Best of : 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 . 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 , you know , people with small organizations might just be themselves , just one or two other people maybe , and they are concerned about having all their eggs in one basket .

The 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 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 get into 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're not , 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 in 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 it's shit or bust .

Basically , this business , this idea , has got to 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 look 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 a domain named broadbandcouk .

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 broadband at couk .

Now , after doing this for years , I was like 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 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 you 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 percent of 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 Broadbent at Currie , 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 , amazon as well . Around a similar time maybe Amazon was maybe shortly afterwards . But having that diversification gave us a bit of a lifeline when we had the issues with broadband at KDK , which meant we could then

survive that loss of income for a while , fix the problem and kick on again with broadband at KDK 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 know you can have tragedies outside of work that can affect you .

You can have , you could have ill health , you could have all sorts of things 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 you know 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've 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 broadband at Kodi UK , 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 broadbandcouk ? 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 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 broadband credit uk to diversify even more .

I obviously use some of the money from broadband credit uk to diversify into keywords people use and again it's building on existing skills the seo , but monetizing in a different way . So we've diversified some monetization and learned along the way and you don't just have to diversify , obviously , within online .

Plenty of people I've seen who have made money 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 it into things like index funds . Some people have invested it into real estate . But they've diversified and what they're doing is they're splitting their risk .

Yeah , 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 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 . Um , and some of those diversification attempts haven't worked . I've launched plenty of sites which never got traction . I you 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 , um , then you know you , you've just made two bigger bets , 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 at the moment . Um , 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 not the way to go .

I imagine that if I go back to when we had the trouble with um , penguin and panda , sort of 12 years ago with broadbent k , uk , if we tried to pivot away from google back then rather than trying to stick with it and fix the problem , then I won't be in this fortunate 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 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 .

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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 . Thanks for being a listener . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share .

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Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode . If you want to get in touch , have any questions , I'd love to hear from you . I'm at channel5 on Twitter . You can email me at podcast at keywordspeoplesusecom . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO . Is not that hard .