Warning: Inspirational rant for newbies to follow.

Since the new year is upon us, and many of you have goals related to growing and expanding your business, I would like to take the time to go ahead and offer a few words of encouragement for those of you just getting into the game of building and profiting from your own websites.

Having been doing this for a couple of years full-time now, in my opinion I have discovered that the single most important element in a successful SEO strategy is simply time.

I started out more or less broke. In order to fund my new efforts, I turned to content writing. I don’t necessarily particularly enjoy writing, especially for other people, but it was a way to generate an income from home while learning and attempting to build my own business. It was also an invaluable way to gain insight on what successful webmasters were doing. Of course there are other ways to make a quick buck doing client work and learn the ropes, such as coding or designing, but writing just so happened to be the thing I was good enough at to make enough to get started.

Since then, many of my friends have become interested in what exactly it is I do on the computer that allows me to spend most of my time screwing around and blowing money on crap I don’t really need. Often times that interest has turned into questions that turned into them wanting to build their own online business. Out of all the friends and acquaintances I have that asked for my help to get into this affiliate marketing business, all of them gave up or lost interest relatively quickly.

It doesn’t happen overnight. I’m now in a comfortable position where I have several diverse sites generating passive income. If I were to take the month of January off, I would still have an income. However, that nice cushion wasn’t just handed to me. It took months of building and optimizing to get those sites to rank and start earning me $.

The short version of what I’m saying is simply don’t give up. You may not see results in the first month or even the first six months. Any webmaster worth his or her salt will tell you it generally takes 6 months to a year for a site to realize its true potential. I know it can be discouraging to work your ass off on something and still not feel like you’re making any progress a month or two later, but if you’re serious about it, you need to stick with it. The people that give up and fail and then post threads about how SEO is dead and all that nonsense are the people that don’t have the attention span or the drive to really make their business thrive.

In the real world of making money online, there is no magical Google Success Kit that will hold your hand and walk you through the steps necessary to build a successful internet based business. There is no get rich quick formula. Like everything else in life, you’re going to get out of it what you put into it. That said, there is still phenomenal potential on the internet and new opportunities pop up every single day.

We’re still living in the wild west of the internet era. With a little creativity and a generous dose of patience, you may very well find gold in them internetz after all.

I wish you all a prosperous new year. Take care of your families, work your ass off on your business, and please, keep an eye on your girlfriends.

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