Introductions Thread

Hello everybody! :smile:

My name is Alex, I am 20 years old and I currently live in the Czech Republic.

I work in online marketing (mostly SEO, PPC, UX, and project management) for the last three years as a freelancer with a small team of VAs, but I would like to start building something on my own, and I like the idea of niche websites, etc. I’ve been thinking about getting into it last two years but never had enough time to do so, mostly because of the college.

But now I want to take this seriously as my long-term goal is to be able to retire at the age of 25 (not saying I will retire - I just want to have enough money by then that I will have peaceful life). To do so, I have to start building my assets and removing my time vs. made money.

I am a big overthinker. I analyze everything, read tons of articles, etc. before I get into anything. That’s why I bought an established website, so I am forced to start and do the job!

How I want to grow my portfolio:

1. website - established website with gear reviews
  • Already has 10k unique monthly visitors from US/UK/CA
  • The site is 4 years old, wasn’t updated for 3 years now
  • Design and on-page SEO is super poor, and the previous owner monetized the website only with AdSense
My plan to continue: redesign the website (new theme, new design, site architecture, SSL, updates…), improve on-page SEO (titles, descriptions, 404s, etc.), monetize the website with affiliate and create new content with high commercial intent. Do some link building.

My struggles: I want to probably rebuild the whole website with Elementor + GeneratePress theme. I like that I have complete freedom with Elementor, and since I don’t want to use ads as my primary income source, I think it should be fine. But I am worried about losing rankings because of all these changes. I will have to do this very carefully and don't mess it up.

2. website - general gaming blog
  • Monetized primarily with ads
  • Starting on a fresh domain from zero
  • I will focus on low competition long-tail keywords and will try different sub-niches to see what sticks
  • I don't want to focus too much on link building (basically what I want to do is a Jon Dykstra's approach), but I think I will need to build some links to accelerate the website on the beginning.
  • I have deep experience with gaming niche, most of my clients are from this niche
I went through some threads in this forum, and it seems to be a very nice, friendly, and helpful environment to be in. That's why I want to start my blog here, so I can keep track of all updates and get feedback from someone else more experienced.

Thanks a lot. I can't wait for this journey!
Have a beautiful day,
Alex
 
Welcome aboard. Great intro, thanks for taking the time.

alwicz said:
My plan to continue: redesign the website (new theme, new design, site architecture, SSL, updates…), improve on-page SEO (titles, descriptions, 404s, etc.), monetize the website with affiliate and create new content with high commercial intent. Do some link building.
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I wouldn't do anything that's a vanity type of thing, like redesigning the site, recreating the site architecture, or changing the design unless they're simply horrible. Otherwise all you'll do is disrupt your rankings, especially if you start throwing in 301 redirects as you restructure the site. A site redesign can cause this too.

The only goal here is to make money. I wouldn't disrupt that. But adding SSL compliances, speed optimizations, etc... all of that's fine if it doesn't upset the source code or move URLs to new locations with redirects.

What I would do is go through the on-page optimization and fix that up and add interlinking if needed.

alwicz said:
My struggles: I want to probably rebuild the whole website with Elementor + GeneratePress theme. I like that I have complete freedom with Elementor, and since I don’t want to use ads as my primary income source, I think it should be fine. But I am worried about losing rankings because of all these changes. I will have to do this very carefully and don't mess it up.
Click to expand...

If you rebuild with Elementor, you're going to be burning up time and not really gaining anything out of it other than causing Google to have to recrawl and re-process your source code to understand the changes. This will affect your rankings, without a doubt.

If you really just have to for whatever reason, rebuilding with Gutenberg would be the move. It doesn't change the HTML structure barely at all on the user-facing side. And there's plenty of blocks you can download now that'll help you add design elements that'll satisfy you. It'll be faster too in terms of speed optimization.

My main point with all the above is that there are better ROI things you can do that'll get you to the break even point and into profit with your purchased site faster, versus doing things that are undoubtedly going to move you backwards and slow down your progress in the SERPs to some degree.

alwicz said:
I don't want to focus too much on link building (basically what I want to do is a Jon Dykstra's approach), but I think I will need to build some links to accelerate the website on the beginning.
Click to expand...

