for financial rewards, experienced changes in personal and working responsibilities, and the fact that the day job has always paid well enough (alongside offering significant other benefits) was a fairly major input. Giving the day job up has never been a genuinely sensible option, at least until recently. Throw in a dislike of external link-building and the whole ethos around it, and you pretty much have the perfect recipe for “failure.” Of course, I made some reasonable income from affiliate efforts in earlier years. For a combination of those reasons, it’s never been consistent enough to classify me as being anywhere near successful at it. Well, not in financial terms anyway. I’m mildly rueful of missed opportunities, but regret serves no purpose. Recognize it, learn from it, file it and move onwards and upwards. You joined the GPWA in 2013, but disappeared fromthe forumfor three years (2018 to 2021). What happened? Back in autumn 2017, I was in touch with a fellow forum member from GPWA, and we thought we could team up to do something together. I respected his work and abilities highly, but it didn’t work out – which was a shame because we had significant potential to get something worthwhile going by pooling our skills. My fault. My day job responsibilities unexpectedly went through the roof, and I couldn’t dedicate the time needed to build the site. At the time, there was no end in sight to the 1416 hours a day the telecom jobwas taking, and I knew that getting a useful site up was going to take that sort of time and effort too. In the circumstances, I felt it was untenable. It was a debatable decision, I know, but I decided that maintaining a known, reliable income was the best option for the family. Things were changing in the SEO world. Whereas a few years before, you could still put up good content and rank just based on that content’s value to a searcher, I could see that more andmore pages were appearing that were strong, and it was all going to get harder and more time-consuming to compete. So I had the domain realmoney.games sitting doing nothing for a couple of years. I knew it would be a good vehicle for development and always felt it was perfect for delivering ways to target multiple gambling-related subjects – some of which are a lot easier to get unasked-for, organic links to than others! I learned how to use WordPress, spent a month getting up a basic site with a reasonable structure and base content (some of it fairly strong, much of it a placeholder), with the plan in mind of letting it age over the next five to 10 years and then seeing whether it had grown any legs. I didn’t even look at it again for about three years. During the lockdowns, I noticed traffic growing to interesting enough levels, the day job responsibilities had calmed down significantly, and I decided to re-enter the fray. Howdid you approach the task of re-entering the world of website development, given the iGaming/affiliate/SEO landscape had changed dramatically over the last few years? Although I had the benefit at this point of an aging domain with some ranked pages, and of course, There is noend to the effort that needs to go intowebsites. You could spend18hours aday and never get it all done – a good reason why sometimes youhave to force yourself to take a small break and avoid the riskof ameltdown. 45 G P W A t i m e s . o r g
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