Anyone who I have consulted with or worked with has heard me say this a million times…

“The better I got at SEO, the less SEO I found myself doing.”

I remember the early days.  I would spend 18 hours a day on my sites, knocking out checklists of every SEO action item to be performed on each one.  I would rack my brain for hours trying to find sources of links and links in places nobody else had ‘em.  All of that work for $100 a day or so in income.

Fast forward six months.  I had a dozen sites or so and there was now an audience to each of them.  Uh oh, what do I do now?  At this stage I was spending a couple hours a day on SEO stuff and about 16 hours on monetization strategies.

Fast forward six months from that.  Now those dozen sites that used to crank out $100 a day were doing 3x that…and I had some new sites maturing behind them.  At this stage, I’m spending maybe 1 hour a day on SEO stuff, 1 hour on monetization strategy, and 14 hours on trying to come up with ways to automate and manage all this shit.

A couple years later, I have lots and lots of sites out there.  Some days there are $1000’s of dollars of income.  Some days I get $1000’s of dollars in invoices to maintain the overhead of all this shit.  It’s nice little personal media portfolio that takes very little SEO oversight and a whole lot of ROI/metrics/project-management oversight to maintain.  If a new market emerges where I want to compete, I usually have one of these mature sites to pass it a little reputation to get things going.  I can also cross-pollenate traffic so my total traffic acquisition costs until site profitability are significantly cheaper than had I had to invest tons of SEO strategy hours into it.

Now my favorite SEO Move is the Site Acquisition.  If I wake up and want to be California Mortgage market or teeth whitening or ringtones…I can just go buy my way in.  Real creative, I know.  And, yah, there’s some SEO work in screening those candidates and bringing each site into what Google deems as compliance that week, but then I’m back to spending most of my time trying to monetize the shit out of every user. 

And so on…and so on…and so on.  SEO’s are the new real estate developers.  Our skillset gives us an amazing opportunity to develop an audience on the cheap.  At my day gig, my biggest concern in building a large media company is not only developing a large audience, but finding the right tools to do that at the lowest possible cost to convert it.  It’s really hard to beat SEO in those types of equations.

I do a lot less SEO “maintenance” these days, but it’s still the most powerful tool in my bag of options.  My biggest problem now is that I’ve hit a glass ceiling on that personal media empire.  The only way I can break through it now is to hire some folks to run the SMG projects.  I’ve tried that before to a certain extent and all I did was train what turned into new competitors in my backyard.  There’s simply too much jack in SEO to expect somebody who has any modicum of talent to take a check every two weeks.

I guess that means I’ve come full circle.  It looks like my only options now are to A) maintain the status quo and be grateful for what I have or B) do more SEO. 

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