I like Jon's approach too, but it's not as simple as "don't build links, just publish content for zero competition search terms." He did lots of paid promotion on social media that gained him a lot of exposure and links. That approach works for him now because he already has a boat load of links to his site. It won't work on a brand new domain in the way it's described. You have to have page rank flowing into your site, for sure.
 
Hello Everyone

Just wanted all of you to know that this is by far the cleanest forum i have found.
Nevertheless I found this forum through it's laboratory and i immediately wanted to join, so this is the first time that i joined any forum in an instant.

So Far So Good Right!

Now about me...

I am a WordPress & Shopify Designer turned Marketing Professional.
So the journey started around 3.6 years ago when i was taken to work on a WordPress based website that was a friend's website but i started liking the thing i was doing so i explored about WordPress that year and still do but now i am providing website design services to others, later i got involved in dropshipping and made some money and when i found out about the demand i started a side project of Selling Dropshipping Website, now i provide ReadyMade Dropshipping Stores through that channel in addition to custom works.
And since all websites in the end connected with marketing aspect i started exploring options in marketing and got a good grasp in FB ads and Google Ads, so i introduced marketing with both models and added my friend to the team who does SEO and other one who do Graphics. And that's how my journey to establishing a Web Agency Started, it's still in early stages and at the time we do freelancing and white-label service for other agencies.

And in search of my hunger for knowledge i have landed here and it's been a good start. Let's see how it goes.

I would love to share my knowledge with you guys too and to know you.
 
Hello!

I'm a web design freelancer trying to expand my business and also looking for a good niche site to start. I believe I've found a niche needing web design that is not very saturated, with the main market being business owners of that niche. It's a huge industry too, around 500-800 billion, although search volume for related web design keywords are low, so I think the angle here is to reach out to business owners directly.

I went ahead and bought <niche>design.com, and <niche>.page since it was available.

I want to rank well for providing web design services for that niche, but since I also have <niche>.page, I'm wondering which domain to use. I think I could eventually expand <niche>.page into an informational or news site about the niche and in the meantime redirect it to <niche>design.com, but it's also such a good URL imo that I'm wondering if I should just use it as the primary promotional site and have <niche>design.com redirect to it.

Would love any opinions or advice!
 
Many years ago when I started out in design, I did the same as you appear to be talking about. The equivalent of your <niche>design.com site was my business site and, at the same time, I created a <niche> informational site on the other domain.

It worked well for me as potential clients noticed the <niche> page in the search results and I could offer a featured placement as part of my unique selling points. It also worked as proof that I could create a 'proper' site that ranked for a search term that for them was seen as competitive.

I'm not 100% sure it would work as well these days - I think if you were going to do that you would need to supplement it with the major social media sites, especially with regard to current news, images and video.

I agree with using the .com as your main business site.
 
@haksxsx, Welcome to the forum. Sounds like a nice operation you have going with a lot of skilled people involved. Have you had a chance to use any free time within the company to produce any assets for yourself? I always thought that if I owned an agency I'd fill free time with private projects and let them continually improve them.
 
Hi Ryuzaki, thanks for the great feedback!

I had to think about it, and I will follow your advice. Making a complete redesign scares me, so I will rather avoid it.

Anyway, this will be a lot of fun since the theme is four years old and no longer supported by the developer. The customization options are almost nonexisting, and the theme optimization is very poor.

I will make only little adjustments for the old content, but I still want to use Elementor for new pages. It shouldn't do any damage on new pages, right? I want to go with Elementor because I can play around with CRO etc.

Ryuzaki said:
I like Jon's approach too, but it's not as simple as "don't build links, just publish content for zero competition search terms." He did lots of paid promotion on social media that gained him a lot of exposure and links. That approach works for him now because he already has a boat load of links to his site. It won't work on a brand new domain in the way it's described. You have to have page rank flowing into your site, for sure.
Click to expand...

Yeah, definitely. I will need to build some links on the beginning to make things rolling.
 
