Introductions Thread

Welcome, I think you're on the right path. I made that same switch from black hat to grey hat to white hat over the course of a decade or so. I sleep far better as a white hat, but the ramping up time is grueling to say the least, and you're still subject to the unpredictable algorithm changes. But you survive if you're doing it right, even if you ride the rollercoaster.

Make sure you check out our Digital Strategy Crash Course and the Traffic Leaks Boot Camp, a method where many of us can go out and get 250,000 visitors across a couple days for free, which also helps with SEO. The point of Traffic Leaks is to be a marketer and not wait on Google (and this ends up showing Google you're worthy of their traffic as a by product).
 
Ryuzaki said:
Welcome, I think you're on the right path. I made that same switch from black hat to grey hat to white hat over the course of a decade or so. I sleep far better as a white hat, but the ramping up time is grueling to say the least, and you're still subject to the unpredictable algorithm changes. But you survive if you're doing it right, even if you ride the rollercoaster.

Make sure you check out our Digital Strategy Crash Course and the Traffic Leaks Boot Camp, a method where many of us can go out and get 250,000 visitors across a couple days for free, which also helps with SEO. The point of Traffic Leaks is to be a marketer and not wait on Google (and this ends up showing Google you're worthy of their traffic as a by product).
Click to expand...

Yea the pace between white and black hat is much differently. Luckily I have some money saved up so I'm not too worried to let some things grow.

Thanks for those course links, I will check them out!

Lately I have been getting good traffic off of pinterest while I work on SEO, and I expect the pin traffic to keep growing steadily for a bit so I'm excited.
 
Hey guys, I'm a programmer / bot developer / webmaster / designer with 25+ years of experience .

Happy to be hear and Happy New Year to everyone!

I'm looking to make 2019 a great year full of new opportunities and good profit. I hope that I can find some new opportunities here :wink:
 
Nice to have you aboard. We need a bot scripter around these parts. I'm sure people will have work for you if you can take it on. Catch you around the forum!
 
Nice to see another dev from the "Good 'ol days". I've been programming since I was a kid, back in 1984 or so and have been working with UNIX (Linux these days) since the mid 90s. Always something new and exciting to learn and that's what keeps me interested. Would love to hear more about the type of projects you're working on, what languages/tech stacks you use, etc.
 
Hey Builder Society!

Been lurking in the shadows here and there for a month or so. Figured I would finally contribute!

I’m excited for 2019. I’m hopeful that this year will be a good tipping point for my site.

A little background on me and my site:

Live in Austin TX and work in the tech world. Started up my affiliate site in January of 2017 out of curiosity and then turned into passion once I saw the opportunity it brought.

Came out of the gate strong in 2017 writing my own content, and then once the site started earning some money I started outsourcing. Did that for a good bit and then let it sit. I’ve done a little link building here and there, and also outsourced some of that too.

Sadly, my earnings are not as much as I would like and hoping some of my page 2-7 rankers kick up to page 1 this next year. I also need to add additional content, but it’s more of a “purchase more content every 6 months” type of process for now.

Here are some site stats from January 2017 until now.
  • Site hits: 56,000~
  • Total Earnings: $4,300
  • Highest 1 month earnings: $615
One of my biggest concerns with my site is the constant curiosity it brings around when some of my keywords will hit page 1. I have felt like my keywords are doing a complete dance on me, and often dive bomb for awhile after adding links, too.

Overall I feel like the site is heading in a good direction but it’s hard to keep adding links and or content (especially when outsourcing because it’s a decent sized investment) when I haven’t seen the needle move too much. Keep in mind it’s now been 2 years.

My first ask to all newbies and veterans is have you had a site that earned minimal income over 2 years and then tip the scales after that mark?

I’ve been told to stay the course by a marketer I trust and has had incredible success with affiliate sites, and have also seen the common theme of “just have patience” on sites I follow , but I get the creeping doubt at times that I should pick a different niche / cut my losses.

My other ask is for those who have had sites that they would consider a good learning failure. How long did you wait before you knew the site was a dud?

I’m betting answers here will vary wildly but really any thoughts or advice here would be great.

Thanks!

Luke
 
@Luke Neely, I'm glad you've started posting.

