Introductions Thread

German, now living in Switzerland.
Computer Science and Psychology background. Hit me up on PM when it becomes available to you.

::emp::
 
welcome.
Not from Germany however just north from Germany
 
Hey @manga, welcome!

What's your experience level in building online assets? What types of projects are you working on?
Been on IM since August 2012. I started doing seo since the middle of 2014. Though I am always online (very anti-social due to SAD), i can't seem to get into working mood because
1. I'm the laziest guy I know.
2. Very bad internet (biggest problem, how we got even 103 ranking is beyond me)

Nowadays, i'm mostly living on autopilot income, paying for services i'm not using atm and the last time i worked as far as i can remember is about half a year ago haha.

EDIT: Wow, too much rant haha :tongue:
 
@buildtodominate
I went the startup path at first. Build sth. and hoped they will come. Tried a lot of things, such as the hyped growth hacking. Finally I found out that this hype is mostly bullshit! After that I changed completely and now I am here at IM :wink:

@emp
Will definitely contact you, man!

@lion1978
If PM is available to you, hit me with a message. I really would appreciate it!
 
Pomodoros @manga - break your working day into 25 minute periods then reward yourself with a 5-minute break after each period.

If I'm ever getting distracted I make myself focus for 25 minutes at a time. No email, no gtalk, no Facebook - just pure focus.
 
Lots of familiar faces around these parts and what appears to be a wealth of quality info. A breath of fresh air perhaps? Thanks to my Wickedfire brethren for showing me the way. It's good to see you all.
 
Pomodoros @manga - break your working day into 25 minute periods then reward yourself with a 5-minute break after each period.

If I'm ever getting distracted I make myself focus for 25 minutes at a time. No email, no gtalk, no Facebook - just pure focus.
Thanks for the suggestion. I had installed several pomodoro and productivity apps to my phone and laptop few months ago but no, i still am the lazy idiot waiting for google to sweep everything. I doubt i'll come to my senses until everything i have built till now tumbles down haha.
 
I'm not much on writing intro or even writing in general. I thought the BuSo community is pretty good with great information. I decided to write my intro "Mad Libs" style so you are welcome to fill in the blanks with your best guesses.

I'm _________(1) years old living in _________(2). I've been developing website since 2005 and for the longest time I was making a nice chunk of cash from Adsense, which CCarter calls people like me _________(3). However about 3 years ago, that easy money ended well kinda I still make some cash from Adsense. It was in the low $x,xxx now it is in the low $xxx. You might think I would feel _________(4); however, it was one of the best things that happen. I was getting lazy and not working on my skills and the websites I was developing were shitty. I wasn't proud to tell other people what the website address was for my websites. Getting that kick in the butt got me motivated.

For the past 2 years, I've been working on my graphic design skills and I found a new _________(5). To end my little intro, I want to leave you with some good advice.

If you make _________(6), you'll have _________(7)!

That is about all for me. Like a said, "writing in general" so you won't see me writing much but I'll be working on at lease responding to posts if I can help.
 
Just think of it this way - you'll never get this moment back.

Every second you sit inactive, someone is going to be hustling to chp away at your 103 rankings. One morning you'll wake up and find that the castle has been stormed and everything you worked hard for has been destroyed.

In that moment, I bet you'll say "I wish it hadn't come to this, I wish I'd done something".

It's funny - you could take action right now to prevent this, you could start today as in right now to prevent it from happening.

I don't know how hard you work and none of us can make you work harder but what I can tell you is right now I'm working 14-16 hour days for my 9-5 and then I'm coming home and working for another few hours each night/morning on my project.

@Ryuzaki said it all in this thread.
 
Just think of it this way - you'll never get this moment back.

Every second you sit inactive, someone is going to be hustling to chp away at your 103 rankings. One morning you'll wake up and find that the castle has been stormed and everything you worked hard for has been destroyed.

In that moment, I bet you'll say "I wish it hadn't come to this, I wish I'd done something".

It's funny - you could take action right now to prevent this, you could start today as in right now to prevent it from happening.

I don't know how hard you work and none of us can make you work harder but what I can tell you is right now I'm working 14-16 hour days for my 9-5 and then I'm coming home and working for another few hours each night/morning on my project.

@Ryuzaki said it all in this thread.

I think about these things all the time. I always wonder how much i would have accomplished if i had worked just 1 hour per day. But my mindset is completely messed up. I had an exam today for which we were given 5 days prep leave from college. I knew I had to study but the only time I studied was today morning for few hours and gave the exam. My sense of fear, urgency is somewhat fcked up until the last moment.

