I am currently doing what I wasn’t doing a year ago. A year from now, I will most likely be doing something new again. My profession is a researcher. I search for and find a competitive advantage. Finding it sometimes takes a lot of time.
Sometimes it’s just lazy to do new things. Lazy to adapt. This doesn’t depend on the sphere: websites, sports, whatever else.
I procrastinate on several directions myself—I can’t force myself yet, so I do others.
Changes today are such that you constantly need to do new things.
I had such a major shift across various areas.
- In 2010 I sold links through Sape, and by 2011 link revenue was gone. There’s still a myth going around about someone who bought a house off Sape links and couldn’t adapt, to the point where he couldn’t pay utility bills for that house or maintain it. Like, he relied on a single income stream and didn’t find a new one. UPDATE: it’s not a myth, someone clued me in, there really was such a person. Sape worked, and he couldn’t find another way. He still has the house bought on Sape money
- In 2016 I was building sites for school kids and saw no other way besides 50 rubles per 1k school kids on the site.
- In 2018 I made my first attempts to build an English-language site selling products with literally just a few pages—I was lucky that out of 6 sites, one actually took off. Back then I didn’t understand why 1 was working while others weren’t, I just tried to build more.
One thing dies, another comes along. To find the other, you have to change yourself, and that’s sometimes lazy and painful.
A guy earned over a million dollars on websites about Dom-2. But you can burn yourself out so badly that later you can’t even insert a <br> tag in the code and just quit websites altogether — https://vc.ru/u/671092-nikdok/189357-doooooom-2-kak-ya-zarabotal-1-mln-na-shou-chast-tretya-ot-zakata-do-rascveta-i-nazad
I have this with several directions where I got negative results, and then I feel too lazy to start over from scratch, virtually from zero; it breaks me.
What has changed in recent years?
- In Google over recent years, it’s definitely E-A-T, which kept rolling out more and more, with the quality bar rising from one Core Update to another. My site would drop out, I’d get sad, do things differently—and the site jumped back to the top. Time passed, the bar rose, and it dropped out again. It demoralizes me that I can’t predict it in advance. Now the niche requires only experts with specialized degrees; fake personas no longer work.
- Analyzing competitors, I see that 100% of them did nothing on their sites to recover. A few sites remained that already had this in place. I’m not the only one, but somehow it’s not very cheerful.
- I can’t adapt so quickly to Google yet; these changes are quite significant and require investment and time—finding a person to review the article, paying them for the review, and agreeing to list them as a reviewer on the site. I’m dragging my feet on this for now.
- In Yandex, it seems to me that employees themselves attended Puzat’s courses and then introduced Baden-Baden for placing keywords according to strict tech specs that many were writing by. The trick stopped working, and it was necessary to change. Many left.
- In foreign markets, competition is sometimes so fierce that no PBNs or outreach links can lift a site. The reason? Incorrect evaluation of link power needed for the top. Analyzers like kwfinder and Ahrefs won’t show the main thing—competitors’ hidden links, which makes analysis very difficult.
And I can give many such examples. The essence is the same—it’s lazy, it’s hard, but you have to push through and do the hard stuff.
«I will only do what I like» sounds nice, but sometimes I do what I don’t like, and it yields results.