Luke Neely said:
I have felt like my keywords are doing a complete dance on me, and often dive bomb for awhile after adding links, too
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is normal, though it does seem to have gotten a lot worse lately. Google has a Rank Transition thing they do where if you get links you may see a positive, neutral, or negative effect. Neutral and negative effects may last for 30-90 days or something like that before you get the intended positive effect. This is to randomize things so link spammers can't really tell what's driving results.

But lately it does seem like a guaranteed negative in my experience, and one that seems to last quite a while longer than it used to. And at the same time I'm publishing content with no links that's zipping straight to the front too. Makes getting links a painful process.

Luke Neely said:
My first ask to all newbies and veterans is have you had a site that earned minimal income over 2 years and then tip the scales after that mark?
Click to expand...

For the most part, that's the expectation. I don't expect to earn much in the first year as a non-PBN users, non-spammer.

I had to dig through old posts because I lost some data recently when Google did their GDPR crap for Analytics. Here's a snippet of how organic traffic grew on my main project, though it doesn't show the whole picture in the left or right directions:

pO5ct0u.png


The site started on January 1st, 2015. So you can see how long it took to ramp up... 2 years until January 2017 before it was looking respectable. It simply takes time and Google fights spam with this kind of time-based throttling.

What more can you tell us about your site, like how many pieces of content you have up total, what the average word count is, how many referring domains do you have pointing at your site link-wise, etc.?
 
Hey Luke and welcome on board,

I make around 2k a month now after 1 year of serious work. I'm only able to work a few hours a day due to some chronic issues. I was in your spot just a half year ago. I'm not sure why you haven't moved forward in your earnings.

You didn't really share the most important things. How many articles have you written, what kind of keyword research do you do, what's the quality of your content (honestly), do you have anything to set yourself apart.

I suspect the content you're outsourcing is not good enough. Do you do keyword research on these outsourced topics? Do you look at Google Search Console to find keyword opportunities there? Do you write detailed instructions for your outsourced content.

In any case, the Digital Strategy Crash Course here will get you going if you apply yourself to it with some extra vigor, maybe skip the outsourcing until you can consistently write earning content.
 
Ryuzaki said:
@Luke Neely, I'm glad you've started posting.



Yeah, this is normal, though it does seem to have gotten a lot worse lately. Google has a Rank Transition thing they do where if you get links you may see a positive, neutral, or negative effect. Neutral and negative effects may last for 30-90 days or something like that before you get the intended positive effect. This is to randomize things so link spammers can't really tell what's driving results.

But lately it does seem like a guaranteed negative in my experience, and one that seems to last quite a while longer than it used to. And at the same time I'm publishing content with no links that's zipping straight to the front too. Makes getting links a painful process.



For the most part, that's the expectation. I don't expect to earn much in the first year as a non-PBN users, non-spammer.

I had to dig through old posts because I lost some data recently when Google did their GDPR crap for Analytics. Here's a snippet of how organic traffic grew on my main project, though it doesn't show the whole picture in the left or right directions:

pO5ct0u.png


The site started on January 1st, 2015. So you can see how long it took to ramp up... 2 years until January 2017 before it was looking respectable. It simply takes time and Google fights spam with this kind of time-based throttling.

What more can you tell us about your site, like how many pieces of content you have up total, what the average word count is, how many referring domains do you have pointing at your site link-wise, etc.?
Click to expand...

Hi Ryuzaki - thanks for replying and for the insight / thorough answer. Really appreciate it.

My site has roughly 43 posts and all are around 2500-3000 words of great content. Not just comprehensive but also engaging and visual. I spent a lot of work on the posts and the outsourced content is great.

I think I have about 70 referring domains last time I checked linkminer. I don’t think that number is entirely accurate though.

How many domains did you have pointing at your main project before it kicked up in year 2?

bernard said:
Hey Luke and welcome on board,

I make around 2k a month now after 1 year of serious work. I'm only able to work a few hours a day due to some chronic issues. I was in your spot just a half year ago. I'm not sure why you haven't moved forward in your earnings.

You didn't really share the most important things. How many articles have you written, what kind of keyword research do you do, what's the quality of your content (honestly), do you have anything to set yourself apart.

