The Good Old DaysAs you know the internet changes rapidly.

Many profitable strategies that worked 5 years ago no longer work today.

Equally, what works today may not be viable in 1-2 years time.

I’ve noticed this can cause a lot of anxiety and worries for many people, especially those that are starting out with their online businesses.

Actually, when I began in 2010 I also worried about whether I’d “missed the boat” and if it was really possible to achieve success.

Today, I am fortunate to have the benefit of hindsight so let’s explode the myth of the “Good Old Days” by first looking at some common concerns that I’ve heard from people:   

Concern 1: “I’m too late. The internet gold rush is over”

Well, which gold rush are they referring too?

Today, a lot of people look back to the good old days as being the mid 2000s. But at that time others were having the same worries and looking back to the late 90s as being the real gold rush.

Although I wasn’t involved in the internet in the early 2000s I do remember a lot of comments about the internet being a flash in the pan and that the party was over. Perhaps you remember this too?

And look what has happened since!

Seriously, Facebook, Google and Amazon are merely teenagers. There’s a lot of growing to do and, as you probably know, online sales are increasing massively every year (including information products like eBooks), even during the recession!

Concern 2: “SEO is dead”

Well I agree with this one!

This year, in 2013, we are seeing a lot of internet marketing products along the lines of “SEO is dead, long live SEO!”.

Yes, many people are milking it because they know that SEO and “getting on page 1 of Google” training appeals to newcomers who think it’s the best way of getting visitors to your website.

In some cases, such as local business marketing where you are ranking a local plumber for “plumbers in Durango” then it is still a VERY good method. Equally, if you are a medium/large corporate with a marketing budget it makes sense to allocate some of it to SEO.

But for the average person starting a business from home? In 95% of cases SEO is the wrong strategy.

If you’ve followed me for any length of time you’ll already know this and that generally speaking I dislike SEO. I spent 8 months working at it in 2010 with almost no results whatsoever.

As you can imagine, after that experience I thought SEO was dead then so I definitely agree it’s dead now!

So if it’s dead, is this a problem?

Absolutely not.

As we’ve talked about many times here on the blog there are loads of other traffic methods (free and paid) that you can use to drive stacks of visitors to your sites.

Concern 3: “Paid traffic is too expensive now”

There were strategies in the mid 2000s that a lot of people made a lot of money with.

For example, using Google Ads (i.e., Adwords) to drive traffic to the sales pages of affiliate products.

But if you think about it this example isn’t really a business. It’s just an arbitrage: You aren’t creating products, giving away helpful information or building a list of customers. Instead you’re just moving traffic from Google to a sales page and making a profit.

So it’s hardly surprising that this didn’t last. Advertising costs rose as more and more people jumped onboard and the profits disappeared.

Adwords, like any advertising, is entirely viable. It’s just that you need to ensure that you have the right offers that generate a high enough customer value.

Evergreen methods

The overall point really with the concerns that we’ve been discussing here is that individual internet strategies (like SEO, paid traffic arbitrage, etc) come and go but the principles of business and marketing remain constant and effective.

The only thing you need to do is to keep up to date with how this is implemented on the internet. That’s what we talk about here on the GHG blog and if you embrace the changes it’s an awful lot of fun too!

As mentioned previously, business on the internet continues to grow so please don’t ever think you’ve missed the boat.

Plus when people think of the “good old days” they sometimes forget that things like web hosting, site design and graphics were incredibly expensive and required a lot of technical knowledge. Today, the startup costs are tiny and you need almost no technical knowledge whatsoever.

There’s never been a better time to get stuck in and moving with your business!

Agree, disagree? Please Like and Tweet if you enjoyed this and let me know your thoughts below… Cheers, Rob 🙂