Some 8 months ago, my brother in law returned from America singing the praises of a course he had been on which had given him the knowledge to be able to reach a number one ranking for any keyword within Google and all the other major search engines. Happy days I thought! I could foresee the end of years being a civil servant and listening to bosses who thought the unimportant things in life were actually important! Money it seemed actually did grow on trees – all it took to do this would be a couple of months hard work between my husband and my brother in law and I and we'd be raking the cash in – how easy is that? In my own mind I had already decided that giving up work wasn't that far away, picked the colour of the sports car I was going to have and decided on Portugal for that luxury villa.
We researched the market and settled on our first internet business, realising the potential income from being a number one ranked site in Google or any other search engine.
So far so good! We submitted our site mid April and it was indexed not long after – next stage completed without delay. It was then that the hold ups started to occur – suddenly the so called 'sandbox' effect kicked in – we'd heard about this before but never knew how it could affect us – ah well 2-4 months seemed to be the length of time we'd be sandboxed but we looked at this philosophically and saw it as an opportunity to get links from other websites and ensure a high ranking on our "release" from the infamous sandbox.
We are now 6 months down the line and patience is definitely the keyword - we secured a PR3 at the last Google update in July and hope to be at least a five at the next one – our on page and off page optimization is what is required and our link building strategy is ongoing – for all of you people who think link building is easy think again – it's laborious and frustrating as in our experience you get one link for every three or four requests you send.
I still hold the optimism that our site will take off and eventually rank very highly in all of the search engines. I think we have learnt to be more patient and more forward thinking – crawl before you walk! However, for the 'easy to make money out of it' syndrome it certainly is not and all of you new internet marketers out there be prepared for the long haul!
I'll keep you posted!
About the Author: Denise Clement is the co-founder along with her husband Andy and brother in law Richard of the gift basket site http://www.thegiftbasket-store.com/
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