Introductions Thread

Hi guys!

I'm a project manager at a boutique agency that handles web designs and landing pages for small local businesses. After doing that for a while, I realized I don't want to be doing this for the rest of my life. I want to be able to look back at my life and think "Damn that was one hell of a ride" instead of "What did I do with my life?"

So now I'm working towards building a website right now.

I don't have amazing knowledge to drop like some of you superstars here, but I hope I can at least fit in with you guys. :smile:
 
Welcome aboard. Glad to have you.

So now I'm working towards building a website right now.

What are you thinking about in terms of build? Going for a big authority site? A smaller contained niche site? How will you monetize it?
 
Welcome aboard. Glad to have you.

What are you thinking about in terms of build? Going for a big authority site? A smaller contained niche site? How will you monetize it?

Thanks for the welcome. :smile:

Right now it's a smaller niche site, but the name can be taken to a big authority site. I wanted to be able to grow when I got to that point.

I'm going to be monetizing with Amazon right now, but I'm looking at other products to offer. I think I need to increase the traffic on my website before I'll be able to promote those though. I might put Adsense on articles that are more "fun" and not really pushing a product.
 
Hey Matt, nice to see you here! Always room for more web devs. You sound a bit like me in the programming dept. I started coding back in the 80s when I was 12 or so and it has been a passion I've been able to make a living with. Looking forward to hearing about your projects, especially the web dev aspect.

Thanks for the support! I appreciate it. What languages do you find yourself using most often these days?

I would 100% say that any action is better than no action or delayed action. Later on, not planning your moves may restrict your growth when you need to focus on "needle moving" activities. But at the beginning, you're better off planting a ton of seeds, so that you have some data to guide your decision making process. Sometimes you do have to throw shit at the wall so you can find out where the real target is. That's when you start planning carefully.



You'll find a lot of people here, specifically @CCarter, encouraging people to focus on one project at a time. Everything is far more competitive at this point, so splitting your attention and energy reduces every projects chances at success. Having 3 or 5 projects rocking and rolling might have the benefit of being able to look at which is doing the best so you know which to focus on. But in general, until you've found success and are outsourcing most of the work, narrowing your focus is going to increase your chances of getting where you want to be.



Yeah, if you're focusing on SEO exclusively, frequent checking of results in the first 6 months and even a year is going to disappoint you. That's what Google does. They demoralize spammers by delaying results for a long time, and it affects us all. If you want immediate results you have to jump into some active marketing on social media, outreach campaigns, and anything else that can send traffic now.

Glad to have you around. Sounds like you have experience, knowledge, and even a few launch pads to boost off of. I predict success in your future!

Thanks so much for the detailed reply! I agree that I need to focus on one project at a time, with my three sites I find myself spread too thin at the moment. I've been focusing most of my energy on just one of them, and it sounds like I should fully commit to that one at the moment.

Ahh thank you! A prediction of success from you means a lot to me! I just need to make sure I'm working consistently and I think being a part of this community will help to motivate me and keep me honest about my work habits.

Thanks for the warm welcome guys!
 
What languages do you find yourself using most often these days?

For the past 2 years I've been using Elixir (https://elixir-lang.org/) with the Phoenix Framework (http://phoenixframework.org/) and I'm pretty sure I'll be using this combo for the next 5 years at least. I'll use Go on occasion for command line utilities and anywhere I really need the speed.

Of course for Web Development there's no escaping JavaScript so I use that quite a bit on both the front-end and in certain cases the back-end, although I'm not really a fan of JS on the server-side. For front-end it's either Semantic UI or Vue.js with Vuetify (material design for Vue). For Sysadmin work, if I need something that wouldn't be elegant in Bash, I'll use Ruby or Go.
 
Hi, @Carrie Lee, how long have you been involved with internet marketing? Tell us more about yourself! Are you currently working on any projects? What kind? What are your past failures, future goals? Glad to have you around.
 
Greetings guys - finally got around to creating this intro thread.

While I'm not new to digital marketing (I work as an account manager for a UK agency) I am pretty green around the tactical elements.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting stuck-in with getting started on my first side hustle.

See you in the threads!
 
Welcome. Definitely post any time you have a problem or just want to talk shop. It's the reason we're all here! Glad to hear you're gearing up to add some more income to your life in a form that you control. It's well worth the effort.
 
I've been reading and got a lot of values in the last two months. I discovered this forums when I was searching for a fast WordPress Theme and found https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/buso-lightning-the-fastest-wordpress-theme.763/.

I have been online off and on for the past 10 years. I did found success in 2012 that lasted for 1 year until I was contacted by a company saying that I have their trademark in my domain. Which is true and I knew I will have to give it up. At the time I was involved with my other business (local storefront) so I just dropped the website altogether. I figured if I can do it once then I can do it again.