I have thought about few things to change this fcked up mindset of mine and i hope to implement it ASAP.
1. Cut several hours off computer time for fresh air. So, the most i spend will be working.
2. Stretching and some light exercise.
3. Find a proper place to work. (always in bed atm... Very bad for posture)
4. Lucid dreaming. (Actually for my social anxiety disorder(SAD)) but imma motivate the shit outta me.

Btw, congrats to you. I really want to be that kind of person that gets exited to work and can't go on a day without working even a little bit. I used to get things done before but something changed me in the middle.

Tomorrow, when i wake up, i am going to load up the posts i've bookmarked and start going through that stuff.

Thanks.
 
Hey guys, I'm looking forward to participating in discussions here - it looks like a good crew so far! I heard about this forum from @Justin Cooke on his Empire Podcast which I've been listening to for years now.

I have dabbled mostly in domain investing/speculation for about 7-8 years now, and haven't done much to monetize them since my main real estate business keeps me busy more than full time. My team has had great success in creating a few high quality websites that get market-leading traffic in our marketplace, so I guess you could say we are 'end-users' of our website building efforts, rather than creating sites specifically to sell ads on.

I am interested though in creating other niche websites to create some other (somewhat) passive streams of income.

Cheers!
 
Sup guys,

To make a long story short, I was a chump with a low paid, miserable 9-5 office job when I started learning affiliate marketing in November 2013. I joined C2M and the Affiliati Network and started pushing paid traffic to CPA offers. After months of failing and losing money, I hit a winning campaign, scaled, banked over half a million, and rolled every bit of it into rental properties.

Those are doing well, but not well enough, so I went to another job in the oil and gas industry that pays over six figs. I'm in the middle of a desert and I have lots of time to work on a side project. It would be a shame to let all the knowledge I gained about the Internet go to waste.

But, affiliate marketing is fickle. So I've decided to build my own brand and make my own product. After doing research, I decided that making an Amazon product would be best since they have so much traffic.

My plan is:

1. I researched high volume, successful items with low competition. I found one that is so successful it has over 2000 reviews, but the category has only 25 other products, or about 5 pages, in it. This seems like a place I could make an entrance.

2. The existing product is bizarrely branded considering its target demo. I found the exact same product from a supplier on Alibaba but I am rebranding it and making some tweaks. I really feel like my brand will be stronger. I hired a guy to do the logo and box art. The product costs $8 per unit, $3 to ship stateside, and $7 for amazon to fulfill. It will sell for $35, leaving a margin of $17.

3. I made my product listing. I used the top seller's ad copy as my inspiration but spiced it up...mine is better. Then I packed the keywords page full of keywords. I typed my product category into the amazon search bar and used those suggestions, then went to google keyword tool and used the highest volume relevant keywords.

4. I bought a lightbox for $30 and will be taking professional photos.

5. Concurrently with amazon, I also built my own ecommerce site. I used the free wordpress theme martable but had hyper6 tweak it and make the colors pretty for $130 since I am no artist. At the bottom of the page there are pictures of my 3 products with a short description and a BUY NOW cta button. For the time being this will link directly to my amazon page. I have added a powered by amazon logo so the buyers are expecting this. For SEO purposes, I will pay to have some articles written about topics involving my product and post these in the blog section of the site. I would drive paid Adwords traffic to it but I think my account is banned.

6. Once amazon FBA receives my products, the listing will go live. I will use a promo code to make it free for 50 people in my circle of friends and family in exchange for a review. So almost immediately I will have 50 reviews. I will also do a small PPC campaign using the amazon platform and do some PPV with the traffic sources I used for my successful affiliate marketing campaign. This won't be very high volume though.

7. I will use feedbackgenius to send an automated message to each customer thanking them and inviting them to review.

8. As sales stack up I will use Tomoson and Productelf for more reviews, and then once I have a really heavy sales volume I will pay for a Zonblast.

I'm just a guy who got lucky with one affiliate marketing campaign and has no idea what he is doing. I would appreciate any advice so I can make any necessary changes. This is a total shot in the dark and I just came up with this from research on public websites. So I'm sure you guys know better!
 
For a guy who says he doesn't know squat, you have a pretty detailed and solid plan :smile: I wish you best of luck in this venture - thread watched =)
 
Haha well I certainly have a plan but is it the right plan? Any of you guys making a living have an opinion? I would really like to start working entirely for myself, as living in a desert without a day off for six months working 16 hour days in cold weather doing manual labor is no bueno.