I suspect the content you're outsourcing is not good enough. Do you do keyword research on these outsourced topics? Do you look at Google Search Console to find keyword opportunities there? Do you write detailed instructions for your outsourced content.

In any case, the Digital Strategy Crash Course here will get you going if you apply yourself to it with some extra vigor, maybe skip the outsourcing until you can consistently write earning content.
Click to expand...

Hey Bernard -
Thanks for chiming in!

I don’t think that the content quality is the issue. I’ll check out the crash course again to see if I missed anything. I know I didn’t look at it as intently as it probably deserves to be when I first signed up.

Site has around 43 posts. Outsourced content as well as my own are all great posts. Well researched on keywords.

Something I did think of when reading your reply was my silo structure. It’s all setup and well organized but I think I may need to go deeper into each category?

When I first started the site I remember setting up all categories because I wanted to cast a wide net but didn’t come across how people were having success from going deep in one area and then rinse and repeat in another category until like...early 2018 I think.

Maybe that could be it? Not enough authority in any one area and google is like “what’s this gobbledygook?”
 
Luke Neely said:
Something I did think of when reading your reply was my silo structure. It’s all setup and well organized but I think I may need to go deeper into each category?

Maybe that could be it? Not enough authority in any one area and google is like “what’s this gobbledygook?”
Click to expand...

Possibly. I've had it happen on multiple sites. Often with categories only having 3-10 posts each. There's no hard number, but demonstrating depth is a benefit, at least to a degree.

Sometimes, you can take it too far and have say hundreds of posts in 1 category. In cases like that, the solution is often sub-categories to build more coherent subjects. It's nice for the user too.

The question to ask yourself is how many posts do you think make sense for a category or sub-category?

In my mind at least, I feel like maybe a couple dozen is fairly good to flesh out a particular category (not including parent or sub-categories). Much beyond that, and for me at least, it just feels like I'm not being specific enough in my categorization.

giphy.gif

For example, no user wants to look at a wall of 99 posts or dozens of paginated pages on "Dog Costumes". Maybe, instead, if I see a sub-category like "Large Dog Costumes" I'll have better UX when trying to find a ridiculous one for a Saint Bernard. :D

Those are arbitrary numbers, so don't quote me on it! ;-) It'll depend on your niche and keyword coverage.

On the other side, I'll expand on what Ryuzaki mentioned about Google's ranking transitions. It's designed to drive you INSANE. Best response I've found so far is:
  • Keep cost overhead to a minimum (wait out the storm and bleed the competition dry)
  • Do the things you know to be right
  • Move confidently forward and don't look back
It'll take some time to develop confidence in knowing that what you think is right, is actually the right strategy. The main takeaway here is, the evil "G" is intentionally trying to sow the seeds of doubt. Don't let them!
 
Hey guys! Glad to be here.
We are proxy provider how already been on a market for couple years and stands strong on feet. Profitable company, trustable reputation and blah blah blah.
2018 was a good year for us, but I noticed that EU-US market slice - is a spot where we still have a lot of work to do. So that is our primary mission on 2019. I hope BuSo forum would be a great place where i can find some tricks and solutions for advertising and promotion of our biz.

Have a great day!
 
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Hello All,

I wanted to reach out and introduce myself to everyone. My name is El, and I am developing and implementing a business selling Saas. My focus will be on the Heavy Equipment based, industries/tertiary sectors. I have lurked for a while until now, because I am friends offline with several veteran members of the community. I intended to do a daily/weekly journal on here to talk about my process and progress. Mostly because i think it will be beneficial to the community, so others can learn from my mistakes and successes as well as keep myself accountable.
 
Interesting, @TechLee. I know someone who did the exact same thing, developing a project for the exact same industries. I believe he has/had a partner in it. Could it be you? Guy's name is Dan. Your journal will be great. This can be a huge business for someone who gets it right due to the massive cost of each item.
 
Samwise89 said:
Interesting, @TechLee. I know someone who did the exact same thing, developing a project for the exact same industries. I believe he has/had a partner in it. Could it be you? Guy's name is Dan. Your journal will be great. This can be a huge business for someone who gets it right due to the massive cost of each item.
Click to expand...

