What happened in October through to November 2009 is unprecedented in terms of internet marketing’s short history. If its not then I don’t really care because personally, I have never seen anything like it.

What happened? Well Google decided to go out and ban thousands upon thousands of adwords accounts, leaving many marketers scratching their heads for a few minutes, followed by the declaration of war again the search engine giant. Reactions ranged from: “well, it was bound to happen”, through to “Why me? I did nothing wrong? Can’t I sell rebill offers people can’t get out of? You F*@#&#”.. and so on.

I am a firm believer in that for every step back, there will be an equal or greater step forward. The problem is that many people chose to just get angry and essentially ‘waited’ for something to happen that would improve their situation. ie… Google changes their mind.. guess what? They are still waiting.

Others saw this as a wake up call or an opportunity. When I saw all the accounts getting banned I realised that I simply can’t reply on Google because in any moment, they could be gone.. and along with it, my traffic. Google’s blanket ban should have opened up the eyes of all the Internet marketers out there and encouraged them to spread their risk and not reply on one body to put food on the table.

The funny thing is that those that were banned are probably better off right now. The ban essentially forced them to look elsewhere and expand their portfolio. Many of those left relying on Google are still worse off and because they were not ‘forced’ to look around, many haven’t. Unfortunately they may only learn their lesson only when Google slams its finger down once again.

Back to that saying about a step back leads to an equal or greater step forward. I wouldn’t take it too literally. That step back doesn’t have to happen to you, but learning from what happens to others can allow you to skip that step and take the steps forward anyway. Why wait?

Its been way too long between drinks essentially because I have been swept away with a whole heap of business stuff that I was forced to put this on wayside.. way way side.

So I will be doing my best to start writing in this thing.

What have I been up to?

In the past year I have focused predominantly on my internet businesses. Remember this? Well these have grown nicely and as of now, I receive a nice half a million hits a month for each site.. bringing in some nice admob advertising cheques (more like paypal payments) each month. Nothing to really rave about but it pays off a car, without having to do anything for it.. nice.

I have also been doing affiliate marketing which has been great fun and rewarding and now have taken up various consulting projects, making recommendations to various companies on how to optimise their web presence. I am still amazed that there are so many companies out there who simply havn’t moved past the initial stages of SEO and PPC. Adwords accounts still have 1 group and 1000 keywords and SEO is all about keyword stuffing and meta-tags.

I have been under the impression that much of this stuff is common knowledge but it just isn’t. I have heard from Internet Marketers that teaching these companies and organisations the new way of the internet is in fact ‘the next big thing’. Although I never doubted them, I never really thought about how it could impact me. I do my thing, stay under the radar, automate my businesses so I can support my lifestyle. Thats it. What I never really understood was the value I was generating simply trying to build and automate these profitable online businesses.

What I’m getting at here is that for many Internet Marketers out there with a decent knowledge of the ins and outs of online marketing, understand how valuable your skillset is. You can create an average full time income because you feel like it, in whatever geographic location your in and yet we take it for granted. This is special and strangely enough we are the only ones who don’t realise how special it is.