Introductions Thread

Welcome!

In regards to affiliate networks - what is the preferred publisher tracking platform these days?

Back in the day I believe Cake was the go to from memory?
 
I've worked as a freelance writer for a long time, helping other people build their sites and businesses.

Started a site a couple of years back mostly to boost my own CV. Never took it seriously.

Then started two other sites this year. Got bored of the niches and stopped writing before long.

For 2022 I'm setting a goal to write and publish 365 articles on my first site. Currently the site has about 20 posts and <100 visitors monthly.

Don't want to go in too much detail here as this is a public forum, but I feel like I need some sort of public journal to keep me going. So here I am.
 
Sounds like a plan. You're describing starting projects and not committing to them. There could be all kinds of other barriers and hurdles to face before success but you won't know what they are if you don't go the distance with any one project.

I wouldn't over-commit, personally, with 365 articles on a site just because you need to overcome giving up on a project. A solid 50 articles would be plenty to start getting feedback and data in other areas where the site may not be up to snuff.

There could be keyword research issues, on-page SEO advancements you can make, technical SEO stuff like page speed, etc. I'd hate to see you spend too much effort and time on something that's not going to do well, when you could otherwise pause and take stock of how things are going and then pivot.

Of course you know these things and I'm typing them for the benefit of the reader. I wish you luck with it. We're here to discuss and follow along with your journal. I hope you'll stick around.
 
Thanks @Ryuzaki . Just firmed up the 2022 plans and unfortunately, I had to ax training. Excited about pushing more content out in 2022. Plan is to work on generating more content for B to B customers and earning more ad revenue on my main site this coming year.

Thanks for all your encouragement. Please tag me if you decide to generate a training course - I'll do the same if I opt to switch directions. Good luck in 2022!
 
Hey all,

First post, been lurking for a bit, the content on this forum is awesome and many of you have been inspiring.

My story - I actually got into this by purchasing a site around 10 months ago on Flippa.

It was making roughly 250-300 dollars in the beginning, last month I did about $1,500 and this month I'll do around $2,000. A lot of that jump is just holiday sales but my goal is to bring the site to at least 2k/mo for an average month. 5k would be amazing.

Making a few bucks in the beginning was nice, but actually making real money motivated me to learn more and begin to take the site more seriously.

I also decided to start a site from scratch, and figured if nothing else it will be a great learning experience.

I built the site a week ago and now have 7 articles up. The goal is eventually to be an authority type of site with a brand.

Anyway, glad to be here!
 
Hey everyone. My name is Jesse, and I'm in my late 30s. I've been a writer, content producer and content manager in the online gambling space for several years. I'm essentially here to meet people and get better at what I'm doing and also see what I can figure out about getting in on the affiliate side of this industry or otherwise building my own assets. I found this place through some Googling and a mention from someone on the GPWA forums.

My understanding from being in it is that gambling/casino is pretty tough to get into because the competition is so serious, so I may go to something else, but I'm here to learn regardless.
 
You're 1000% correct.

I'd hate for me to spend too much time and effort and not get anything in return as well. But at this point, I've accepted the fact that there are no magic bullets.

Anyhow, even if this project 'fails' it's ok. Doing this more so as a trial by fire type of thing.
 
Hi Bernard, thanks for the welcome!

I'm hoping I can join the success stories, not fail, and be happy all at the same time. A 2022 resolution miracle!

I appreciate your thoughts and kind words. I spent the last little while thinking about your questions and at first felt none of my skills had no relation to this stuff (like I don't even use social media at all and I am the complete opposite of an extrovert!). After some deep inner diving I think I have exceptional researching skills which could translate to content writing. I won't know till I start I suppose. I am pretty decent at leading myself and a team through the thick of trouble (thank you league of legends and CoD) so maybe that will help me scale up if I can figure this stuff out.

I checked out income school, thanks for the suggestion. Their videos had some good tips but felt like the newer ones (especially the latest one) was a sales advertisement. I ended up looking at what that was all about and through my browsing I ended up piecing together a plan I could try to follow (most of the info came from this site but I wouldn't have found it without that initial query, thank you for that lead!).

