Introductions Thread

Welcome, @wooTang. Glad to have you and your vast experience and knowledge on board. Looking forward to interacting with you through out the forum.

What are you working on these days?
 
Welcome, @wooTang. Glad to have you and your vast experience and knowledge on board. Looking forward to interacting with you through out the forum.

What are you working on these days?

Thank you for the welcome. Currently my biggest project is an in-house comprehensive client portal. This provides a dashboard where SEO/webdev clients are able to view all statistics and information about their sites and ads in realtime (or close enough,) send support tickets or live chat with me via messagebox/browser-enabled VOIP, securely send and receive documents, use their CMS panel, and manage billing and every other aspect of whichever service(s) the client gets from my firm.

None of the other dashboard/portal solutions I found had exactly what I wanted, so I figured the easiest way to achieve my ideal system was to start from the ground up. Much easier for everyone in the long run than convoluted email and SMS chains.
 
Hello!

Made an account here a while ago and wanted to introduce myself. I'm in my early twenties from a small country in Europe. In real life, I don't have anyone to discuss marketing with, so these communities of like-minded people mean a lot to me.

I stumbled upon internet marketing one year ago. My main focus is growing my authority site, currently receiving ~120,000 sessions per month. It is monetized with display ads, making ~2,000$/month. These days I'm working on list building and improving monetization (besides adding more content). Down the road I plan to build a portfolio of authority sites.

Thank you for making this forum, reading here is a feast for my brain.
 
Welcome, and hello from a large country in the United States. It is a great idea to diversify monetization if the sites can be truly designated as authority in their niche Selling ads could potentially end up as a minor revenue source if you can squeeze in CPA/affiliate content. May your growth be exponential.
 
Hey all,

Pleasure to be joining you here. I have been a member of the reddit /r/juststart community for a year or two now, but it's increasingly infested with noobs. So far I'm amazed with the quality of posts here and the credentials of those posting them.

As for a little backstory, I'm 22 based in Central Europe. I believe I launched my first affiliate site around 4-5 years ago - about supplements - and made a total of around $30 in Amazon Associates commissions over the course of a year. I didn't really understand SEO at the time so my articles were super short (400-500 words) and poorly-targeted. To make up for that, I'd go and spam them all over reddit. I can't remember why I stopped building the site but I'm pretty sure I just let the domain and hosting expire.

Welp, I got back into building content sites about two years ago, after a few other minor failures in various niches (print on demand T-shirts, anyone?). I built a site about a fringe medical topic - clearly not learning my lesson from the supplements site. I was able to get it up to decent traffic (500-1000 users a day) within 6 months, but it was impossible to monetize. I've slowly let that site die as a competitor plagiarizes it.

Moving towards the more successful present, I started my first project which could be described as "successful" back in December 2019. I picked up an expired domain, chucked a buyer's guide on it, and watched as in March 2020, I made my first $100 on Amazon. This proof of concept was incredible, so I doubled down, and since then I've added over 200 articles to the site. I'm still getting a feel for mixing commercial content (X vs Y, best of X) with info content, but I feel like I'm finally gaining traction. I'm making low-to-mid four figures a month, with just 30k-ish sessions.

Anyway, this is all super exciting for me and I see so much scope to scale. Currently, the main things I'm looking into are analyzing and updating old content and link building. There are some keywords in my niche which look relatively profitable that I haven't been ranking for, so I'm finally tracking them and introducing small on-page changes (content optimization with Surfer, internal linking, images, etc) to see how that moves the needle. Also starting to work on link building (I feel like the expired domain I am using has been extremely valuable), both on my own and hopefully with buying some links.

I'm grateful to be joining you all. My initial goal is to hit $10k a month, although I'm 90% sure I'll get there this year unless search/affiliate circumstances change dramatically. With that in mind, and in light of the SEO big dicks on this forum, I think $15-20k/mo would be a relatively ambitious goal for this year, and hopefully $40-50k+ within two or three years. I've got to make sure I'm always grinding, though - I get pretty lazy sometimes.

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Sounds like you're in a similar situation to me! One day I hope to meet other affiliate marketers and online entrepreneurs in my city, but for now, Reddit's /r/juststart and BuSo will have to do.

How many articles do you have on your site? I'm tempted to do an ad-focused website for my next project.

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Interesting analogy @phung. I'm still relatively new to internet marketing but I've chosen the path of building my own assets (sites) over building an agency for the same reasons you mention.

