Wait a minute, when did you fail? Or did you quit?
Let me see if I got this straight, just from reading about it, you managed do all the keyword research, pick a product, build a website on your own, figure out SEO on wordpress, managed to keep the targeting of the article correct, managed to get it all on a server and online, and rank it to spot 14 with almost no backlinks. On your first try.
And you are Bummed?
Do you even know how good your onpage SEO had to be to do that?
What on earth were you expecting?
Here are a few things you might want to consider.
Many (most?) people here can't build their own site, even with WP
They cant load wp with cPanel
They can't write content
They always mess up the on page and blow the keyword targeting.(almost always).
Hell, many of them cannot even pick a niche or find a clickbank product.
Your problem is that you do not recognize success.
You did pretty damn good for a first time out, and unless that site is a year old, it hasn't failed yet. Imagine what might happen when you do actually learn SEO.
How are you going to learn SEO? By reading more?
What you really need to do is practice on a site that no one cares about and see what works and doesn't work.
The only way you failed at all is if you quit. That is all on you.
I give you a A+ for taking action, but a D- for sticking with it.
AND ANOTHER THING:
You didn't even try to figure out the ratings drop.
A big panda update just hit. Panda is designed to keep sites with thin or poor quality content from advancing into the top SERP positions. How good was your content?
Your rankings might have been a fluke, or maybe they were real, and your content was a little thin, and panda slapped you back a bit. (too many 300 word articles?)
Google rankings bounce around all the time. Data centers have glitches, sub routines fail to run, updates are partially tested, all kinds of thing have to sync perfectly to show you the rankings.
When you see a ranking drop, check obviously for a cause, then just watch it. If there is no obvious reason for it, give it a little bit.
I often see sites take a little dive before a decent movement up. I often see sites drop 5 or 6 spots one day and be right back up where they were the next.
You certainly want to react to things but overreacting to ranking changes will drive you nuts.
AND ANOTHER THING:
Don't you dare tell people to put off taking action until they know what you know.
People need to build a website the first week they get into IM, even if it is for toenail fungus or training truffle sniffing pigs, or a local baseball team. Until you actually have to start doing SEO, you know NOTHING.
Build it while you are still too ignorant to be scared to do it.
How many people have been here for years and haven't done much of anything anything yet? I bet the number is staggering.
