Tom Libelt – When You Face the Choice of the Easy or Hard Way Take the Hard Way

<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomlibelt/"><strong>Tom Libelt</strong></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">was born in Communist Poland and escaped to the US when he was 11 in the early ’90s. At 9, his father sold products at soccer stadiums in Eastern Europe, where he learned the hard way how to sell and how not to be hustled. He is hyper-focused on helping course creators market their online courses.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p> <p><strong>“Becoming a big fish in a smaller pond often is not only more profitable but will make your life easier.”</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tom Libelt</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p> <h2><strong>Worst investment ever</strong></h2> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In his early 30s, Tom was running a reasonably successful SEO business. Back then, it was easy to rank on Google using what people today consider as blackhat methods. Tom would pay bloggers to get backlinks.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tom had a team of 14 writers at the time, spending a lot of time, money, and effort getting into these blogs. Their goal was to get 50 backlinks pointing to a website every month to keep it ranking higher. While he had other tactics, this model worked the best.</span></p> <h3><strong>Google gets smart</strong></h3> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After riding the wave for a long while, Google smartened up and was out for businesses doing shady stuff. Google destroyed almost all the blackhat networks. They looked at IP addresses and de-indexed them. Thousands of SEO companies were pretty much back to square one.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tom now had a massive team of writers with nowhere to put the blog posts.</span></p> <h3><strong>Trying option B</strong></h3> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tom learned about</span> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks/b?ie=UTF8&node=154606011"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon Kindle</span></a> <span style="font