Lauren Bateman made thousands monthly from Google Ads on informational websites until the 2009 Panda algorithm update wiped out her income overnight. She pivoted to guitar teaching and now advises keeping a backup income stream so one business collapse doesn't leave you broke.
When I was doing information based websites, I put Google Ads on the web pages and I was making thousands of dollars on Google Ads just building these websites. This is the early to mid 2000s. And then in 2009, Google Panda came out. They completely changed the algorithm and it completely dried up all my income. I had nothing else to do but pivot into the guitar teaching. I was doing the guitar teaching at the time, but I wasn't as big into it as I should have been because I was like, I'm making thousands of dollars over here, not killing myself, and over here I got to do prep work and do all this stuff. So the back end of my businesses fell out and I had to pivot full force into the other business. So it's always good when you're making money to have that income source, but when you start making some real money, it's always good to have a secondary source of income. You don't want to pivot too early because then you're going to be dividing your time and energy. But at some point you want to have some parallel business running just in case one dries up, you still have the other one that's producing income for you.
