— Tom, why did you delete all the case studies? You inspired and motivated me. Those were some of the most interesting articles I’ve ever read. An entire era is leaving.
— Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it, but now I know why there are no top SEOs in public sharing their case studies and why some of the most successful SEO specialists I know stay in the shadows… where I will now stay as well… at least for a while.
So that’s how it is. A guy who shared making $160,000 a month (case study here) from a website is going dark. The peak revenue he revealed was in January.
Profit: $379,616.36.
As the cherry on top, the site generated $1 million over its lifetime. 1 site. 1 million dollars. 1 site.
«And as a cherry on top, we crossed $1,000,000 in total profit»
From my conversation with him and his reason for going dark, someone did him wrong, and he wasn’t really profiting from sharing anyway. Just sharing info on a blog without much financial gain.
On the other hand, there’s Matt Diggity, who revealed sites even in his courses and stays in the public eye. But he gains profit from his public activity, whereas Tom was basically writing for free. Neither Matt’s nor Tom’s sites were harmed, so who knows what really happened.
I’ve seen many blogs like this: people start and then close their blogs due to a lack of useful payoff for them, so my advice is to think upfront about how you will monetize. Writing articles for the soul is great, but eventually motivation just disappears and the blog shuts down.