Also I just bought .com domains for very buy-oriented keywords in my niche. They actually have my product name in the title and things like "best" etc. They get about 1000 google searches a month each. I just bought 7 of these for $50. What do I do with them? I am thinking I should just redirect them to my branded sales page.
 
Yep true :wink:

However, as a newbie I am quite interested in this stuff.(its also probably valuable to others as well)

How do you automate content creation partially?

As a newbie you should ignore everyone pushing you towards spam and automation because otherwise you'll just be another newbie getting hustled for affiliate commissions from charlatans, who has no idea what he's doing. Learn the basics first, THEN worry about taking shortcuts.

C'mon, are you seriously asking for advice from a guy who's admitted he has zero work ethic and can't bring himself to do any work at all? If Google penalized his sites tomorrow, he'd be further behind in the game than you are.
 
C'mon, are you seriously asking for advice from a guy who's admitted he has zero work ethic and can't bring himself to do any work at all? If Google penalized his sites tomorrow, he'd be further behind in the game than you are.

Gracias for your reply thamonsta! I think that you are right, when you say that as a newbie you shouldn`t take shortcuts. However, I am also here to learn a lot and I think manga seems to be like someone, who definitely knows what he is talking about(right qmanga ?!?!?!).

Therefore, I would love to hear from him how he does it?
 
Yeah I'm not trying to take a dump on the guy's accomplishments but the fact that he can't drag himself out of bed to keep building anything new speaks volumes to the mindset of people who are in this to take shortcuts instead of just working hard.
 
Haha, things are getting messy. First of all, i never said i automate anything(except seo), I only said that i'm living on my autopilot earnings since i cant get myself to work.

@captainT you should listen to @thamonsta ; as a newbie you should be learning new things, automating will only make things worse. The case about duplicated content is there and it will be extremely hard to convert with AGC.
 
Glad you made it over, man!

I haven't been here long, but it does seem to be a high-quality community. Surprising, especially since it's free/open.

There are some great executors here - some of which have some amazing case studies and AMA's going. I'm picking up some tips/strategies here and a much-needed reminder to stop thinking about things and just do it, heh.
 
Sounds good if you can truly snag 50 verified reviews out of people. That should help rank and convert inside Amazon quite a bit. The PPC afterwards will only help further both of the above goals and hopefully be ROI positive in the mean time. Then if you can get it flowing organically... cha-ching!

8. As sales stack up I will use Tomoson and Productelf for more reviews, and then once I have a really heavy sales volume I will pay for a Zonblast.

I could look these up, but for the sake of discussion, what is Tomoson and Productelf and Zonblast?
 
Sounds like a solid plan. I would get a new Adwords account and make sure you get a solid Adwords campaign up and running.

What do I do with them? I am thinking I should just redirect them to my branded sales page.
This won't help much. If there's search volume for your primary keywords I would build out small minisites, each on a different hosting and with different WHOIS, and do some basic SEO on them while linking to the main website.

This will help the rankings for the main website and at the same time bring in sales from the long tails.
 
Sounds good if you can truly snag 50 verified reviews out of people. That should help rank and convert inside Amazon quite a bit. The PPC afterwards will only help further both of the above goals and hopefully be ROI positive in the mean time. Then if you can get it flowing organically... cha-ching!



I could look these up, but for the sake of discussion, what is Tomoson and Productelf and Zonblast?

Should be easy...just send it out to all the bishes on my Facebook for free. Hopefully fifty is enough to get the ball rolling.

I would be ecstatic with 10 sales a day...that's full time job pay right there.

Productelf is a site that posts your product at a discounted price. It's users, if interested, will request a coupon code for that price and give you a review in return.

For Tomoson, you send a free product to small bloggers in exchange for a plug on their site.

Zonblast is the nuke of the three . You pay $300+ and get an email drop with a discount code that will encourage buyers to review . Not all of them do though. It's more of an unfocused volume approach for when you are already successful
 
Thanks. I almost can't believe this is a good plan.

My Adwords account got reactivated somehow so I am good there. Can you link toyour amazon page or should I link to my ecommerce site to avoid a ban ?

Seems like I fucked up on buying those domains. I'll probably write like two articles targeting the domain keyword and throw them up in generic wordpress, then fill the sidebar etc with banner ads for my product. I don't think the ROI is here for all that different WHOIS etc stuff, but thank you for the suggestion as I did not know google penalizes for that
 
This is all solid work man. The only thing I can suggest is to start implementing everything and then hit us up if you get stuck on anything. Something tells me that you have the head to figure most things out on your own - but bouncing your ideas off other people can never hurt.
 
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