I think the key to scaling an agency is - like you say - building the processes that enable others to do work. Then you simply delegate out the bulk of the work and focus on working on the business instead of in it.

Also, based on my experience as a freelance writer, I would say that excessive meetings is a client issue, and not something specific to the agency model. You might be able to reduce back-and-forth by setting clearer expectations of what reports clients can expect when, and firing difficult clients.

I was looking at @Ryuzaki's link building service (see his signature), which one might compare to an agency. It's interesting to see some of these ideas in play. He has an update from December 17th:
You guys have kept us busy, so much so that we had to take the time to improve our processes. We revisited our operating procedures, created more detailed training videos, and brought on more employees to help us build out these killer Boosts.
He's not out building links himself - he's creating training videos to enable his personnel.

Also, clients play by his rules:
• Turn Around Time: Please allow 30 days for the work to be completed. Please don't check in with us before that amount of time has elapsed. The answer will be the same every time: "Please allow 30 days for the work to be completed". It may be faster, but expect around a month. Allow around 6 weeks typically from delivery for the maximum effect in the SERPs to take place.
I'm not trying to convince you to grow your agency, @phung, but based on my limited experience, I'm wondering if taking a step back could help you to run your business smarter?
 
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Welcome, and hello from a large country in the United States. It is a great idea to diversify monetization if the sites can be truly designated as authority in their niche Selling ads could potentially end up as a minor revenue source if you can squeeze in CPA/affiliate content. May your growth be exponential.
Thanks for the welcome!

Diversification is important, especially with the cookies going away next year. Ad management companies are working on new technologies though, I hope it won't influence ad revenue much. But it is not wise to make plans based on hopes, so it is high time to come up with alternative revenue sources. It's an exciting time for sure.

Sounds like you're in a similar situation to me! One day I hope to meet other affiliate marketers and online entrepreneurs in my city, but for now, Reddit's /r/juststart and BuSo will have to do.

How many articles do you have on your site? I'm tempted to do an ad-focused website for my next project.
It is great that we can connect online. 342 articles, around 490,000 words in total, as of now. I plan to grow it at least to a thousand posts in the next few years. Ad income is nice once you get accepted into premium ad networks. Content publishing is a great business model in my opinion.
 
Interesting analogy @phung. I'm still relatively new to internet marketing but I've chosen the path of building my own assets (sites) over building an agency for the same reasons you mention.

I think the key to scaling an agency is - like you say - building the processes that enable others to do work. Then you simply delegate out the bulk of the work and focus on working on the business instead of in it.

Also, based on my experience as a freelance writer, I would say that excessive meetings is a client issue, and not something specific to the agency model. You might be able to reduce back-and-forth by setting clearer expectations of what reports clients can expect when, and firing difficult clients.

I was looking at @Ryuzaki's link building service (see his signature), which one might compare to an agency. It's interesting to see some of these ideas in play. He has an update from December 17th:

He's not out building links himself - he's creating training videos to enable his personnel.

Also, clients play by his rules:

I'm not trying to convince you to grow your agency, @phung, but based on my limited experience, I'm wondering if taking a step back could help you to run your business smarter?
1000% both of you guys are correct. I definitely appreciate the feedback.

It's funny you say that about dialing back.

That's exactly what I've done at the beginning of this year.

I cut the 2 biggest main clients because of the time and energy that it really took to build their projects. One being a successful MLMer and the other in the entertainment business so... these 2 industries come with a lot of baggage that I really didn't sign up for but maintained for 3 years lol.

But by cutting those clients, I was able to address my issue and will soon have someone that I'm able to hire for a smaller fee but allow them bigger cut of the projects that will come in.

That's what allowed me to invest into a mentorship and jump into forums like these.

Pretty much take myself out of the fulfillment side of things little by little.

If the agency scales organically then great but I would rather work on my own assets instead of someone else's now ya know?
 
@tomer, welcome aboard. Glad to have you here. You're obviously serious and smart and focusing on what works.

You can absolutely hit $10k a month and beyond. Zero question about it. Just keep the conveyer belt chugging along. There's no reason you can't have writers, editors, formatters, and quality assurance team members doing all that grindy work for you. Then you can focus on the optimization stuff.

Expiring domains with great links can absolutely help, but only for so long before you dilute the power of the links you have and end up needing more. It's a big time saver at the start, letting you focus on publishing for a while. It's definitely my preference these days.

Looking forward to you joining in other discussions around the forum now that you have free reign!
 
That's great results already.