Right now I'm thinking I will follow the avalanche technique and focus on massive content output with use of big branding. I'll have to read more on SEO cause it seems like there's a lot of little details to keep in mind of and maybe it will be more of a doing type learning as I learn to make a website. For PPC (which sounds insanely fun to do) I will probably avoid since I don't have monies yet and I think it isn't the right method for this kind of project(?). I'll also focus on traffic leaking on the 30 day rotation that I read about. I think that will be the main things I do. For monetization I will stick with display ads to start till I have the content part figured out. I think this is my best bet.

I've been trying to pick a topic but it's been tough. I'm sure I will figure it out soon enough though! Thanks again for your suggestions!
 
JesseEddleman said:
My understanding from being in it is that gambling/casino is pretty tough to get into because the competition is so serious
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Not only is the competition crazy fierce but it's dirty too. It's one of the arenas where there's still less of a code to live by and no concern about honor or not using tactics to take you down instead of lifting themselves up, etc.

Welcome aboard. I've enjoyed your other posts and am glad you joined us here.
 
Hello folks. Happy new year!
I am from the south Mississippi. Not a noob to affiliate marketing neither I am noob to web design. Having said that there is always room for improvement so I am looking ot learn all I could and share the tricks I learned along the way. Anyway, looking forward making few friends and making those fat stacks!
 
Welcome, @GreenDust, glad to have you. How long have you been involved in the industry? Did you learn by yourself or through agency jobs or what? Do you have any special successes and failures along the way?
 
Ryuzaki said:
Welcome, @GreenDust, glad to have you. How long have you been involved in the industry? Did you learn by yourself or through agency jobs or what? Do you have any special successes and failures along the way?
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Thank you @Ryuzaki for welcoming. The very first webpage I built in beginning of '98 using Frontpage light that came with Windows 98 (or was it W95). It was about war in Kosovo. I simply copypasted tons of text from Yahoo news which back then was the search engine of choice.

The page was ugly as sin and even formatting wasn't perfect but I miraculously got visits and visits did I get! I joined some great grand GRAND daddy of CPC program where I was promised $20 for 1000 clicks. How do I get them to click? I downloaded some free gif editor and made a banner that read verbatim : "Should USA pull out of Kosovo War" and below that line I had YES and NO buttons which were simply an animated image of buttons. I had amount up to $42 which I never got because I switched to a next shiny thing and the CPC company disappeared...

I have done affiliate marketing as well but in incentivized niche. I had several "get paid to" websites back in 2005-2007. Made good money until affiliate networks decided to cut me out and roll their own GPT websites. One of those networks still operates today and they wronged me for $7800+. The whole experience put a really bad aftertaste in my mouth and I changed the direction. I was totally burned out and I decided to take a break from online things. For the following few years I worked on getting my offline business off the ground, I worked on getting a pilot license and building my own airplane.

I even worked in manufacturing industry on assembly line just to decompressed from dealing with lying cheaters. I was seriously burned out on the GPT and all the scam that was involved from both, members and networks. Eventually I got back in to online things of life. I couldn't stay away. I started on doorway sites. I built a few in work from home niche and made a few dollars. Eventually one of the networks I worked with went under. It was peerfly. Another set back and a spoon-full of disappointment. I dedicated few years of my life after that to my true passion - aviation. I flew the shit out of my plane, I built some time and I made some memorable trips. I even had a few close calls.

I guess I never really worked on white hat SEO - I was always impatient, like a teenage boy on his first date. Building my own airplane taught me self discipline.

All the bitter experience with fraud and commission shaving, all the roller coaster with SERPS of my black hat projects made me take a second look at white/grey hat of things. I still believe doorways could work if done carefully. I am sure some unsaturated niches would do ok with it but I am now concentrated in learning solid SEO methods for promotion of my offline business. Its a local service company with three or four large competitors in my area.

Only one of them employs fiverr spam type seo. Of course it could be a decoy. One of my competitors is also rolling up CTR using bots. His seo helper definitely bombard big G with brand name searches. Others are ranking due to their age(around 12-15 years. I am hoping to learn some tricks and methods of ranking local WITHOUT using garbage PBN's of fiverr.

What a trip down a memory lane! I forgot all about my first website until you asked about it. Ahh where all this time has gone!?
 
New member to the forum.

I have been experimenting with SEO and use to freelance website development before graduating college.

I'm a database architect / developer during the day but enjoy to build websites and keep up to date with SEO news and techniques during my free time.

