Can you guess what happened next?

Absolutely f*** all, the site sat there like a lemon with little to no traffic and that was that. I kept at it though, writing the occasional article and scheduling some content but my main focus went elsewhere. I built tons of affiliate sites, probably close on 30 or so different sites. These sites ranged across so many different subjects. I was an expert on food hygiene certification, a guru on green tea weight loss and an e-commerce store owner selling tunics to beauticians amongst many things. Many of these sites fell flat on their face, but I was playing the numbers game, all three of those examples I listed are actually success stories. I sold food hygiene courses fulfilled by a third party, matcha tea through affiliate links, and beauty tunics through an Amazon affiliate storefront.

Then something strange happened.

I started getting emails begging to buy links on the loans site. You see, as an effort to ‘game’ Google we would have unique accounts and identities (and use VPNs, TOR, etc and more, depending on how much of a conspiracy theorist you were) so I wasn’t checking the loans site regularly and I’d set all of the content to auto-post on a schedule. However, these emails piqued my curiosity so I logged into my AWStats account and saw over ten thousand visitors in the past 30 days… what the hell was happening?

Turns out I’d reached rank 4 for short term loans with nothing more than a few thousand spent on a domain, a bit of content and a handful of paid-for backlinks across various finance blogs.

Shit.

I was outranking Payday UK and Wonga, the biggest players in the space at the time, with little more than some tinkering in a coffee shop. I didn’t know what I was doing, I was just making it up as I went along.

So, what the hell do I do next?

I put an affiliate program on it of course. I took a look at the source of Lee’s site to see who he used and used them too, a brand called ‘Lead Affinity’ they operated a tree-like system, where they match your visitors with a lender willing to lend to them.

It was quite clever at the time, a little bit of javascript added to your site and a full loan application form is rendered for your visitors, and on-completion they are sent off to their actual lender. Should they then accept the loan, you get paid your commission and that is that. I was an ‘introducer’… at least that is how Lee communicated his offering and I copied his disclaimers too. The industry was rife with this sort of parasitic business, proxies sitting in front of the actual lenders, matching those up desperate for money, no matter how bad their credit was. Looking back at it, I can see just how awful it is, but to me at the time, I couldn’t or didn’t want to put the two and two together. I even justified it by telling myself I was offering a service helping people find a lender (at one point I even published a very in-depth article on payday loan alternatives, credit cards and overdrafts for example). I’d like to say I was naive but maybe that’s apologist behavior. Still, later on, I did grow a conscience but back to the story.

The site boomed, I bought some more links, I got it to number one. I don’t want to go into all the details, but it started to earn some real money. I didn’t believe it, my brother didn’t believe it. I remember him saying to me that he’d only believe it once he saw the cash in my bank account.

Then the first payment came, I’d built it up so much and I hadn’t even realized. I thought the cash was going to offer validation, well done me on my great execution, a big pat on the back…. I was a business success, following in the footsteps of many before me.

Except it didn’t offer anything, it meant absolutely nothing and worse, it made me feel hollow. I took that first payment, withdrew as much as I could and walked across the road and gave it to the hospice charity opposite the ATM. I’m not saying this as a moral brag, my moral deficit was far greater than that charitable donation. It was just that the money meant nothing to me. I had to rationalize and understand why I was feeling the way I was. The truth was, I knew somewhere inside me I was enabling a terrible industry and partaking in it was wrong.

I had built this idea of success in my head, and when I reached that rung it all evaporated in front of me. The work I had been doing for the last couple of years meant nothing to me. Worse, the pursuit of money that is ingrained so heavily into many of us from birth had left me completely unfulfilled. The media constantly ties happiness to success and wealth, yet I had wealth and what many would view as success and felt absolutely no satisfaction whatsoever.

I decided right then, any future ventures I partook in would offer real value to people in one form or another. No get rich schemes, no empty proxy businesses, just real value that made a difference to people. I had absolutely no idea what they would look like but I was determined as hell to never be in that position ever again.

I wish I could say that everything changed overnight, that I shut everything down and started something more ethical. The truth is I abandoned the site and it ran its natural course… straight into the ground. Google had wised up somewhat (though next came the black hat hackers… a story for another time maybe) and it was gone.