I'm also a huge believer in making the most of the traffic you have. I have similar earnings pr. visitor as you, for some sites.

It's all about tweaking the content and methods to provide the absolute most earning pr. visitor.

When you get your EPV up as high as that, then you can also really dig into the long tails and make it worth targeting those keywords that are too small for others, but you do that after you proved you could earn.
 
Welcome to the board.

Great job on making the big step into 4 figures monthly. Capitalizing on your time. Huge achievement!

I was doing commission sites back in like 2008 and stopped, got into PPC......... It's amazing to hear these stories of commission sites still going strong.

I dont have time to do these sites now but I love to see how people are thriving in them!
 
Not sure how I missed the introductions section for so long, but anyway, here's my intro.

I've been running niche websites for years now, and right now I generate around $5k in Amazon commissions on a typical month. I was coasting for years though content with my income, and it was the lockdown that woke me up and start seriously thinking about financial security and what not.

So over the last year I've been mainly focused on diversification and reducing my dependency on Amazon, especially with last year's cuts in commissions. I've started adding more informative articles and monetizing my websites with Ezoic, which now account for a significant chunk of my income. I guess I'm still very much dependent on Google though, so going forward I'd like to acquire some social traffic too.

Before I started affiliate marketing I was making good money dropshipping, but I quit after a couple of years realizing I didn't want to be flipping random stuff from China for the rest of my life. However, more recently I've starting exploring some non-Aliexpress Ecommerce stuff as there's obviously a ton of opportunities in this space.

I've lurked Buso for a while now, the forum seems fairly slow but it's nice not having to sift through bs. I recently purchased links from @SerpWolf on legiit and found them to be miles ahead of the stuff I was seeing on BHW and similar, so I'll definitely be checking out some of the other offers on the marketplace.

Anyway, nice to be a part of this community, I feel like actually engaging with people doing similar stuff is something I should have done a lot earlier in my journey!
 
Welcome from a fellow 2019 newb to this board. The Amazon cuts were brutal, I couldn't imagine staying in for what it took the Amazon affiliate lifers to sustain (or even barely meet) the revenues they were used to. There are better networks and deals out there that give us sweat-and-blood soaked web marketers the proper share we deserve.

I also definitely resonate with being dependent on Google. In addition I use ad networks such as BuySellAds. Google remains the god of the web, though, and we must appease it.
 
Hello guys, here is my intro
Nice to meet you all here and hope to learn a lot with you guys in this journey

I am Malaysian and working at Singapore now,
I realized that they are a lot of opportunities at the online world and started to explore since Mar 2020

I am now handling some projects and planning to build my first company
so that I can have the capacity to give my family more and a better life
Thank you so much for reading this, would like to know this platform and you guys more :smile:
 
Hi Grace, welcome to the forum!

What sort of company are you planning to build? Any big lessons you've learned in your first year, or things that you've struggled with?

You've found a very helpful community and many of us can relate to your ambitions of providing a better life for your family. It's good to have you on board!

----

Heya, welcome lurker. C'est bon, ici :smile:

How is Ezoic working out for you? If you're pulling in enough traffic, it might be worth it to check out AdThrive or Mediavine, too. Have you tried Ezoic Premium? The whole idea of it is a little strange to me still, but it gave me a nice boost nonetheless.
 
Heya, welcome lurker. C'est bon, ici :smile:

How is Ezoic working out for you? If you're pulling in enough traffic, it might be worth it to check out AdThrive or Mediavine, too. Have you tried Ezoic Premium? The whole idea of it is a little strange to me still, but it gave me a nice boost nonetheless.
Hey Potatoe, Ezoic is working out quite nicely for me. I keep reading about this Ezoic Premium thing, but it seems it is invite-only and I've been with Ezoic for around 2 months and haven't heard anything about it.

As for AdThrive and Mediavine, I always hear good things about them. One of my sites borderline qualifies for Mediavine's 50k session requirement, but I haven't applied yet. I have built up quite a few affiliate sites that are getting around something like 25k traffic, instead of 1 or 2 with really solid traffic, so I should probably focus on scaling them more so I have more choices with ad platforms.
 
Hey everyone!

I joined this forum at the start of this year. Prior to this, I didn't even know a community like this existed! It's great to have found you all.

I didn't have any experience with SEO and affiliate marketing. I still don't but I've learned a lot and love learning the ins and outs, what I can better, what I shouldn't keep doing, etc. This forum has been very helpful. I personally view a lot of the "laboratory" use cases and watching the YouTube videos of users on here.

