Diversification

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. The SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, this is Ed here. This is episode 99 of SEO is not that hard. Today, I'm going to talk about diversification, and this is something that's quite relevant. At the time of recording, we've still got the March core update rolling through, even though it is now heading towards the end of April.

Diversification is a subject that comes up pretty often in the SEO world, especially for people who are making a living off their own sites, especially for people with small organisations might just be themselves, just one or two other people maybe, and they are concerned about having all their eggs in one basket. Question is should we or I diversify? That could mean a number of things. It could mean diversification in terms of creating new sites, or it could be diversification into completely unrelated businesses, or it could be diversification of traffic sources. It's just an age-old question that comes up and different people have got different thoughts on it, different, different suggestions, and this is just mine. This is the way I look at it and the way I've done it for the past 20 or so years. So let's um, let's it Okay. So what is diversification? Quite simply, it is about splitting your risk across two different income streams or two different traffic sources. You are basically making a situation from where you might have all your eggs in one basket to start with and if anything goes wrong, you're completely stuffed to splitting it across multiple streams and if something happens to one of them, you've not lost everything, basically.

So, like I say, in investing, if you are a stock investor, you wouldn't just put all your money into one share of one company. You would split your investments across multiple shares, across multiple companies, across multiple niches. You wouldn't just invest all in one. Now you might get lucky. Some people probably do invest all in one. If you invested in tesla at the right time or an apple at the right time, then you've got massive returns. It can really pay off, but the likelihood of getting it right on a one-shot bet like that is very, very, very slim and 99 times out of 100, probably even less frequently than that you're not going to get those big returns. And if you decide not to diversify, you are essentially saying that's it. It's shit or bust. Basically, this business, this idea, has got to work. Work, otherwise I'm completely back to square one.

Now you'll always see examples of people who've done companies like that, started companies like that and have, you know, had great success like that. You don't tend to hear about the people that did that and it didn't work out, because they don't tend to tell their stories very much. Um, they should do, because stories of where things go wrong are some of the ones you can actually learn the best from. You only listen to people who've had massive success. You tend to, um, miss out sometimes. It's.

A good part of that is luck. Some of it will be judgment, but there'll be a good bit of luck there. It could just have been being in the right place at the right time, and you can't replicate being in the right place at the right time. That is something that just tends to just happen for you. Now I will be the first to admit that good bit of that being in the right place at the right time. That bit of look with broadbandcouk because that was very much. Broadband was a new technology, so timing was right. I was in the right place to even come across the option to get involved with the domain name broadband at code uk. Go and listen to the story episode, which is where I talk all about that, to get the full story. And it was also the early days of affiliate marketing and the early days of seo. So there was all those things aligned. That gave me a big dose of luck that let us move on, kick on and build Bromham at Code UK.

Now, after doing this for a few years, I was like the same thing. I was worried. Was it just luck? Have I just got here by luck? And um, I was rid of the situation, realized you know, all our eggs are in this one basket of broadband at code uk. If it goes wrong, if anything happens to that, then we're completely stuck and around.

About 2010. This is when I started thinking hard about diversification and started um, looking, um to build other income streams, um, and know it's a good job that I'd started doing that because in 2012, we got hit by Penguin, which completely wiped out Broadman at Code UK in terms of traffic from Google, took us down about 15% to where we had originally been, and you know I had a massive knock on our income. It was just fortunate that I'd already been looking at diversifying before that and my diversification plan was not to diversify traffic into Melbourne and UK but actually it was to diversify into other businesses and we got involved with e-commerce and we got involved with Amazon as well around a similar time. Amazon was maybe shortly afterwards, but having that diversification gave us a bit of a lifeline when we had the issues with broadband at Code UK, which meant we could then survive that loss of income for a while, fix the problem and kick on again with broadband at Code UK Again. Go and listen to the podcast about Panda and Penguin when I go into full detail about that.

So what I'm trying to say here is that no matter how lucky you've been or how clever you've been or however you want to attribute any kind of success you've had to, whether it's look judgment, whatever however you decide, nothing prepares you for when things just completely come and side, swipe you out and change everything. We had it with Penguin, people are having it now with the core update that's going on at the moment. Things can come along and swipe you, and it's not just Google, it can be. Things in life can come along and hit you. You can have tragedies outside of work that can affect you. You can have ill health. You can have all sorts of things that could go wrong that could affect your ability and your business's ability to earn, make money and kick forward.

