Feedback Received Old School trophy - being a member for 10 years

I just want to say that the trophy system is a good addition to these forums. Maybe I was not very active lately, I was focusing on doing things instead of reading and posting.

Today I opened my account and noticed that I have received the Old School trophy. I am a member for more than 10 years. Wow, that's a lot of time. It's been 10 years since I've built my own website ( I started to build websites for others about 15 years ago ) and started to make money from it. I want to say that maybe the information and support I got from this forum is also a contributing factor to the fact that after 10 years I am still in Internet Marketing business ( creating and promoting my own websites and products ).

What I want to say that doing your own internet thing requires motivation and dedication. So many people try this but they quit after few months. I think that I entertained my motivation reading messages in this forum. Maybe I got stuck at some point, but I read the forum and I learned a new "trick" and applied it. Maybe it was working, maybe not, but this thing kept me going.

Thank you Digital Point forums for 10 great years.

 

You'll doubtless have noticed that traffic has gone down in those years since you first joined up. But I firmly believe that the quality of the posts, and indeed the quality of the overall membership has gone up.

 

I think at some point, the quality of the posts declined and this led to loss in traffic. Now I see that post quality is high again. Meanwhile, forums lost a lot of traffic to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Pinterest.

 

That and also the continuous algo adjustments by the big G left a few IMers in disarray wondering if they should start looking for a day job.

 

It is sad to see IMers that give up so easily. Search engine traffic is not guaranteed, this is what I learned very quickly. I launched my first website in July 2006. In the first months of 2007 it started to get some traffic. Few hundred of visitors per day, then more. Most of them from google. Reached a point where I could made a living from the site, despite I was still in college and don't needed much money. After 1 year of traffic and income growth, an outdated wordpress install on the server got me some malware. Google removed the site from rankings because of this. I removed the malware but the rankings didn't came back. A friend helped me and managed the website, promoting it further. The penalty was slowly removed and by 2009 the website was back with traffic. Made good income, switched from google ads to a freemium model in 2010. In 2012, got hit by Panda. Traffic down 5 times. By the end of 2012, the adwords tests provided good results and I was getting more traffic, paying for it, but at the end I got more than waiting for search engine natural traffic. Sometimes I have to pay more, sometimes less, but I always earn at least twice than what I am paying.

 

Good for you. Only stupid people quit when the going gets tough. Success almost always comes with experience. But how is anyone going to get experience if they quit too soon?

I hope you have a happy and prosperous 2017!