Well, I started it again but this time it's a lot harder. I am stuck at $200 per month for a year now.

I almost give up. I am so happy to have found this forum. Thank you everyone. I've been reading your journals and it's so inspirational to me. I want to comment on your treads but can't yet because I'm a newbie here.

I open the tread not to talk about me but to say: Thank you everyone and for this forum.
 
Yeah, that's the only problem with risky projects like ones you spam with backlinks for SEO or using a trademark in the domain to get easier rankings... once it goes sour there's really nothing you can do to salvage it. You can't 301 redirect the domain to a new clean one because all of the problems follow it. But it's nice earnings while it lasts.

I'm glad you found some value in BuSo Lightning!

You can most definitely bust the $200 barrier. The hard part is already done. It's a lot harder to go from $0 to $100 a month than it is to go from $100 to $200 or $200 to $500.

What kind of project is it? A content blog with Adsense or Amazon? An ecommerce site? Shopify and PPC? Let us know more and I'm sure we can all spit some ideas at you and help out best we can.
 
$200 per month almost certainly puts you in the top 0.1% of all people that try and play this game. This forum has all the knowledge that you need to 10x or 100x that number, if you're willing to put in the work. Welcome!
 
Yo bro, you can follow my log in the Laboratory setting. I began at less than $100 less than a year ago and now I'm at $600. I'm not balling, but just to show you how easy it is to break through those imaginary barriers if you have faith and do the program as told here.
 
What kind of project is it? A content blog with Adsense or Amazon? An ecommerce site? Shopify and PPC? Let us know more and I'm sure we can all spit some ideas at you and help out best we can.

It's a content blog with a CPA offer. I had Adsense and CPA together before but I dropped Adsense about 6 months ago because I slow down my website and I was thinking that it's somehow was affecting my ranking.

But I was reading here about Auto Ad and thinking about giving it a try.

My main source of traffic, well, my only source of traffic is SEO. And it's mostly from Google.

I made some much changes and tests that I tanked the site a few times. I did what Cash Builder did here: https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/journal-–-building-an-authority-site.2714/post-36750

But even worse, I changed it to a subdomain. And it tanked, I panicked and reverted back to original. I didn't wait the 90 days as CCarter advised.

Lucky within a little over a week my rankings started to come back.

Anyways, reading Cash Builder's journal helps me a lot. It explained so many things that happens with that test. I now only test one page at a time.

I feel there are two things that get me stuck.

1. I am impatient and SEO required it. Every little thing I do on my website, I have to wait weeks and I get lazy.

2. It's related to lazy. I hate writing so I don't add much content.
I noticed that everyone here mentioned how they kept on adding content while they are waiting for all the SEO stuff to kick in. That's what I need to do. This forum gave me a lot of awesome ideas already but I just need to implement it.

Thank you so much all of you. And thank you to Mod for moving my thread to the proper location. I didn't see the Intro Thread when I posted.

$200 per month almost certainly puts you in the top 0.1% of all people that try and play this game. This forum has all the knowledge that you need to 10x or 100x that number, if you're willing to put in the work. Welcome!
You are right. I do see this forum with so much knowledge. It's amazing that it's free. Stuff on here are golden. I saw courses that selling for $97 or more even in the $997 that doesn't even come close the the values of this forum.

And you are right again, I have to willing to put in the work. I will. Thank you. I am very motivated with this kind of support. It has been a lonely 10 years for me.

Yo bro, you can follow my log in the Laboratory setting. I began at less than $100 less than a year ago and now I'm at $600. I'm not balling, but just to show you how easy it is to break through those imaginary barriers if you have faith and do the program as told here.
Congrats on your success. I will follow your thread. I hope this is the right one.
https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/the-re-up-starting-over-smarter-and-better.3183/

I hope soon I will able to post on your thread.
 
2011 - Newbie
I bought my mother an iPad. Before she knew nothing about computers. And now she's legit addicted to Facebook / 3-hour toilet sessions with Angry Birds. :surprised: I can make Money with this. Digital Marketing is where the $$$ is at.

2012 - Black Hat
I quit my IT job and went straight to black hat SEO. I built a 100 large PBN network, 40 niche sites, and 5 VPN's with GSA. Joined the Terry Kyle Traffic Hacks forum and learnt "always experiment" and I enjoyed Jacobs Kings "No fucks given SEO".
BLACK HAT WORKS.

Early 2013 - Grey Hat
During this time, NoHatSEO were my heroes. I did 2 traineeships with them and worked on Niche website. Their keyword research and other techniques are insane. I made more niche and ticket sites. I hired writers from oDesk and tried to rank sites with sheer content. GREY HAT WORKS. Of course, I did a lot of domaining. I got a CCCarter SerpWoo grandfather account (I am a fanboy with heaps of "easter egg" keywords).

