Introductions Thread

Hello everyone,

I got here by referral and I landed in the DIGITAL STRATEGY CRASH COURSE.

that is one of the best things to happen to me in my digital marketing journey.

It turned me into a newbie and I had to register so I can have the entire forum on my watch list.

I recommend it should be added as a must read articles to newbie.

Too much information for FREE, I AM SO GLAD I AM HERE.

i love you all!
 
I used to do some MFA / affiliate stuff but never made much or put that much time into it as I got caught up with a web dev job. Looking to get started back up and also start working on one or two SaaS products I have ideas for.

Glad to be here.
 
Welcome. If you have a decent SaaS idea, I'd focus on that rather than spread myself thin across MFA sites as well as multiple SaaS's. That's me though, I don't have the mental bandwidth to give my all to that many projects. You say "one or two" SaaS's. Are they related enough that they could be rolled into one offering?
 
Hi Buso members!

Been a lurker for sometime but it's time to jump in and start contributing to this wonderful community.

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I have been hustling online since '07 and my bread and butter is ranking affiliate sites on G. Been through many ups and downs, having had countless sites slaughtered by Pandas and Penguins. The swings in this volatile industry can be insane but I believe there's never been a better time to build a long-term online asset with all the resources available these days.

We're all on different stages of our path in this crazy industry, but we are all on the same path. I'm hoping to share, learn and grow with all the bright minds in this community.

Feels good to be out of the shadows, thanks for checking out my post!
 
SPAGHETT!!!!

Glad to have you aboard. I don't see many people churning and burning these days, although it sounds like you're moving away from it into long-term sites? Are you still actively spamming (assuming that you did back in the golden era)?

I'm with you though, the best time to start a long-term big site is yesterday. The barrier to entry is going to be too high, SEO-wise, for most lucrative industries pretty soon. A matter of years even.
 
Ryuzaki said:
SPAGHETT!!!!

Glad to have you aboard. I don't see many people churning and burning these days, although it sounds like you're moving away from it into long-term sites? Are you still actively spamming (assuming that you did back in the golden era)?

I'm with you though, the best time to start a long-term big site is yesterday. The barrier to entry is going to be too high, SEO-wise, for most lucrative industries pretty soon. A matter of years even.
Click to expand...
Thanks Ryuzaki.

Don't do much spam these days, maybe on the lowest tiers to get a little bit of juice flowing. Bulk of my link building these days come from PBNs and authorships on major publications.

I'm dipping my toes into whitehat linkbuilding (primarily infographics) and seeing some decent results. Hard to scale but very little worry of getting smacked by Google.
 
Hey Builders,

I just checked my profile and saw that I'm signed up here for nearly 3 years now.

This lurking has to stop. I'm going 100% this time..

I realized if I keep doing what I've always been doing, nothing will change.

I created my first profitable website last october (on weekends and after work), since then the traffic is growing each month:

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However there are a few big problems.

1) More than 90% of my traffic comes from Search Engines
2) I rely 100% on the Amazon Affiliate Program

So far I've implemented a Newsletter with a E-Book incentive in July - and I'm getting around 30 Subscribers per month now. I tried to do some E-Mail Marketing but I'm only getting around ~5 Clicks per Mail. Still better than not collecting E-Mails though!

My plan now is to concentrate my efforts into expanding this business to a real one - with more than 1 traffic source and monetization method.
 
Well, traffic sources would be easy.. tis the home of the leak, after all.

- reddit
- imgur (I kid you not)
- facebook
- pr0gramm (for the Germans)
- etc
- ...

http://trafficleaks.com/
 
darkzerothree said:
Well, traffic sources would be easy.. tis the home of the leak, after all.

- reddit
- imgur (I kid you not)
- facebook
- pr0gramm (for the Germans)
- etc
- ...
Click to expand...
I've tried leaking from reddit before - there is only 1 subreddit related to my niche in german, and there are not alot of users.

I didn't think of pr0gramm.com - seems like a pretty good platform to leak from. Im going to try that right now..

Edit: Okay this seems pretty hard - 1 account is €9 without an invite, and I'm pretty sure I would get banned easily linking back to my affiliate site.
 
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(I did not know your site is in German)
Read all on traffic leaking you can find here.

Step one is to get to know your targets and to make them feel they know you / become trustworthy.
Big one in DE for this is forums.

Hit me up via DM if you want to discuss in more detail
 
I tried forum posting too, seems like the Admins/Mods in german forums (especially in the tech niche) take the forum rules very seriously.. only few of my posts sticked.

Sure I will hit you up via DM, as soon as I'm unlocked.
 