I would love to have a solid partner, but i am actually am doing this solo currently. However, I am employing services of a few people on the forum so in a way they are loosly like partners.
 
Hello everyone,

I signed up a long time ago, but this is my first post.

I started building websites back in 2007 when I was a student. I mostly used Wordpress, and built different types of sites: MFA, magazines, affiliate sites, informational blogs... It was nice pocket money, used to pay all my holidays and one of the sites even became an authority in its niche (lifestyle). My sites were bringing around 2-3k per month. Then I graduated from university and started working. It was never my goal to quit my job and earn a living from websites because I love my job (private banking) and having a salary allows you to borrow money to invest in real estate (I now own 4 flats that I rent out). Not to mention benefits such as car, health insurance, etc.

When my salary surpassed 3x my online income (3-4 years ago), I thought that it made no sense to continue spending time on websites. Furthermore, as you all know, the rules of the game have changed and the old approach doesn't work anymore. I didn't see any future for my main project, so I decided it was the right time to exit. Sold the site for low 6 figures and put other projects to sleep.

So why am I posting here? Well, my "problem" is that I have passions / interests / hobbies and I just love doing research on and sharing my thoughts with others (via a website - if I don't, I feel that all those hours of research go to waste). This is how I managed to bring the project I sold to the top 3 blogs worldwide level. I am also generally interest in entrepreneurship and online businesses so I want to stay up to date.

I launched a website around this new hobby end of 2018. So far only a couple of articles, but they literally take tens of hours of research each and are the most complete resources that have been written on this to date. With my day job, I can't allocate too much time to this project unfortunately.

In terms of monetization, this niche is very present on eBay. In a couple of years I would like to add an ecommerce component to the website (I am already doing some selling through eBay myself).

The goal for 2019 is to continue adding content, develop social media following (I am active on Instagram but need to leverage Pinterest & other channels as well), gather some emails, and build trust with Google. Any natural links will be welcome, so far the only link-building I'm doing is knowem type links.

The questions I have for my fellow builders at this point are:
- Anyone working with eBay affiliate? I used to earn quite a lot of money with this program back in the day using a plugin called phpBay and micro-niche sites. Any modern alternatives? Efficient strategies?
- What are you using today to build email lists? I always worked with MailChimp, are they still one of the best alternatives? I am looking for something slick and cost-efficient.
 
I'm glad you've decided to post with us!

Luxalpha said:
What are you using today to build email lists? I always worked with MailChimp, are they still one of the best alternatives? I am looking for something slick and cost-efficient.
Click to expand...

Sendy is pretty cool if you can manage the setup (I'm sure you can). It costs $60 and then links up with Amazon SES (simple email service) which costs a literal fraction of a fraction of the cost to mail with MailChimp once you exceed their free limit. One option if you're too married to MailChimp on a project is to let them collect the list and then export it out to Sendy for mailing.

Luxalpha said:
I launched a website around this new hobby end of 2018. So far only a couple of articles
Click to expand...

Are you seeing any search engine traction on these? With as much work as you're putting into each article, they sound perfect for places like Reddit, Facebook, Voat, and forums too.
 
Hey people,

New her but have been following the aff business for so long.

Few months ago I was about to join a company on Seo junior position, we couldn't agree on the terms so in the end I didn't join the company but re ignite the affiliate bug in me.

For what I being see I saw that there's some difference in the game, long are the times of only using EMD and some content to being money.

The picture I have right now of the game is this:

- the domain should be a brandable one.
- the text should be more focus on the user.
- the content silo is still the same, small (>1000 word) product review. A main post, top-5 for example, that would be our money post. Beside this type of content we should put also some more information about the products.
- the should be some social presence.

This idea I have about the game right now is correct? I'm a missing something?

I huge believer of not putting all eggs in the same basket, but nowadays the authority website is the way to go, right? Any of you guys are still profiting from small website? .

I appreciate any feedback. Looking forward to learn from you guys

Regards
 
Messed around in my teens and early 20's making little sites that did all the SEO tricks. Profits came and went. I never went all in on affiliate marketing and so I never really made a living from it. Always a focus on short term profit and quick results. Now in my mid-30's I regret wasting my time and cheap tricks when it was a lot easier and I had more energy to make a real business.

