I Was Assaulted by a Panda! My First IMA Confession.
Hello:
It's time I bared my soul here.
My name is Bob, and this is my first IMA meeting. (That's Internet Marketers Anonymous, if you don't know.)
It started out simple enough. A domain here. A post there. Every so often, I'd inject a plug in to make me feel better.
Then, I met 'Bill' (not his real name). Bill was peddling the good stuff. Quick. Easy. Euphoric. Bill was an autocontent dealer.
I fought it at first, but Bill hooked me.
"Try it for seven days. You'll like it."
I was weak. I tried it. And I liked it.
The weeks went by, and before I knew it I was strung out on autocontent. I had developed a 10 domain a day habit. I was hooked.
At first, things felt GREAT! I was getting coupons from Google, along with a lot of rank love. I was pulled in further by page one appearances that I hadn't earned.
I realized that if one post a day was giving me this feeling, then ten posts a day had to be better. I fell for it. And it worked.
For a while.
I was getting some pretty good checks from Amazon, AdSense, Clickbank and ShopZilla. Commission Junction even sent me some love. We all want to feel loved, and I did.
But like any addict, I built up a tolerance to my drug of choice. My daily dose went to hourly, and then to every 15 minutes. I had built up over 100 sites. And I was high on hope, and autoposting like a crack whore.
It was getting too good. Time to pay the piper.
About ten days ago, the Panda came to visit. And he wasn't wearing his 'happy face'.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_TsLCLDRh1k..._costume_1.jpg
He snuck in quietly at first. Watering down my sites. Diluting my results.
A day or two later, I was starting to get the tremors. My front page results had gone south. I was hurting.
A month ago, I was flying high with 25% of my sites hitting page one for my keywords. Five days ago, it was only 3%. Today, nothing in the top 5 pages.
I'm Jonesing bad, and I can't find a vein. I need some keyword love bad. I'd sell my soul for a page one rank, if I hadn't already sold it.
Instead, I'm sitting here. Fearing Google, Pandas, and most bamboo products. (Teak is sort of nice, but no bamboo.)
Even farmers will send a shiver down my spine for some reason.
So it's time to go through my intervention. I've disconnected my cron jobs and shelved WPRobot. I've got to make it on my own in the cruel, cruel world.
But I need help. I've used to have 30,000 visitors per month to my sites. I'm at about 25,000 and falling.
I have 7500 twitter followers who are no longer being auto-tweeted.
I have a lot of ugly sites, such as BabyCowboyBedding, that need remodeling and lots of fresh posts.
I'm not totally clueless. SmoothieRecipeTV gets me a couple hundred visitors a day, and is mainly good content (although older posts need SEO work). Unfortunately, I'm not earning much revenue, since most come to just read a recipe and leave. I'm working on an autoresponder series for it.
But as I go through detox, intervention, Panda Regression Therapy, and a sad and sorry bank account, I'm looking for my IMA Sponsor. Someone I can call at 2am when I'm eying a cron job that has that too familiar feel to it.
Actually, I'd settle for anyone who's gone through this. I really hate to just drop 100+ sites and walk away. I'm looking for any feedback on how to get them back to earning in as little time as possible.
I'll sit down now, and let you all speak.