I have a site that is on the same boat as yours. Almost 90% organic traffic + Amazon monetized.

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I've had tiny success with pinterest but haven't really tried to scale the effort. My main issue is being ADD with multiple projects, which I'm sure many of us suffer from.

One suggestion I can make (if you haven't) is to install FB pixel on your site. You can gain some valuable insights on your audience that you otherwise wouldn't have without it.

Here's a snapshot of audience insights from my visitors. There's a lot of data you can dig out from here, which has given me tons of ideas about marketing to my audience.

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Damn you get a lot of traffic @serpape :tongue:.

Thanks for the FB Pixel suggestion, seems like a good idea to gather some data.

How do you reinvest into your project?

I think im not nearly investing as much back into the project as I should - and all of the investment went into content and links so far. Really need to expand into other areas aswell...
 
Reinvesting back into content and links is what I do as well. I do try to look at the analytics and try to figure out what content is performing the best and why, then double down on those.

Another thing I reinvest on once the site is profitable is delegating some of the more mundane/boring tasks so I can focus on high-level tasks.
 
I discovered the crash course about a year back but never really came back to or got involved in the forum. Back then I was more of a link builder using SER to rank my sites with one where I used a PBN, the SER sites were slapped by the Penguin 4 rollout and I lost the PBN site to the Fred rollout. Since then I have been slowly developing a few new sites via trial and error and looking for grow my knowledge from just a link builder to a more well-rounded internet marketer. I remembered the crash course and decided to sign up.

I have been rebuilding since April, lost/dropped a bunch of sites and currently have two main ones I am focusing on below with two or three smaller ones I am toying with while attempting to recover the one hit by Fred.

For the first 7 1/2 months of its life I never built a single backlink to the site but decided to send it some PBN links about a week and a half back and it has started to lift off although its still only pulling minor traffic. Looking forward to the next three months.

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This is a test site I decided to keep, its pages have had all sorts pushed to it including SER links, manual web 2.0s, automated web 2.0s, PBNs as well as a new thing I am trying. Again it is only getting a small amount of traffic right now but I am happy that it is climbing each week so looking forward to the next three month.

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Hey, why don't you go for more white hat link building instead?

Instead of using PBNs, you could do guest posting. If your website provides some value, its easy to score guest posts on real sites with real traffic.

If you're serious about your project I would not touch SER links / automated web 2.0s. You could use them on some parasite pages, but not your main site.

The first 6 months of your project are going to suck, I experienced that myself. You have to keep on grinding though and provide some real value through content/links and you will see success - its all about delaying that gratification.
 
shaunm, Welcome to the club! I quit any form of low quality link spamming and PBN's after Penguin 1 and haven't looked back. I'm trying to build long-term assets that grow to huge sizes, and they just can't exist under the level of risk that those links bring.

But I'm extremely pleased to see that you're still testing. Even though I have no intention of going back, I'm always interested in seeing if anyone can make it work. PBN's can work for longer and even indefinitely if they're truly private and not exploited (although it's cheaper and faster to just do outreach and let the entire net be your PBN, in my opinion). But seeing what someone can get done with the old school spam, that's still interesting to me.

Of course the culture with that is to not spill the beans, because if it's working, you want to use it since you discovered it. But I do hope you'll keep sharing results surrounding that, but not lose focus on your better sites with cleaner backlink profiles.
 
psyvortex said:
Hey, why don't you go for more white hat link building instead?

Instead of using PBNs, you could do guest posting. If your website provides some value, it's easy to score guest posts on real sites with real traffic.

If you're serious about your project I would not touch SER links / automated web 2.0s. You could use them on some parasite pages, but not your main site.

The first 6 months of your project are going to suck, I experienced that myself. You have to keep on grinding though and provide some real value through content/links and you will see success - its all about delaying that gratification.
Click to expand...

By my personal definition of white hat/black hat guest posting is still black hat but closer to the safer end. It's on my to-do list as is many other things but I hope to get to it eventually.

I don't suppose you have any numbers for your reach out rates to successful links with guest posting? I know a few people who do it and they have a nightmare getting links for their sites so I have never thought it would be easy to score links.

I have always heard that about SER/Automated web 2.0s, even last year before penguin 4 when I was using it to rank my sites but penguin 4 definitely changed the game and wiped my sites out. I am mainly using SER to post to self-hosted domains now rather than random ones with open submissions. I do have a plan to use it to help dilute anchor text ratios and increase referring domains with a few select engines in the future though.

100% with you on the delayed gratification though.

Ryuzaki said:
shaunm, Welcome to the club! I quit any form of low quality link spamming and PBN's after Penguin 1 and haven't looked back. I'm trying to build long-term assets that grow to huge sizes, and they just can't exist under the level of risk that those links bring.

