This blog has become the bane of my existence, the object of my ire, the whipping boy, escaped goat, and swirling black hole vortex of all my energy. Every time I think of RickButts.com I get an “eye-tick” and involuntary hand shake followed by an immediate desire to pack up my stuff and toss Little Dog into the truck and head out for a long drive in the Rocky Mountains. (How do you spell avoidance?”)
I bought this domain the day that a domain broker offered me $50,000.00 (yes that’s fifty thousand dollars) for butts.com – (do not go there now, or ever). It has alternately been my professional speaking site, Internet marketing site, banned by Google for a year for black hat SEO and now, 10 years on, it is an archive of a few flashes of creative genius surrounded by a whole lot of self-doubt and awkward attempts to make a buck from affiliate marketing.
Why should I continue to pay bandwidth charges for proof that I have had an ongoing identity crisis for 2 years?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, my SEO buddies recite the mantra “never take a page down off the Internet” because those pages are useful for page rank juice and bad links make you look bad to Google – but upon checking my stats I was even more depressed about this site.
1/4 of all my traffic comes from different iterations of “how to change your Twitter username” for which I am ranked #1 in Google. With the help of a link from Mashable, more than 1000 people hit this page each month.
But, that page has a 95% bounce rate – which means that nearly all 1000 of them enter on this page – and leave from this page.
These ungrateful bastards don’t even follow me on Twitter! So how is this traffic of any use to me?
For the last 3 weeks I’ve had a 301 redirect set on it so that all these cowbirds are taken immediately through my affiliate link to The Twitter Method – but it doesn’t appear that I’ve made any sales of that either.
As for the rest of my search engine traffic, I continue to get hits from searches related to my last name Butts – if these unsavory leads DO become customers, I don’t wanna know. (Massive volumes of “butts traffic” was part of the reason I sold butts.com. The $50,000.00 was the other part 
Honey, I Blew Up the Blog!
This is my plan. I’m going to go through this darn wordpress installation with the help of my cool daughter. She has started a business installing, configuring Wordpress and even sitting down with Go To Meeting and showing her clients how to actually use it!
Once clean, pretty, and functional, I’m doing the following:
* Deleting posts about dead affiliate plays.
* Deleting posts about my unfounded personal issues.
* Deleting posts about my accurate personal issues.
* Creating a custom 404 error page so that traffic to those pages gets “the news” and an opportunity to optin to my Stardust Factor giveaway.
* Using 301 redirects to send purely affiliate related traffic directly to the offer.
* Regularly check stats and my Easy Link Manager for the effectiveness of this traffic.
Then I’m going to take the 10,000 ideas I’ve NOT written about because I wasn’t sure what “direction” I was going with my life/work – and get the good one’s out.
The best advice I’ve ever gotten about being a writer is 2 words – “Writers write…”
I’ll write what I want to here on my personal blog, and let the horses run with my marketing stuff on StardustFactor.com
The whole Stardust Factor thing, the teleseminar product, the 90 Minute Stardust Sessions I’ve been doing for $250, and the crazy idea that worked “Unlimited Monthly Consulting” for a handful of clients has transformed my life.
So, what have we learned?
- Never Give Up Refining Your Shizzzle. It’s so worth the effort.
- Try Stuff, and Embrace Failure. Most stuff won’t work, but you’ll learn so much more from trying than making little notes on your legal pad.
- Adjust on the Fly. The decision to add the 90 minute Stardust 1 on 1 sessions less than an hour before I did the Stardust Factor teleseminar turned out to be the most important idea I’ve had in years! The impact on my business and my life from this one little tweak is beyond calculating, but had I not “tried” the Stardust Factor as a product, it never would have happened.
- Stay Authentic. Every time I’ve succumbed to the temptation to “manufacture” some kind of persona or effect, it’s turned into an exhausting chore that I was unable and uninterested in sustaining.
Your comments – your tweets – and trackbacks are gently encouraged. “And, in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love, you make. Paul McCartney”
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