Now I have some time off and I want to make an authority site that brings in $3000-4000USD per month in profit from Amazon and display advertising. Am I too late? I know it takes 1.5-2+ years to reach that level, if it ever happens!

I used to work professionally as an SEO guy from about 2007 to 2013, but I burnt out and lost interest after that. I think I will have an advantage over someone who has never done SEO before, but I am sure I have a lot to learn.

I am hoping to devote 50% of my day to writing articles for the site and 50% of my time into learning to code in order to become a front-end web developer in the "real world". I cannot risk putting 100% of my time into building a site that might never take off!

Am I wasting my time trying to make an Amazon affiliate site in 2019 and beyond?
 
I don’t think it is too late. There is always an opportunity somewhere. Publishing isn’t going away, but how publishers make money is always evolving. You can’t just follow the herd. Doing what everyone else does will lead to the same outcome. And even if that works now, eventually the market gets saturated.

I do fear Amazon. I’m pretty sure that they don’t need affiliates. What value do we offer them that they can’t generate themselves? Good affiliates know how to help people choose the best product on Amazon. What happens when Amazon decides to include that on their site? In some respects they would be ostracizing some of their sellers, but they already have the “Amazon Recommends” label in many categories.

I think there is still money to be made, but I would also be thinking about what happens to your site if Amazon closes the affiliate program. How would you pivot? Or would you be ok with what you extracted from Amazon when the getting was good.

Every publication needs some form of R&D. Always try to push the envelope and try new stuff. Be a leader. Be a real business. Evolve and solve reader needs better than other publishers. Then there is money to be made.

It isn’t easy. Full disclosure, I’m not good at it, but I do see people here pushing the boundaries. They don’t reveal details (obviously) so their posts are cryptic, but you should try to think like them.

Be a real publishing business.
 
Hello, builders!

I've been reading this forum daily for a few months now, so I feel like the time has come to introduce myself.

Up to this point, I've been active only on reddit/r/juststart. Someone linked to BuSo a few months back, and I've been hooked since. I've read most of the lab case studies and both crash courses, and I must say that I'm really glad that I found this forum. I've gained so much these last few months.

Anyway, I'm new to affiliate marketing, and I started my first affiliate site in June 2018.

Before that, I had a small woodworking business, where we made wooden sunglasses. It was my first experience in business, but I didn't see too much value in continuing, as our product wasn't too different from hundreds of other manufacturers. I finally closed the business in May 2018 and through Reddit somehow stumbled on to AM, which I decided could be much more profitable. Not AM particularly, but it's a good starting point.

Fast forward today, the site is making around 200$/mo with 4000 uniques/mo, 27 articles, and 63000 words. I've been treating this as a side project up to 2019, but now I'm ready to push it to the next level.

I dedicated most of the December on taking a step back and doing all the stuff that I should have done at the start, which included:

Keyword research. I researched ideas for around 150 articles that could be viable and came up with 63 main keywords that I could rank fairly easy, and another 50 which will need some backlinks. I plan to publish around 80 of these articles until May 2019. These articles will cover only two silos and around 60% of the content will be informational.

Competitor research. In these main two silos, I have 15 main competitors, that I researched thoroughly (Article count, avg post length, Info/money post ratio, backlinking strategies, social presence, target audience, e.t.c.)

A quick overview of my competitors:
  • 5x Large competitors, that I will likely never outrank. (1m-10m monthly traffic)
  • 6x Medium competitors that I could eventually outrank, but only with several writers. (400k-1m monthly traffic)
  • 4x Affiliate sites that I could outrank fairly easy in two years (100k-400k traffic) All of them have the generic bad quality affiliate content, and I'm confident that three of them I will outrank fairly easy. The fourth one will not be that easy, but It can be done.
Target audience research and unique selling proposition. This came after doing extensive competitor research. Now I know who I am writing for and the site will be focused only on a small topic. Both of my silos are kind of related, but not really. By the way, my site is in a really popular and competitive niche.