Over the last 3 years I take 12 months to build out a blog and test my theories of Google rankings. All have only used AdSense to monitize, which I have seen some return on.

Going into 2022 (year 4) will be no different. I bought a new domain and am going to start filling it with articles.

I enjoy all the technical/design aspect of websites building. I don't enjoy content creation so I usually outsource that.

The plan for this year:
1. Outsource content creation
2. Use Hugo instead of WordPress to maximize speed and cut down on hosting costs.
3. Focus on visualizing data whenever I can in my articles. I build web bots so I can scrape sources of I have to and visualize that in a chart or web app.

I have never bought a site on flippa. I've only ever built it then sold them. Starting from scratch allows you to figure out how to replicate. Take plenty of notes so you can review when you move onto your next site.
 
Hi everyone,

James here from the UK! I've recently built a Wordpress site for a client of mine who works in the online marketing space and it piqued my curiousity about doing something similar myself especially when you consider how much of a PITA working with clients can sometimes be!

I'm not really sure where to go next but I'm eager to learn and start making some money.

Looking forward to getting to know you all.

- JT
 
Hey, @jamesthomas, glad you joined us. I don't hate all types of client work, but doing web development stuff for anyone that's not already a semi or full success in internet marketing is a nightmare to me, simply because I'm trying to get the work done, not educate and argue about it as well. I don't blame you for striking out on your own.

I'm not entirely sure how experienced you are, but if you didn't see our free Digital Strategy Crash Course here, definitely give it a once over. It'll give you a frame of reference and fill in any gaps you may be missing in your experience. Catch you around the forum!
 
Thanks @Ryuzaki - my first order of business is to go through the course and then ask all the questions I need.

I have a few Shopify clients who I love working for but there are a couple of others I'd love to fire. Hopefully with a bit of effort I can get earnings to where I can do that.
 
I understand where you are as I moved from a niche type of web design to internet marketing for clients to design and marketing for myself.

The only difference I would say is that there is nowhere to hide shoddy work (which many designers and marketers get away with because clients know so little about what they can and should expect) when the client is yourself. But the good thing is that the client is yourself, if that makes sense.
 
Hey Everyone,

I'm excited to join the community and start to take things seriously. I have a background in e-commerce, digital marketing and web analytics. I know with some discipline and accountability I can get something to stick. Here's to a successful 2022 :smile:

Also, I was looking through the Digital Strategy Crash Course earlier and was wondering if there is an updated link somewhere to the Market Research Checklist? It's not working for me.
 
Hey, @GoBlue24, welcome to the club.

Will this project or whatever you're embarking on this year be your first attempt? If so you'll definitely have a leg up with the experience you have.

What are you considering doing? e-Com with PPC ads? SEO type project? Social Media Marketing? Mixtures of all?

Glad to have you aboard. @CCarter may be able to answer your question about the missing Market Research Checklist, though I just checked and both seem to be live for me.
 
It's at the bottom of the very first post: Day 3 - Market Research Post #1

7FQQjy9.png

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There are literally 2 options: a zip file or the Word doc file.
 
CCarter said:
It's at the bottom of the very first post: Day 3 - Market Research Post #1

7FQQjy9.png

--

There are literally 2 options: a zip file or the Word doc file.
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I saw that. Nothing downloads when I click on them. Is it just me then?

Ryuzaki said:
Hey, @GoBlue24, welcome to the club.

Will this project or whatever you're embarking on this year be your first attempt? If so you'll definitely have a leg up with the experience you have.

What are you considering doing? e-Com with PPC ads? SEO type project? Social Media Marketing? Mixtures of all?

Glad to have you aboard. @CCarter may be able to answer your question about the missing Market Research Checklist, though I just checked and both seem to be live for me.
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Thanks for the welcome. This project is not my first attempt. I tried a few different projects over the last 5 years or so with varying success. The first few were SEO focused and I was not patient enough to wait for results before quitting. The most recent was an e-com project where I was starting to get some traction in late 2019/early 2020 and then Covid threw a wrench into those plans.

Professionally, I've been a part of e-com teams that grew revenue from $0 to $20MM and handled all of the digital marketing channels. I feel I have a good grasp on what needs to be done to see success, but just need to stay focused and disciplined during the rough patches when things aren't moving along quickly.

