I've been doing SEO for about 5 years, been full time on my own sites for about 3 years. Had ups and downs, made some good money, but also had poor months.
Long story short, all the Google updates which can decimate you overnight (happened several times) combined with admitted fatigue/lazyness over SEO and I'm looking to expand my skill set. Learning some coding, but also want to get good at paid traffic, conversion optimization and the whole package.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone is doing both SEO and paid or if anyone transitioned from SEO into paid. Do you think it is feasible to do both? My plan is mostly to skip the short term game in SEO and focus only on a couple of larger niches with authority sites. I can outsource most and passive income is passive income.
I was also thinking about testing niches with paid and if profitable, build some sites out. Using Bing for example, then building a site out, adding Adwords (more lenient rules in my country), then expanding the sites and growing their organic traffic slowly. Also interested in trying all kinds of different traffic sources.
I am thinking that the skills learned from paid can transition well to running any kind of online business and websites.