Man, I was stuck. Like seriously, absolutely paralyzed and digging myself deeper every single day. For about three months, I was grinding hard on this whole content schedule I’d set for myself. Eight hours a day, seven days a week, pushing out new posts, checking the analytics, responding to everything. I was doing everything “right.”
But the numbers? Flatlined. My traffic was stuck, my affiliate sales had totally hit a ceiling, and my overall income stream just stopped moving. I was starting to spin my wheels so fast I was just burying myself in the dirt. I was about to just throw the whole thing in the bin and go back to a proper nine-to-five.
I remember one Tuesday morning I was sitting there, just staring at my screen, feeling that familiar knot in my stomach. I grabbed my deck, shuffled it five times, and just laid down a simple “Current Problem, Root Cause, Action Required” spread. No fancy rituals, just a gut check.
The first two cards made sense. But the third one, the one that tells you what to do next? It was that damn Prince of Pentacles, upside down. Reversed.
My Practice: Reading the Reverse
I stared at the card for a good five minutes. The Prince of Pentacles is supposed to be slow and steady, right? He’s the one who takes his time, but he always delivers solid results. He’s the guy who builds a house brick by brick. But reversed? That means stagnation. That means stubborn refusal to change the method. It means being so obsessed with the details and the perceived “plan” that you completely miss the opportunity right in front of you. Basically, it was shouting: “You are stuck because you are being an idiot, doing the same thing over and over!”
My first reaction was that typical knee-jerk one: Oh no, bad sign. Everything is blocked. But the goal here isn’t to predict the future; it’s to get your butt moving. The card was telling me the movement itself was the problem—I was moving too slow, or moving in the wrong direction, or just plain refusing to look at the ground beneath my feet.
So I swore right there that I wasn’t going to write another new article until I figured out what the Prince was trying to tell me. I decided to flip the situation around by doing the exact opposite of what the reversed card implied I was doing wrong.
- The Reverse Implication: I was ignoring the foundation in favor of chasing new, shiny results (new articles).
- My Flip Action: I would stop all forward movement and only work on the foundation.
The Action: Flipping the Situation Around
I scrapped my entire content calendar for the next two weeks. Every single topic I had lined up, I deleted it. I then pulled up my dashboard and sorted my entire catalogue from oldest post to newest. I was going back to the beginning.
For the next five days, I dove into the first fifty posts I ever wrote—the foundation of this entire blog. It was tedious work, the kind of grind that feels like you’re cleaning out a muddy ditch. I was ignoring the pressure to publish, ignoring the traffic numbers, and focusing only on making the existing structure absolutely solid.
Here’s what I did, every single day, for those five days:
Day 1 & 2: Structural Integrity.
I searched every single post for broken internal links. I checked for old external links that went to dead sites. I updated all the broken images. I read through the comments to see if there were any technical questions I’d missed. It was brutal, mundane work, and exactly what the Prince of Pentacles demands when he’s reversed—stop the big moves, fix the tiny, boring details. I re-keyed all the SEO data for those old posts, making sure every foundation post was pointing correctly to the next one.
Day 3 & 4: Monetary Foundations.
I scrutinized every single affiliate link. I logged in to all my partner accounts and verified that the linking code was up-to-date. Guess what I found? A single, stupid affiliate tracking code on a major review post from two years ago was broken. It was a one-line error in a config file I’d overlooked because I was too busy writing new stuff. That tiny, broken link had probably cost me hundreds, maybe thousands, in passive income. I fixed it instantly. That feeling when you find the problem—it was a huge release of pressure.
Day 5: Re-Launch Prep.
I took the five posts that had the most potential and gave them a complete refresh, not changing the core message, but updating the statistics and adding new photos. I forced the existing work to be good enough to carry the load again.
The Outcome: The Card Flips
I pushed the updates live. I didn’t write anything new for another two days. I just waited. And man, the numbers exploded. Within 48 hours, the traffic to those old, solid foundation posts shot up because the internal linking was finally clean. The sales from that one fixed affiliate link tripled my weekly total from the previous month.
Is the Prince of Pentacles reversed a bad sign? Hell no. It’s the best sign you can get when you’re stuck, because it tells you exactly where the problem is: it’s not your ability or your potential, it’s your methodology. When you see that sluggish Prince upside down, you don’t keep pushing forward. You stop dead. You go back to the start. You dig up the foundations and re-level everything until it’s painfully, ridiculously solid. You force stability. That’s how you flip the situation around. You don’t ask the card to fix it; you do the work the card is yelling at you to do.
I learned to love that reversed card. It’s just the universe telling you to check your damn shoelaces before you try to run a marathon.