As for this project, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I want my own e-com brand selling my own products but don't have the budget for inventory right now. I was thinking of laying the SEO ground work and monetizing via affiliate links and dropshipping to start and then tweaking everything to drive sales of own product(s) once I can launch them.

Do you think this is a good approach to take?

CCarter said:
It's at the bottom of the very first post: Day 3 - Market Research Post #1

7FQQjy9.png

--

There are literally 2 options: a zip file or the Word doc file.
Click to expand...
FYI...It works when I used Edge browser but not when I was on Google Chrome ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
Hello from FL. I feel like I tried to do this a few years ago and stopped because I didn't have a forum like this to guide and motivate me. I am looking forward to starting again!
 
Hey welcome to the forum!

I don't mean to drill you, but what are you going to do differently this time, other than being aware of this forum? It's going to take more than that.

This forum can't post for you, or write for you, or buy content for you, or promote your blog for you, but we're here to help guide you in the "right direction" (bearing in mind that 10 different people here will have 7 or 8 different ideas about what that direction may look like - your job is to process it, determine whose worth listening to, who actually does the stuff they talk about, etc.)

There's bad advice that can cause you to waste a lot of time, and there's great advice that will help you cut through a lot of obstacles quickly, but the motherfucker of it all is that the "good" advice that helps one person could ruin someone else, and "bad" advice for someone could be the advice that somebody really needed to hear.

"Shut the fuck up, post 500 articles" has worked great for a lot of people who did exactly that and now they have all of their bills covered and they're doing whatever they want to do from now on, but it's also lead to people wasting a lot of time and energy cos they were missing too many pieces to pull it all together, then getting discouraged and quitting.

"Pick up the phone and call 50 people every single day" could make you a millionaire, or it could lead you to working for minimum wage in a call center fantasizing about whether the monitor cable is strong enough to support your body's weight.

You gotta make the right calls, you gotta post the right articles, and "right" means it also has to fit you as an individual. So, that's what you really need to figure out, but I think other people can help fill in the blanks and guide you beyond that.

Any plans for your new blog, have you found a topic that you're going to cover, do you have hosting, a domain, etc? How far along are you, and what's your next move? How far along are you?

I think most of us are happy to help guide you as best we can, but the motivation part... I think you're on your own for that and honestly I don't think motivation is really that important in the long run. You can do all of this without being motivated at all, you need consistency and grit.

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Hey welcome to BuSo!

How do hosting costs compare between hugo and wordpress? How expensive has hosting been that this was a factor in switching? Just curious, it's not something I've ever really considered. Are we talking about a site doing huge traffic so shaving off a bit of server cost per visitor adds up to a lot, or are we talking about the difference between like $10 and $5?

Point number 3 in particular sounds really interesting, hopefully you'll share your progress, cheers!

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Heya @Kelechi, looks like we missed this thread somehow, just wanted to say welcome in case you're still around.

What sort of help are you looking for, and what do you need guidance with specifically? Happy to help :smile:

Cheers!

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Hey @BusyBee, how's the coding going? Have you been sticking to it, or working on something else?
 
Hey there,

I'm a 19-year-old University student from Germany, who's been interested in the field of SEO over the past 1.5 years or so.
I've also started my own project about 9 months ago, but there isn't anything to write home about, as I've just been kicking it along.

I will focus primarily on my degree, which takes up to 40h per week, and my job to pay the bills taking up to 20h per week.

For the last couple of weeks, I've finally gotten into a daily habit of writing again, and I'm pushing out posts pretty regularly.

Not at all at the rate that all of you are, but as of now, I don't have to rely on any SEO-income as of now, so I can focus on other parts of my professional life. It would be a long-term goal, though, so I want to put in way more effort and actually get some shit done.

This year, I will publish at least 100.000 additional words on the website to get the ball rolling and be able to test stuff out myself, instead of only relying on case studies of other people in order to learn.

Anyways, I love the topic and the journey and look forward to my time here :smile:

Cheers
 
Welcome, @AmicableSkipper. Glad to have you around. Sounds like you have a sensible plan. Your education can be your main gig or a fall back if you don't make SEO work out. At 19 years old you have ample time to shuffle your priorities around as life and your interests and needs change.

How is your current 9 month old project doing? How much content do you have published? How much monthly traffic are you receiving? Is it earning any revenue?
 
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