune from those keywords. 3 years ago there was zero competition across a combined search volume of a million searches a month. Now.. Let's see

I'll pick 1, "best gifts for 3 year old boys"

We have goodhousekeeping.com, gearhungry.com, johnlewis.com, nymag.com, independent.co.uk and thespruce.com all targeting the keyword. Goodhousekeeping are literally just doing it affiliate style. Review article with their affiliate links to amazon. They're a mega-corp. (Hearst media) Good luck beating them.

Time is running out.

I'd say you don't have more than 10 years. Anyone who's not made much money in the next 5 years is going to be out the game unless they're the sort of person that can build a business in any environment. But the days of the average person coming online and making easy money is ending fast.
Click to expand...
This is really scary but it is 102% true.
 
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