Strategy for 2019. Pretty simple, really. Up to May-June 2019, I will be solely publishing content. (Goal is 60-100 articles). After that, I'll spend two or three months doing just outreach (Traffic leaking with controversial topics, Pinterest & Twitter, Quora, medium.com, niche forums, Reverse engineering links, infographics & tools ). And the last months of 2019 I will be splitting 60% of my time on writing and 40% on outreach. I believe that I can get to 50 000 monthly uniques by the end of 2019.

My goal with AM is to make enough money to buy a house in Spain in three years time. I need around 300 000 - 500 000$ to achieve this goal, so I need to push this site to 10k-20k/month revenue and sell it for 30x. Based on my experience and research, I'd say that it's possible.

I'll stop here because I plan on making a case study in the lab.

Regards, Online_wizz.
 
Sendy looks exactly what I need, thank you for the suggestion.

I'm starting to get some search engine traffic, but we're talking about just several visitors/day so far. Still, this is rather encouraging.

I wanted to have at least 5 nice pieces of content and email captures set up before leveraging forums and Reddit, I think this type of content should work well there if used not very aggressively.
 
@StartingAgain, The best time to have started is yesterday. There's always room for newcomers. And even if it takes 2 years for you to ramp up, in 2 years you'll be glad you did, or slapping yourself if you didn't. Of course, you can bypass all this by buying an established site, or get a head start by buying a non-dropped expired domain that has great links and possibly some content you can recover. That takes some capital though.

But all of that is coming from the viewpoint of someone focused 100% on SEO, which is a mistake. There are a lot of ways of getting traffic that aren't SEO but are some of the best ways to improve your SEO. The concept of Traffic Leaking is one, doing superb Social Media work is another, and also paying for promotions on any platform. All of those lead to you getting traffic, links, conversions, etc.

But no matter what you do, there should be an SEO angle or you're leaving a lot of free traffic on the table. The fundamentals are the most important or you'll sabotage yourself before you start. Make sure your niche selection and keyword research is on point. It's okay and even good if the niche is saturated, because that means there's money flowing in it. But don't start off going for the hardest keywords, you'll get no results. Find the easy ones with little competition and slide up in there and slowly go for harder and harder keywords as your link profile is built up.

It's never too late. Every single day, some hot shot is buying the best sites in the niches you want to go into and destroying them. I see it happen all the time. Niches are always cycling through sites coming and going and ones not evolving while newcomers do. It's never too late. And if you don't start your chances of having the reward is an assured zero percent.
 
@online_wizz, congrats on your success already. It sounds like your willingness to be meticulous is paying off. I'd venture to say you're already beating 80-90% of "SEO's" in terms of earnings. Most never make any money, just lose it.

Your plan sounds reasonable. You'll get a base of content up that you can then promote later. During that period of time where you just do outreach, save a handful of articles back so you can schedule them during that period so you don't have a huge dry spell where you don't publish at all.

You seem like you have a solid plan, and even plan to venture past just pure SEO in terms of promotion. There's not much to say other than good luck and I look forward to reading your case study thread. Just get 3 posts in and 3 likes and you'll be free to start that.
 
Ryuzaki said:
The concept of Traffic Leaking is one, doing superb Social Media work is another, and also paying for promotions on any platform. All of those lead to you getting traffic, links, conversions, etc.
Click to expand...

Does traffic leaking and social only give you traffic short term, or can you get enough of them that it becomes a steady, on-going source of traffic and conversions?
 
StartingAgain said:
Does traffic leaking and social only give you traffic short term, or can you get enough of them that it becomes a steady, on-going source of traffic and conversions?
Click to expand...

It's a snowball effect. Some leaks continue to give traffic, but most of the time it's a game of getting as many interested eyeballs on the page as you can. This leads to bloggers and journalist-types spreading your page to their fanbases, and then their fan-bloggers spread it more. In the meantime people are posting it to their social media profiles too. This lands you a ton of links and social shares that rank you and get you recurring SEO traffic.

Traffic leaking can directly bring recurring traffic. Like if you were to plant your link on highly ranked and traffic Quora questions and forum threads. Stuff like Reddit, if you hit the "top" posts of a sub-reddit you'll be there for a long time, and lots of people like to look at the top posts.
 
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