But I'm extremely pleased to see that you're still testing. Even though I have no intention of going back, I'm always interested in seeing if anyone can make it work. PBN's can work for longer and even indefinitely if they're truly private and not exploited (although it's cheaper and faster to just do outreach and let the entire net be your PBN, in my opinion). But seeing what someone can get done with the old school spam, that's still interesting to me.

Of course the culture with that is to not spill the beans, because if it's working, you want to use it since you discovered it. But I do hope you'll keep sharing results surrounding that, but not lose focus on your better sites with cleaner backlink profiles.
Click to expand...

Cheers :smile:.

I am starting to look at more long-term things now as I am trying to go IM fulltime rather than just a hobby. I have a plan for some zero backlinking projects where I focus on keyword research and on page rather than backlinks as it seems the best way for me to go to reach my goals on the scalability/safety scale.

Are you including bribes with your outreach or literally emailing them out of the blue asking to guest post? I always imagine outreach out be a right pain and a few friends who do it say they have a nightmare with it.

Regarding the automation stuff, it's much harder this year than it was last. A week or so ago I compared the performance of my link pyramids to each other on my test network. One with either 100% unique human-made articles or high quality manually spun articles to that of pyramids using 100% autogenerated content and it seems Google are much better at detecting the autogenerated stuff now as their target keywords hardly moved where as the human content is on page two now climbing slowly.
 
Hi everyone,
skipped the introduction when I signed up a few months ago, so I guess I should do it now. Basically found this group through Charles Floates recommendation (inside his group or videos, I don't know which one).

I am 20 years old and just dropped out of college without any meaningful planning, just knew it wasn't for me. Now I plan on spending this extra free time I got on my hands (until I get employed) to learn some SEO and implement it on an affiliate site.

Already went through Digital Crash Course once, but will do it again to make it 'stick'. Also starting monday I will start posting my follow-along, hopefully to get some guidance along the way and to inspire any future starts from anyone inside this forum.

I don't plan on just working a 9-5 job, I want to make this work so I can have some freedom in my life, atleast financial freedom...

Enough of me rambling - excited for a new chapter in my life and will work on it to be the best one yet :smile:
 
Welcome. I'd say to definitely find employment, because it can take quite a while to work through all of the possible pitfalls in this game and get past your own psychological barriers about it. Ramping up to a full time living can be done fast even without funding, but it's rare.

And with gainful employment you can at least have some funding to toss at your business and/or site to help accelerate growth. That'll actually be a must since you won't have as much time to plow and work your digital fields since you'll be at the day job.

Best of luck. A journal where you actively share progress will help you keep track of what is working or not, and it's a place where you can ask specific questions where the rest of us can offer perspectives and solutions. It's definitely a great way to bolster your progress.

Looking forward to seeing you move forward in this industry and in life.
 
Thank you for the support man. I will definitely get a job as I need an income for stability and need to get used to 'reality' of life. I think it will benefit me as well to know what I am working towards not having (and that is a 9-5). I'm already planning how I will structure my journal :smile: Again, thank you for replying and helping out.
 
Hello, everybody.

As I'm new here, I figured I'd introduce myself. You can call me dopeideas. :wink: I've been involved in website development and internet marketing for a number of years, and I've pursued many projects and had varying degrees of success.

I started out at Digital Point way back in 2005, made it to Wicked Fire back in '08, and tried Stack that Money for a time, and lost my orientation as far as online marketing and entrepreneurship communities go. I came across Builder Society in doing research, read some threads with some awesome value, and saw there were at least a few old school players here.

I lurked for a while, but decided it's time to register. I joined Builder Society for the opportunity to network, keep accountable in my pursuits, and hopefully find some high value informational content that will enable me to reach my goal of financial independence.

As for myself, my biggest success is my online forum, the second largest in it's niche. I made the mistake of getting a college degree instead of solely focusing on my business ventures, and it's definitely hindered my growth. I spent the past two years pursuing an entertainment/media startup with the wrong team. Now I want to get my feet wet in internet marketing again.

I fell out of the game a few years ago, so I'm still trying to reestablish my footing.

I have a tendency to pursue too many projects at once and pay too much attention to detail, which often hinders my progress in these pursuits. I hope my time here will help change that.

In addition to the daily employment grind, I'm testing the waters in crypto investing and Amazon Merch. My current focus in on launching a new informational resource affiliate site, which I hope will be launch ready by the 15th. I'm also working on preparing my forum for Xenforo 2.0 and developing new methods for monetization and growth.

Thanks for having me.
 
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