Courtney Tuttle Takes Keyword Sniping Material Offline!

I was very surprised to find that just a couple of weeks after Courtney Tuttle opened up his paid site The Keyword Sniper, he has now closed the site and has even gone as far as to remove all of his posts about keyword sniping from his blog. As this is the strategy around which I am basing my AdSense Project, this was a little worrying.

So What Happened?

Well I’m not sure of the full story as I only read Court’s main blog posts and usually don’t read all the follow-up in the comments. A little while ago he made a post about content not being king which talked about the importance of backlinks which seems reasonable to me and in his latest post he has turned around his point of view completely but at the same time, shut down his work on keyword sniping and announced that he will updating his site to be inline with his new philosophy, but doesn’t say what that is.

Some people took the word ’sniping’ to mean something negative and wrongly assumed that it was some kind of spammy strategy. If there is one thing that you can absolutely rely on in the online world is that people will misunderstand you, misinterpret, disagree with you, and probably flame you too!

It seems clear to me that all of this negative feedback is completely unfounded. The strategy is nothing more than a way of structuring a website to rank for a particular keyword and whenever you build content for the web there is an underlying assumption that you should create good content. Google doesn’t tend to rank spam too highly so I honestly don’t know why people would have thought his technique to be spammy.

Future of the AdSense Project

There will be no change to my project. I like the keyword sniping strategy and luckily I studied it in great detail before Court took down the posts. As I work through the project I will be blogging about the process so when I get to the content sections I’ll go into detail about exactly what I’m doing so it won’t matter that the original work is no longer online.

Some Thoughts on Court’s Decision

I really don’t know the full story here – only what has been said on his blog. Court seems concerned that the name ‘keyword sniping’ is giving people the wrong idea and so he has decided to pull it all offline while he re-thinks the strategy. That seems like a very extreme decision to me.

It’s entirely possible to change the name of an online product without having to remove anything – I went through this myself last month and it wasn’t a problem. So I do wonder why he didn’t just change the name of his strategy and start a re-branding process. Maybe that is something he will do in due course.

I suspect (and this is purely speculation on my part), that he has taken this stuff offline due to negative feedback. This stuff happens, especially in the Internet marketing niche. The online world can be hostile but it doesn’t have to be a problem if you don’t let it.

I know I have a lot of ‘fans’ here which is nice but I also know I have plenty of enemies. The Traffic Rush course in particular attracted a lot of negative feedback. Many people wrongly assumed that the course somehow exploited / spammed StumbleUpon and I received all sorts of threats. Many of the people also wrongly assumed that StumbleUpon would be outraged by the course and so reported the site. I have a 3-page legal document on my hard drive from the StumbleUpon lawyers telling me how happy they are for me to be selling my course, just as long as I don’t call it Stumble Rush :-)

Here’s the thing – what other people think about you, is not your problem! This might seem counterintuive and your ego may be shouting at the screen right now saying, well of course it concerns me if it’s about me but I urge you to think about it a little. Author Byron Katie says that there are three kinds of business in the world – your business, everybody else’s business and God’s business. I don’t choose to use the word God but by that she means the business that is not in human control – such as the weather for example.

What you do, what you say, what you think – all that is your business. What somebody else does, or says or thinks is their business. Yes even if they are saying things to you or about you, it’s still their business! You cannot control what other people think of you and as long as you allow yourself to get sucked into that, you’ll always be suffering!

Moral of the story: if you know what you are doing is right, then ignore what other people say or think about it.

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