So after 5 years of lurking, figured it was time to post and say hi.

About Me: I have been living in the Philippines for a little over 4 years now. I run a content biz with both office and remote staff. I also am into local lead gen (via call only ads) and run a small handful of content sites.

Looking forward to contributing to the convos and making that internet money.
 
Welcome, @MassivelyPassive. I used to do lead gen with pay per call ads. It was incredibly lucrative when I was ranking in the addiction niches. I sold the sites and not too long after Google started cracking down on those niches, not only in the SERPs but with Adwords too. It was good timing to cash out. I tried again later but the competition was so much more stiff. I should have switched to PPC but I moved on to building content-based authority sites.

When you say "content biz" do you mean that you sell content?
 
The idea of having multiple low paid writers working on the same article scares me a bit, in that it would take alot more time to edit it with repeated sections etc I guess this comes down tot quality of the plan

Ive started using tools to outline the page content for me (think surfer & POP type tools) that will show word count, LSI keywords etc and then also copying good examples from other sites, telling the writers they can use the same content but to rewrite it - its a fairly quick way to get the content brief written and then after the fact I can go back through it to tweak as needed
 
Thank you all for the advice!

Based on the posts from @Stones and @ToffeeLa I will be using <niche>design.com for the business site promoting my services and then build out <niche>.page to rank for news/guides in the industry while also promoting <niche>design.com. I also think there's room for a job board related to the industry - might be something else to explore.

I'm excited to get started.
 
While it is more challenging, you can still run addiction ads once you are certified (based on the Google Ads support page). I focus on home services.

I do run a content writing service (via Fiverr + white-label partners). Working on scaling/productizing it at the moment.
 
@Ryuzaki thank you for your comment.

And yes i have many ideas for new projects just the time is tight at this point that i have no time to work on them. Though i am still working on a project from this year which i am aiming to complete in next month.
I have also thought of expanding to more source and assets once we start scaling.

I would have made a journey thread on that too, but my works are not consistent due to lack of time. There is already a queue of projects of clients that have to be finished and we have to keep them on track to complete before deadlines, our clients comes first then our own projects.

Looking forward to working it out.
 
Hey Everyone!
Happy to be here.
I'm a full-time digital marketer.
I had a desk job at one of the largest banks in the world.
I had just started in 2007, then the whole world decided to meltdown.
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I was newly married and worked with a ton of people 2 and 3 times my age who hated their lives.
It didn't take long for me to figure out that I needed to get out.
I was never meant to work in cubicles anyways.
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The Grind
That's when I found internet marketing.
Eventually, I stumbled upon Market Samurai, which was too slow, then I found Long Tail Pro (back when it was an Adobe Air app) and learned about keyword research.
For 10 more years, I grinded away at my day job, and would come home and work on my websites.
...but by this point, my wife and I had already started a family and I was missing out on milestones.
I was promoted as high as I was willing to go at the bank... anything beyond where I was at, and the company would've owned me.
Calls after hours... calls on weekends... calls on "vacation"... flying out to client sites...
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The Change
I decided to instead work as though I was their voluntarily (at this point, I basically was).
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My boss would tell me things like I would get a promotion to VP if I only put in 55-65 hours each week (on top of my 15 hours each week of commuting).
I told him that it's really cool that he'd even consider that, but I was happy where I was. Eventually, he asked me the magic question:
Where do you want to be a year from now? Will you be here? You seem like you want to do something else.
Click to expand...
I had no choice but to be honest.
No, I didn't want to be there any longer, and I told him that. I told him that I had about 3 more months in me, and he should find a replacement. It was strange, I had no plans of telling him at that moment "I quit", but sometimes, the universe seems to have different plans.
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It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Now, I do this full time.
The Future
My business is almost entirely from search engine traffic and display advertising.
Keyword research is our bread and butter, and I have a team of 6 people who help with the writing and publishing across our portfolio of sites.
I'm in a really cool spot, but I don't let that go to my head. There are so many more talented people than me, many who are on here. There are many who are better at all of this than me and learned more quickly than me. I'm OK with that. I hope to learn from all of you.
Click to expand...

