you're preaching to the choir buddy. I agree with everything you said. I was talking about getting a well paying 9 to 5 as away to eventually bounce back in the IM world stronger. Bills have to be paid man and this year has been rough for a lot of SEOs. This forum is full of proud people that don't want to admit they took a serious hit, but I see it on plenty of other IM forums... people have seen their entire empires crumble under these 3 major updates. This year has been the roughest SEO year in a decade. Now bills needs to be paid so I'm saying that maybe getting a 9 to 5 for a couple months would be a good alternative in order to fund new projects on the side and come back to the solo game with a better strategy... obviously relying on Google organic traffic was a bad idea but I think a lot of us did it because it WORKED for like 7 years straight. We all banked hard during that time and now it's not working anymore so we have to re-adjust our strategy.. nothing wrong with that.
I think SEO is better as a tactic in a strategy rather than as a strategy in and of itself.
It might have worked for 7 years, but it's always a a bad idea to build an income on the back of one marketing channel -especially what you can't control. Don't find yourself holding one rope with an 800 pound gorilla on the other end who can pull you overboard with a twitch or a sneeze.
But if you really want to make it work, hole yourself up and work like a dog. I can't think of anything worse than a 9-5. I don't know what your living costs are, but I'd rather tighten the belt and get the minimum going online asap then go get a dead end job regardless of how much they pay me. A couple of k a month isn't hard to make to skate by with until you scale things up.
I don't know, but nothing could break my spirit more then going 9-5.
I'm just...
