www.affiliateconfession.com

I learned a lesson in the last several days that I assume could have been much worse. Sometimes no matter what you hear or read about, you just have to try something for yourself. It’s probably a good idea to follow the advice you read about in some cases rather than being the Lone Ranger and doing it your way.

Case in point, I recently bought a text link on a very high profile blog, which will remain nameless, and thought I would get some traffic and maybe a little PR juice as well. Needless to say, I ignored the most recent advice I heard from Jeremy Palmer, I believe it was through the Black Ink Project, in an online session. Jeremy remarked that he thought he would boost some of his sites by buying text links and ended up getting them all penalized and losing some serious rankings.

Of course I thought, that’s Jeremy, Google knows about him because he’s a big shot, I’m just a medium order of fries, they don’t know about me. Wrong!

I don’t get a lot of traffic from Google here at Affiliate Confession, but it is enough that I don’t want to lose it, mainly because it is a source of ever changing new traffic. The 30 or 40 organic searchers that Google sends my way every day come from a huge variety of long tail keywords that are pretty diverse in the niches they come from. I jeopardized that traffic last week when I purchased the text link on May 28th and only 3 days later my traffic from Google dropped by 80% as you can see below:

Luckily I realized what was going on the second day after purchase and immediately converted that text link to an affiliate offer. It took a couple of days for the link to change, but when it did, the traffic returned to normal. I’m thinking I didn’t do any long term damage to this blog because I caught what was happening in time and changed it in just a couple of days. My strategy for buying text links now is to either use them only for affiliate offers or to experiment with links on lower profile sites sending traffic to sites that I can afford to do without. I’ll probably just stick with affiliate offers though.

Sometimes you just have to do something stupid before you realize how stupid it is. Don’t be stupid.