I'm trying to diversify so I don't get ruined in the future as I've seen happen to plenty of other people.
I'm working on affiliate marketing, and product creation.
I found BuSo a couple years ago through the traffic leaks bootcamp.
I've been on BuSo a number of times in the past as a visitor, but wanted to join the party.

I know this was kind of a long introduction, but I hope it inspires some people and makes a few others laugh.
Most of all, I hope you, the person reading this sentence, has a fantastic day.
 
I am Peter and currently am a Writer on Medium, now before anyone asks I am not A Medium. I love learning and have a passion for food and art. Also some people say I have green fingers, as gardening is something that comes naturally, photography as well as cooking.

At present webdesign is one of my past times and art. Where I medically able to woodwork would be a very strong interest, as I am not able to lift anything heavy and get tired easy it is not something I could pursue for long periods of time.
 
@SEO, thanks for the great introduction.

I had an experience like that when I was younger and still in college. Very prestigious job, quit it after 9 months. Was being promised the world in terms of bigger opportunities and was really going to get it, but there was no way I was going to keep going to that lifeless, sterile, stale place any more. Pretty soon after I was a full-time SEO.

You sound like you're doing very well in the game. I hope to learn a lot from you as you continue to post and share, and hopefully we can offer much in return as well.
 
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I got to ask - why go with the username SEO? Why use an unidentifiable name?
 
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Ryuzaki said:
@SEO, thanks for the great introduction.

I had an experience like that when I was younger and still in college. Very prestigious job, quit it after 9 months. Was being promised the world in terms of bigger opportunities and was really going to get it, but there was no way I was going to keep going to that lifeless, sterile, stale place any more. Pretty soon after I was a full-time SEO.

You sound like you're doing very well in the game. I hope to learn a lot from you as you continue to post and share, and hopefully we can offer much in return as well.
Click to expand...

Thank you, Ryuzaki, for the very warm welcome. The display ad business is rough, so I'm happy to be branching out into new things. I don't want to be a one-trick pony either :cool: I too look forward to learning and sharing:-)

CCarter said:
I got to ask - why go with the username SEO? Why use an unidentifiable name?
Click to expand...

Hahaha. Thanks for the pointed question. After you asked it, I realized I will probably be giving another $25 to BuSo to change it to my actual name. I've used this name over on BHW for a few years, and originally used it to avoid leaving footprints all over the internet. I was trying to keep my online worlds and real-life worlds very separate because of my job.

I, perhaps, might have continued that habit if you hadn't pointed it out to me. Thanks again for taking the time. I've read a number of your writings online, including Traffic Leaks, WickedFire and the like.
 
"I was never meant to work in a cubicle"
I remember seeing that movie Office Space and it had a profound effect on my view of work.
 
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secretagentdad said:
I think it’s a great name and you should keep it.

Make some sick posts. Maybe we can rank BuSo for seo if you’re epic enough.


Welcome.
Click to expand...

Hahaha. Thanks! I'm probably not epic enough, but I've done well enough for myself so far. I'll share and help where I can :cool: . Good job on Keyword Sheeter, I've used it here and there over the years when I can't access VPS or I'm not on a Windows machine to use my scraping tools, definitely a big help.

Supermulti said:
That was an enjoyable intro, you write like Gary Halbert.
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Hey, thanks! I appreciate the compliment. Copywriting isn't my strongest skill, it's something I'm working on.

Stones said:
"I was never meant to work in a cubicle"
I remember seeing that movie Office Space and it had a profound effect on my view of work.
Click to expand...

I'm fortunate that I saw that movie before I ever entered the workforce. When I walked into that corporate job, I was like "oh no! That movie was a documentary!"

I also identified in many ways with The Shawshank Redemption because my escape was slow, patient, tedious, hard work.
 
I am writing this to document where I have come from and where I am going, and been going through Builder Society made me choose this forum to do this! My only regret? [not discovering this space sooner]

There's a TL: DR version at the end for people like me.

