7 Reasons Why You Might Not Be Making Money As An SEO

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony because I just don’t even know where to start with this one. Let’s just go for broke and see what happens:

You Can’t Manage People – Even if you think you can “out-SEO” Rand, Aaron Wall, and Wikipedia to boot while riding a scooter down a hill with one brain tied behind your back as you make fun of Matt Cutts’ momma to his face, then guess what? You still need some skill managing people if you ever want to scale your income up dramatically. After all, even multi-millionaire, 1 hour a day worker Markus Friend pays people to do all of the tedious tasks that he needs done for his mega popular and mega profitable dating website.
You Aren’t Organized – You can only let your list of link partners’ contact info that you should have kept up to date go stale for so long or forget to pay your copywriter for so long or spend too much time trying to find the password for your client’s site for so long, etc. etc. before you begin to see a serious increase in stress and a serious decrease in your productivity and ultimately your money making potential.
You Spend All Day on Forums/Blogs – If the majority of your time is spent reading about SEO instead of doing SEO, then your income will never be what it could be. Of course, I am not saying that reading and learning about SEO is not important, and in fact it is extremely important to always be learning, but you and I both know that it can be easy to justify what is really just mindless browsing as “SEO training”.
You Have No Process – The value of your time decreases if you have to keep repeating and trying to remember steps that you should already have documented. Call it an SEO cheat sheet, call it a list of steps for researching a new niche, call it whatever you want to call it, but write it down and document what your plan of action is so you don’t waste valuable time thinking about what to do instead of thinking about how to best do what you need to do.
You Don’t Take Risks – Whether this means striking out on your own to start your own firm to do SEO work for clients ($ potential if you are good but also some risk) or whether it means getting serious about spending some time and money to do in house SEO for your own website(s) ($$$ potential if you are really good but of course some risk as well), you have to take some risks in order to really maximize your SEO earning potential.
You Are a Cheap Son of a Gun – If you don’t believe in yourself enough to invest in tools that will make you a better SEO, then good luck because that is all you have – luck. Think of yourself and your SEO education as an investment. Pretend you are putting yourself through “SEO School” and spend some money all the while realizing that this investment in yourself will pay off in with a higher future earning potential.
You Treat SEO as a Hobby – I’m going to tell you something that you may not enjoy reading… SEO is work. There, I said it and now I feel better. SEO has fantastic opportunities to make a great deal of money if you are smart, willing to learn, and you work hard. However, the same principles for offline business success hold true online in the SEO realm as well. There is no magic elixir that shoots through your cable modem into your PC and right through your mouse into your fingers that makes any halfhearted lazy SEO effort you might muster up instantly fill up your bank account. Work smarter AND harder and SEO can make you a lot of money. Treat SEO as a hobby at your own risk if your goal is to make money and not just have fun.

I run a domain name tools website and I see a lot of awesome risk takers that work long hours and research domain names until they are blue in the face, and then they pounce on great domain names that will likely make them quite a nice sum of money in the future. On the other hand, there are some who maybe don’t put in the necessary research and just snap up what-ever.info piece of junk domain name they come across that strikes their fancy, hoping that their domain name “lottery ticket” will pay off big in the future.

Be someone who is dedicated to working hard and making a lot of money as an SEO. Hopefully these 7 reasons are a help to you as you strive to be the best SEO you can possibly be and make the most money possible.

BONUS REASON: “7 Reasons” just sounds better than “8 Reasons,” but maybe even the #1 thing that can hold back your long term SEO money making potential is a Short Term Focus. A long term focus wants to provide loads of quality content and offer an enjoyable user experience while a short term focus is concerned only with “gaming” the search engines or exploiting flaws in the system with no regard for long term user loyalty. Concentrate exclusively on the short term to your own money making detriment.

DISCLAIMER: I love SEO and think that SEO is a lot of fun. Money is, of course, not everything, and there is nothing wrong with doing SEO purely for enjoyment or as a hobby. That being said, making a lot of money doing SEO is also a lot of fun.

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