Late 2014 - White Hat
During this time, BlackhatSEO was on its way out (I say that in jest). So I wanted to learn White Hat and I let my entire network expire. I joined a white hat SEO firm and learnt technical seo. Canonicals. Crawling. Screaming Frog. Robots.txt. I also learnt "client management". Don;t worry, you'll rank. Probably!

2015 - CRO
Traffic with no conversion is pointless. Spent a long time doing CRO. Copywriting.

2016 - CRO
I fell in love with Loganix. I gave up SEO. Said hello to AdWords PPC. SEO is dead.2018

2018
Hello SEO! I am now mastering niche knowledge. I still do SEO. Aka... No more best spinner. Just a beer and hand-written spintax.

NOW
I'm looking for buddies to hang out with while I write niche relevant spintax. I hope that Adam Steel will read this and give me a phat discount with his services. SEO now is "throw money at it" and wait.... and make sure your landing pages are really good. And overpay Google AdWords. I hope to find vendors to help me with my marketing needs.

FUTURE
I would like to find hardcore people to make me work harder. I really enjoyed the Terry Kyle Forums. I was told this forum was the best :smile: Let's look for "marketing hacks" together!
 
Great timeline, similar path I took, starting with mass spam once I realized I couldn't possibly generate real backlinks for the 30 micro-niche sites I had built. I moved on to PBNs, and ultimately ended up at White Hat Authority Sites, because I got sick of the demoralization of losing your assets (even when expected).

I've used hand spun spintax with %variable% ad-lib content filled by custom field data and CSV uploads, mixed with maps and locations and all of that, it works well. I didn't do 1000 words of spintax, but maybe 50-100. It reads perfect if you put the proper attention to building the spintax. This was back in my database site days. I actually still have one live that I don't pay attention to that brings in a surprise $300 once in a blue moon. I need to hit it with some links, it's on the verge.

Thanks for the detailed intro, looking forward to interacting with you around the forum.
 
Stumbled in here from WF years ago! I stepped away from my affiliate business for a few years (my sites still pulling in some steady income though) and I'm back! Ready to rock the last half of 2018!

About me:

Started affiliate marketing back in 2003, started with some PPC ads on Overture (anyone remember that?)
Made roughly $6m in affiliate commissions since then
Affiliate marketing allowed me to pursue my real passion .... real estate investing

Ready to get back in the game boys and girls, so hola amigos!
 
Oooh boy. $6M in commissions. Very nice. PPC blows the lid off of scaling if you can balance the net-30 and net-60 payment dates with the expenses. Asking for faster payments is key, I'm sure.

Glad to have another veteran around. My experience in PPC is so small. I need to have the nuts to just go for it, buy the data, optimize, and laugh my way to the bank.

I'm all ears if you have things to share on that topic around the forum. It's something we could all benefit from, no matter the project, really.
 
Oooh boy. $6M in commissions. Very nice. PPC blows the lid off of scaling if you can balance the net-30 and net-60 payment dates with the expenses. Asking for faster payments is key, I'm sure.

Glad to have another veteran around. My experience in PPC is so small. I need to have the nuts to just go for it, buy the data, optimize, and laugh my way to the bank.

I'm all ears if you have things to share on that topic around the forum. It's something we could all benefit from, no matter the project, really.

I'm happy to answer any questions. Yes PPC is a bit risky but when you find a winner that scales out the sky is the limit really. Balancing the Net 30 is easy once you start scaling, most of the time the companies you're working for start drooling over the number of sales rolling in and will work with you.
 
Depending on the company, you can get Net 7 terms too. If not Net 7, it can be something faster than their standard.

The key to the whole thing is volume.

In some regards, it is sometimes better to break even to achieve high volume, than to profit with low volume.

With the higher volume, you can ask for faster payouts, higher payouts, exclusivity, and more. Those added advantages then give you a moat around competitors and turn your break even campaign into a profitable one. 2 for 1, sometimes even 3 or 4 for 1.

You end up much better than someone lower on the totem pole with less volume, but a profitable campaign.

.
 
I occasionally lurk around BUSO and figured it about time I registered and contributed once and a while :tongue:

I specialize in outreach and I'm sure many of you have seen my partner, Steve Brownlie, posting here for years.

Looking forward to some cool discussions and improving my weak areas!

Also, please vote in my poll for a funny result.
 
Welcome to the club. I appreciate all of the work your team does in getting us some great links.

Do you have an interesting history in marketing (online or offline)? Are you working on any projects currently, unrelated to your service? I'd love to hear about them.
 
I’m working my way through your 24 hours of SEO for charity on your YouTube show. Lots of great interviews, I’m surprised that your guests gave away so many of their secrets.
 
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