So I have been thinking about it for a while and I decided I want to give this site a break. On Friday the 15th I am going to close the site to new memberships. I will keep the membership area of the site running for somewhere between a month or two depending on member feedback.
Changing the site from the ebook model to the membership model sharply increased the customer quality and the enjoyability of running the site. The level of discussion in the forums and strength of the community within it were both drastically above my hopes and expections. If I were a customer of the site (and did not have the responsibility of maintaining it) I would gladly pay somewhere between $300 to $500 a month to be a member of the forums.
But the truth is I am not the target market, and most people attracted to the SEO market are attracted to it because they are cheap. So most of the market is not interested in paying $100 a month...or even $10 a month. And the irony is that if you tried to cater to the broader market with a lower price point the community and information would be so watered down that it wouldn't be enjoyable to run and the site wouldn't be worth much.
Today I got this via email
I know that you answer about SEO all questions via forum now. All i ask is 10 your minutes via chat mate.10 minutes of your life and you will change mine mate.
The guy pre-qualifies that he does not care enough about me to value my time, and then he expects me to be giving enough to change his life for him. For about 5 years I was dumb enough to try to help people like that, thinking that in some grand karma scheme that it would come back to me. But hundreds of people have sent me emails telling me I changed their lives, and some have even went as far as telling my wife that reading my blog made them millionaires, while they also exclaimed to her how they never even bought my $79 ebook.
By running this site (and the blog on it) I am essentially creating a lot of competition for myself. Here is an example...I bought a strong domain for well below market value. A related domain name (ie the same name but a different lower value extension) went to auction about 8 weeks later and sold for nearly 20X what I paid. If I was forced to pay that rate I would not have been able to. And the person who paid 20X told me that they got into domain stuff from reading my blog. Had they competed on the other name I scooped up, I would have prciced myself out of the opportunity by giving away valuable information to a non-customer, which is a pretty stupid business building strategy.
And there are two more competitors you create by running a well known SEO site...
- search engineers who are more likely to penalize your sites because of who you are (in some cases you get penalized for doing things that are far less extreme than your own clients are doing)
- other SEOs that claim to be your buddies and rat you out to search engineers (it is a dirty, saturated marketplace...and there are too many people chasing nickels)
Most the people in the consumer facing SEO market do not get the big picture of how the market opporates (or else they wouldn't be in the market)...they would be cranking out affiliate sites and building strong online media brands.
The problem with me running this site is that I sink too much time and effort into it. I am not the type of person who is comfortable with the idea of going half way, or employing people to provide something that is watered down. It is not within my work ethic to do so and I am the type of person who gets emotionally attached to my work. It is all or nothing for me...it's how I was wired. I have already made over 5,000 forum posts, put out a monthly newsletter, blog, and create members only featured content each month. Meanwhile some of our other projects are doing well, but are being all but ignored.
The income from the site is substantial, but this site eats up over 95% of my work time and is less than half of my income. That makes me wonder how much more substantial my other income streams might be if I were to treat them like a real business and put effort into making them best of breed sites. The income disparity is actually greater than 20 to 1 when you consider how many years I put into this site, the money invested on branding, and the offline social interactions.
And even with the ability to attract Fortune 500 clients the payout for that work is still far below the value added. Some ideas we have given clients were worth 10s or 100s of millions of dollars, and there was no 7 figure paycheck from a client thusfar. Relative to running affiliate sites, traditional consulting is yet another pennies on the dollar strategy.
I got asked to speak at an SEO conference for pharmacy corporations. After I said no they offered me $1,500 to speak, but I still said no. While Google is comfortable using the web as a messaging platform for pharmacy corporations I don't want that blood on my hands. I have seen a friend's scars on their wrist from when they tried killing themselves when they were on Paxil. And that too is a big issue I have with running this site...I teach people how to manipulate access to information, and while I generally try to increase the quality of the user experience (re-investing in offering a better user experience even when there is no direct revenue upside from it), I can't guarantee I know who all my readers are or how my readers shape / influence the broader web.
The value of the SEO knowledge I have (combined with my market experience, social connections, and other knowledge) keeps increasing logarithmically when applied on our own sites. But the amount of work needed to keep a large SEO brand afloat has power laws working in the other direction - increased required work to maintain a fairly static revenue base. Its not that I want to be greedy, but from an opportunity cost perspective, why work twice as long as most people when you could cut your time spent working by 95% and still keep most your income?