This is why I personally am very big on diversification and I've always got more than one thing on the go. So right now, obviously, I've got Keywords People Use. That itself was a diversification, because Keywords People Use is a SaaS, software as a service, a subscription model. It's a different model to what I'd done previously, which is affiliate and e-commerce, now affiliate. I still do, and again with that affiliate, the whole reason I have other affiliate sites other than Broadbent Codeuk, which we obviously sold, was because I wanted to diversify of just having one site.

And having done that diversification by having more than one affiliate site meant that when someone came along and said, hey, do you want to sell broadband at UK, we could actually consider doing that because we were in a situation where we didn't want to sell it and then have no income. But because we'd diversified out into multiple affiliate sites, we had the luxury of being able to say let's sell this, we can take the money from broadbandcouk sale. We haven't got to live off it. We can live off our other sites and we've taken some money off the table and we can do other things with it. We we can diversify our investments in a different direction now from that. So it's only by having the diversification of the additional sites that we then got the opportunity to sell broadbandcouk. To diversify even more Now. We obviously use some of the money from broadbandcouk to diversify into keywords people use and again, it's building on existing skills, skills, the seo but monetizing in a different way. So we've diversified some monetization um and learned along the way, and you don't just have to diversify, obviously within online um. Some people plenty of people I've seen who have um made money um with affiliate sites or with display sites or e-commerce, whatever. They have then taken some of that income and invested it into. Some have invested into things like um index funds. Some people have invested it into real estate um, but they've diversified and what they're doing is they're splitting their risk um and I just think it's a sensible thing to do.

Some people will disagree. Some people will say you can't concentrate on more than one site. You know you can do several sites badly or one site well. Maybe that's true, but one site is all your risk on that one site. So for me personally, I like to split it out Now. I'm not saying, if you're starting off right now, if you've only got the one site, if you've only just started it, that you should be creating multiple sites right now.

No, obviously, you know, as I say, I've diversified, but it's taken me. I've done it over 20 years and some of those diversification attempts haven't worked. I've launched plenty of sites which never got traction. I've launched plenty of sites that kind of came up, peaked, died, you know, know, they were just not right at the time. Um, that's the key thing with diversification is, when you do diversify, it shouldn't be an all-in bet. It needs to be something that can start as an experiment, and I'd strongly, strongly recommend people start experiments all the time. Even if only one in ten work, then over time you'll get enough that work that it builds up. But you've just got to be careful how much you put in at the start. I've seen some people try and diversify, like it's an all in bet again, and that again brings its own risk, because if you risk too much then you know you've you've just made too big a bet. So I like to keep it at small bets and then back the small bets that start to show promise. That's my method of diversification.

Now should you diversify traffic? That's what a lot of people are talking about in the moment because of the Google update People talking about going to Facebook, going to Pinterest, going to all these other places to get traffic. Personally, I'm still bullish about Google. I think you know Google is still the very biggest source of outbound clicks on the internet. I don't see that changing anytime soon and pivoting away from it is probably not the way to go. I imagine that if I go back to when we had the trouble with Penguin and Panda, sort of 12 years ago with broadband at KDUK, if we'd tried to pivot away from Google back then rather than trying to stick with it and fix the problem, then I wouldn't be in as fortunate a situation as I am now.

So while in the short term, it feels very hard if you've lost your traffic, and I totally understand how people who have lost traffic feel. I've been there. It's awful, but I still think the long-term bet is google. Um, but it's okay. It's a learning process and seo is always a learning process. I'm still learning stuff now after so many years. Because the industry moves, things change. What works changes. So just because things are hard now for some people, I don't think is the reason that people should abandon Google. So yeah, that's my thoughts on diversification, why I think everybody should diversify over time and not put their eggs all in one basket. I know people will disagree. Be interesting to see what you think. If you've got any thoughts on the idea, do get in touch. I love to hear what other people's thoughts are. And yeah, till next time, take care Before I go.

I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that Keywords People use, that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again, that's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

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