Enter Penguin...
If you have been around SEO that long you know that October 17th 2014 was when Penguin 3.0 (a major change to Google’s algorithm) took effect.
And my site took a massive tumble and the money stopped coming in.
The worst part was that I had no idea that there even was such a thing as a Google algorithm, that it could change, or why it was named after a bird (I am still confused about this one).
I was discouraged but I didn’t give up.
The next month the guy that created Bring The Fresh sent me an email about another course that was coming out called Source Phoenix… this course was $997 which was an astronomical figure to me at this point… but after much debate I finally decided to pull the trigger on it.
This was a decent course that made me a bit of money and was the first time I had ever considered doing SEO for clients… but the most important thing it did was introduce me to some crazy guy named Alex Becker for the first time.
I picked up a couple of (very) low paying client bought a bunch of tools and was making a little bit of money… but it wasn’t enough to be life changing or anything like that.
In the summer of 2015 Alex Becker opened another product similar to Fiverr called Source Market (now Konker). I decided to put to use one of the tools I bought, Syndwire, and start selling the social media blasts it created for $5 to hopefully recoup some of the cost of the tool… what happened next blew my mind.
I started getting a few orders, then more orders, then LOTS of orders.
I added more services and most of them began selling too!
I eventually managed to make friends with Alex and his partner Gregory Ortiz and they started showing my services in videos that they made and this brought me in even more sales.
I was blown away… and started making more money and having more opportunities than I would have ever thought possible just a year before that… but I still had a problem… I was trying to balance this with my client work, my affiliate sites… but most importantly… my 40 hour+ a week day job.
Even though I was making more money from my “side” job of internet marketing I was afraid to quit my day job and give up the security of a regular paycheck.
So I had to find a way to balance all of it so what I did was stay at my office at my day job for hours after everyone went home working on my internet marketing business sometimes until 12am (when the alarm would activate and I would have to leave or I would have stayed later)
I had a better computer there and there was less temptation to relax and watch Netflix. This worked for a while but, as you can imagine it was exhausting and still made it hard to focus on getting more clients since it was after hours for most businesses.
At this point my day job took a turn for the worse… they weren’t treating me very well and it was getting more and more miserable (looking back on it now I think maybe they knew that I had outgrown the job and didn’t want to be there anymore) in April 2016 I made a plan to quit and go full time IM in November 2016.
But things there just kept getting worse and worse and, after talking to some of my friends, mentors, and my mother I eventually decided enough was enough.
I sent my boss an email and told him that I needed to speak to him in private.
He came down to my office and closed the door and I told him “this job is hindering my success and I can’t afford to stay in it any longer”.
That was May 18th 2016. One year ago this Thursday as of this writing.












