xJamesQ

Yeah, it absolutely can. You have to keep in mind though that this isn't something you can just do once. You have to budget for it and have it be a steady influx or it could backfire and hurt your websites credibility. I tried it on a few of my sites early on. It helped one of them but I ended up doing damage to the other two. Just be cautious!

I have had this happen a few times. I realized the reason this happened for me was down to expectations. I made the goal WAY bigger than it was, in that it was a massive deal in my head but didn't change much for me at the end of the day.

It depends on the size of your sites as well as the traffic. Early on for a few of mine, I used Adsterra and Monetag. Both are great options for smaller or newer websites. They don't have threshold requirements to hit. Media.net is another one. That is powered by Bing rather than Google. I think it might be Bing and Yahoo although I don't know anyone that uses Yahoo anymore lol You have to show you have good traffic markers for that one though. I think the minimum might be 50k a month.

You really want companies to come to you, don't go looking for them. In most cases, they will see your follower counts and send you messages. You likely have already had dozens try to contact you without knowing it. I had this happen with 2 of my socials. I had no idea because I seldom checked the e-mails associated with them.

I don't think anyone actually knows. Sure, you have things to look for but I think in many cases, Google decides this. There is always a chance something goes viral on its own but for the most part, I think for something to blow up out of nowhere, Google is in the back giving it a nudge.

I would say the biggest myth is that "anyone could do it". That has to be the biggest lie and hardest sell because it just isn't true. If anyone could do it, a lot more people would be working from home. It took me 3 years to get things going for myself. Most people would give up after 3 months. They either didn't want to find the time or were comfortable enough with their 9-5 to just let it go.

Off the top of my head... The pros: You get full control over what is used including specials needs and hardware used. You gain data privacy which is a HUGE plus IMO. You aren't locked into any sort of contract. The cons: You are responsible for all of the maintenance. You run the risk of downtime due to internet or power outages. You will need to pay more upfront if you need to expand capacity. And I want to put extra emphasis on the cost to expand... Because prices for most PC parts are up by as much as 400%. Just look at RAM costs!

I couldn't for the life of me get a domain that fit my one business so I had to improvise and I did exactly what @Ryyyan mentioned. I shorted it to 3 letters and added a word after it. It didn't seem to hinder it at all and it was one of my fastest growing websites in terms of traffic.

This. I know this was a factor for me. AI made everything a lot worse following these changes. I think they were making these changes to anticipate for AI but also because of everything happening in the world at the time. They were trying to safeguard for misinformation. It just ended up hurting so many of us.

This might be a hot take but this is how I feel. I run a number of socials and have some websites. I have been fairly successful in that I was able to earn a living from the comfort of my home, working around 4 hours a day. Since around 2022, I saw everything going down. Revenue, traffic, views, followers, interactions, sales, etc. etc. I am somewhat of a jack of all trades when it comes to earning online so I was able to shift things around to make up for losses but I still took a sizable hit. The only thing I can see changing everything this drastically and all at once is AI. I know this is around the time when everyone started using it. Companies started putting it in browsers, on phones, in online stores like Amazon. It was all over social media (and still is) and I saw massive amounts of it all over YouTube. I will be transparent in saying that I hate most of it so maybe my blame is factored by this, I don't know. I just feel like AI is ruining the internet. Especially for freelancers and those of us that multitask online for a living. Am I the only one that feels this way?