There comes a time in every internet marketer’s career when they are faced with a burning desire to do better and bring their business and projects to the next level. Unfortunately for most of them, they’ll never get there. This happens because most people aren’t willing to take on much risk, due to thinking too far into the future, or just putting too much thought into taking a leap of faith.

It has nothing to do with how much or how little you’re making. There are plenty of people out there who make $100k’s a year who are fine and dandy with doing just that because they like feeling safe and secure with the market and strategy they’re using. There is nothing wrong with this type of thinking or business model either, hell, most people will tell you to play it safe and to not take giant risks or gambles when you’re doing fine for yourself as it is. Why? Because they follow the laws of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Which yes, it’s a great way to play it safe, and I for one am not against it, but then again, I would never be where I am today if it weren’t for taking risks that others warned me were stupid or untested, and told me many times to keep playing it safe.

Sorry, but playing it safe is just no fun. I am the way I am now because I like to take risks. I’m not saying I like taking huge risks where the odds are a billion to one for me, but I generally gamble with new concepts or ideas/investments when the odds are in my favor for the most part, or if I can at least retain some type of control over the outcome. This is why I don’t gamble with the stock market, but I do gamble with allowing my money to be managed by a hedge fund. To me, the gains are the same, but the profits are the big difference. I feel that if you’re going to gamble your money, why waste it on stocks that fall and rise and even when you do make a few bucks on it, the fees and taxes are enormous, and the returns are meager compared to the amount of cash you’ve put in. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the risk to return percentages of affiliate marketing too.

Maybe a better example is when I buy domains. I own over 15,000 domains now. Sometimes I can’t believe I’ve spent THAT much money and time on acquiring so many. I wrote up a post about it a few months ago when I was a few thousand domains lighter than now. Sometimes I wish I wouldn’t have spent money on some of those “well it seemed like a good idea at the time” 3am domain purchases, but, why cry over spilled milk. So instead of doing what everyone else has been doing, which is buying domains that sound good, or buying domains with traffic, or even worse, buying domains with pagerank that will just die quickly, I started to buy trusted and authority low and medium level ranked domains. The average domainer would think I’m an idiot, because most of these trusted ranked and authority domains are lower in the pagerank dept and not so special in the traffic dept either, plus they aren’t very good for type-ins or any type of real monetizing that’s available to us. Many times the domains themselves sell for around $1500 a pop (not considered expensive by domainers standards, but when the domain is not brandable, has little traffic, low pr, and there is nothing all that attractive about it, I look like a fool for buying it at those prices).

But the best part of my risk in acquiring them, when everyone else is saying “don’t do it, they are useless” is the future return on my investment. I don’t expect any of them to earn more than $100 a year on traffic, but when you put them all together and focus their trust and authority towards a niche/topic related domain that doesn’t sport much trust or authority itself, but has the traffic or starting to get the real sweet rankings, woah. It’s been able to shoot them from a zero to an absolute hero. For instance, one of the domains I ran it with was real estate related. Now, I may know the general market research information on thousands of niches like real estate, but I have nothing nor have I ever done anything more than toss up some Adsense or instant blog and just let it ride. Maybe did some leads on it for a very short while, but until now it was too competitive in the engines, and too much of a pain in the ass for me to care about monetizing it for the fairly low affiliate profit margins it comes with. But I know it’s a hot commodity regardless of how hot or cold the market offline is. So I tried it. Spent around $6500?ish in acquiring some medium and lower level TR (TrustRank) and authority domains, dressed them up quickly to retain their authority standings, sent them on a very conservative IBL (In-Bound Links or Direct Links) spree, and then “naturally” pointed them all towards a fairly mediocre real estate domain. I started this process very early in my TR reverse engineering research stage (back when it was more for fun than obsession), and I just wanted to see what would happen. It took around 4 months for it to attain a nice lowlevel TrustRank score, but then as I made it seem more natural, and actually used the landing domain for a more in-depth SEO process (just using regular white hat seo on-page and linking techniques) it jumped. I ended up selling that domain for $38,650 in late July. I do regret it now because it was probably worth WAY more now than then, but hey, not a bad ROI for a short period of time. I still have the original domains that I used to build up the one I sold so I’m just doing it all over again.

Anyway, just figured I’d give people a quick little insight into doing something that others may argue is the wrong move. Yeah well, if it’s the wrong move, who cares. It’s better to try something out for yourself and follow your gut instincts than it is to play the safe road all the time. Risks don’t always produce rewards, but they do however keep life fun and interesting. Seriously, who the hell wants to sit around doing these things if it’s no fun? The cash should not be the primary focus, it should be the perk and/or reward for getting it right and trusting yourself and your data before jumping into something that others may feel or say are scary or unchartered, and if you fail, pick yourself up, and just learn from your mistakes, but don’t be a quitter.

Yeah!

[Via Aojon]

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