I'm currently working on my first blog. I have been writing around 60% of the posts and outsourcing the other 40%. My goal is to get to 100 posts by the end of the year. I also want to add affiliate marketing (possibly along with ads) and make it profitable by the end of this year.

Cheers!
 
Welcome, @TotoMuffinMan. Work smart, work hard, keep it simple, think outside the box, be persistent, and you'll do fine. I would try to get past 100 posts well before the end of the year. It's only mid-March! I guess it does depend on the complexity of the content, but it's doable either way. Don't sell yourself short. And don't forget link-building since you're doing SEO. Best of luck and catch you around the forum.
 
Thanks for the warm welcome and for the tips! Will definitely be doing some link-building in the coming months.
 
Hi guys, I am new here. I found this forum through a very specific Google search and I am glad I am now part of this community :smile: It seems like you have great thread discussions here that can help me in my marketing career.
See you around!
 
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Hi BuSo. Another new joiner here, from the UK, just wanted to say hello and introduce myself.

Me, I'm a developer, and I've been keen to grow a successful side project since.... well.. for ever. I'm not new to the tech side of creating websites, or trying to dream up an amazing app idea, but I am new to the idea of growing websites as assets.

I've been poking around for a few years, writing a personal blog. I also sell an ebook with the blog, but the income from that is just pocket-money, definitely nothing life-changing. (Selling is the part that I'm not that good at, yet.)

I always assumed that the right approach was to build a personal brand, find your 1,000 true fans and sell products. But I always felt that middle part was missing. I had an awakening last year, when I was reading r/JustStart and saw not only how much money people are making with content sites + display ads, but how much these sites can potentially be sold for. I felt daft for ignoring something so simple for so long. Then I went down the rabbithole of discovering Jon Dykstra, Income School, Authority Hacker, Matt Giovanisci....

Like a lot of people, Lockdown has given me a lot more time at home. In November I decided to just start something, and focus on it. So I've been working on an authority site in my domain (programming/tech). It's on track to hit 4,000 visitors this month. I'd like to put something up in the Laboratory soon to track progress. It would be an ideal side-business for me, to try to grow a second income stream from my day job.

Of course none of my friends and family are into this, so I've nobody to talk about it with, or be inspired by. I was so happy to land on this forum (great, a forum! not a Slack or a Discord or a Subreddit!). Looking forward to contributing and learning.
 
Thanks for joining and introducing yourself, @Ceefax

So I've been working on an authority site in my domain (programming/tech). It's on track to hit 4,000 visitors this month. I'd like to put something up in the Laboratory soon to track progress.
Very nice progress. I'd love to see you journal about it in the Lab, too. In programming and tech, the traffic is there but so are a lot of ad blockers and low ad rates. Your experience with product creation and selling will serve you well here, providing a much higher ROI than some other methods. Even affiliate commissions (in tech anyways) tend to be very low like 2%.

Anyways, glad to have you around!
 
Welcome to the board and Good luck. Having digital assets is no longer a 'good idea' to me. It's a must for anyone who wants a 10 & 20 year future
 
Hello, @SEOResort. If you were searching that term, you must be into the spammier side of things? How is that working out for you? I did that maybe 8-10 years ago and could make it work but inevitably it came crashing down enough times that I gave it up. Churning and burning in that fashion just wasn't for me.
 
Yay a programmer who can write.

Look forward to your victory lap AMA later.
That would be nice! We shall see. My experience is that I can "build the stuff", but my business chops need more training.

Very nice progress. I'd love to see you journal about it in the Lab, too. In programming and tech, the traffic is there but so are a lot of ad blockers and low ad rates.
Thanks. Yep, you're absolutely right. A lot of my colleagues use ad blockers, blockers like NextDNS, or run a PiHole. The developer audience is a bit different.

Your experience with product creation and selling will serve you well here, providing a much higher ROI than some other methods. Even affiliate commissions (in tech anyways) tend to be very low like 2%.
My goal is to grow the traffic & authority first, and think about monetisation later, but I expect that display ads would be part of a mix. There are other sites in my niche which use display ads and sell their own digital products, so I think it can be done.

I'm glad I already created a product, and learned a lot by doing. But, it took me way too long to create it, and the ROI hasn't been great. I can definitely improve on that, and bring my learnings from that into this new project.

Welcome to the board and Good luck. Having digital assets is no longer a 'good idea' to me. It's a must for anyone who wants a 10 & 20 year future
Thanks! Agree with that.
 
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