Life Journey: 'It's a long story' but I will keep it relevant. I belong to a tier-3 country where you'd usually get your cheap Facebook likes from. Yes, Pakistan! I'm 24 now and for the last 6 years, I've been living away from my family for studies and in search of better opportunities to uplift my family and my community.

Midway to my bachelor's in Finance (what was I thinking?), I decided that the field was too uncreative and less exciting for me to spend my entire work-life on and decided to shift my focus to this "booming" field of Digital Marketing. After watching some YouTube videos and reading some articles, I learned that probably AdSense was the best thing to get into (I will be proved wrong!). Everyone said that for a blog, you should choose something you are passionate about and so I chose Football or English Premier League and created a news/predictions website (www.totalpremierleague.com is expired now but you can check the WayBack lol) in hopes to getting traffic and eventually monetizing it (This was 2014). With no clue about on-page or off-page SEO, I set my journey with 3 other friends in my university batch, to write 10 long articles on football matches predictions every week including lineup predictions, goal predictions, etc. We did this for ONE year without getting more than 50 visitors a day on our website, before realizing that off-page SEO existed as well (thanks to blackhatworld for that). Even though it was a lesson learned the hard way but it exposed me to the world of Internet Marketing and I was glad it happened. By then, I had been reading a lot of BHW and quickly realized that there were numerous monetizing options in the IM world and I was determined to test each and every method to make my first $ online. And this brings me to the answer to the second question

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Here I started the journey of Affiliate Marketing / CPA:

As this saying goes, "Hard work never goes in vain", and this is where my tireless work on the football predictions website for SEO came in handy. BHW exposed me to the "Affiliate Programs" section and I quickly learned about MaxBounty and Clickbank. The former excited me more than the latter. I read about various ways to promote Nutra offers in these platforms, including Black Hat and White Hat methods but since I was still a beginner I couldn't comprehend much and what made the most sense, was to play in my backyard and that was? Yes, SEO! I signed up for various info, pw, site and website TLDs and started writing copies for the diet and health offers on these CPA networks. And now, I knew off-page SEO a little better as well so I was able to rank the pages on 6 to 7 position on Google's first page That's how I made my first couple hundred dollars in Affiliate Marketing.

However, the competition was increasing and more and more affiliates were competing on the CPA diet and Nutra offers. Now, I needed a new strategy. And surprisingly, my mind went to something that very few talk about, and that is, THERE ARE OTHER GEOS TO TARGET and one day a friend told me about AdCombo and had an account on it. So, I saw an opening, and I started promoting Goji Cream and Titan Gel in geos like the Philippines, Sweden, Denmark etc. (Not going into the specifics) but this I how I ended up making my first few thousand dollars/month with Affiliate Marketing and life couldn't be better!

BUT WAIT! ✋ Here comes the Google update and Google policies to wipe me out from the face of Google and bury me on the 3rd page of Google and it was a crisis again. But at least now, I had some money to invest and test other sources of traffic. And another friend whom I found online, hooked me up into the STM forum. Apparently, he was making a killing with Black Hat CPA. Desperate to start earning again, I asked him to teach me some and he introduced me to cloaking and how AdWords is used to promote Nutra offers. And so, I created WordPress sites on .info TLDs and got them approved in AdWords after which I used to cloak it with NoIPFraud to the CPA landing page and it started raining $$$ again for a while.

BUT THE BIG G JUST CAN'T LET YOU EVEN IF YOU ARE PAYING THEM HEAVILY FOR ADS! I was pissed at getting banned again and again and every few weeks, it became harder and harder to cloak and get my accounts live. And until the last parallel tracking update, none of my accounts came live and I haven't tried after the October 30, 2018, update of Parallel tracking, in search of something for the long-term rather than this churn and burn cycle.

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And what do I discover this time around? Parasites! And a lot of them. [Is this traffic leaking or what, lol idk]

Boy have these worked like a charm. Automating YouTube videos for CPA offers to posting on sites like Medium, Pinterest etc, I am ESSENTIALLY having multiple properties for my Affiliate offers within the top-10 results and either getting them to pass on their traffic to my site OR directly to the offer if I am feeling TOO LUCKY.

Now, discovered the wonderful compilation of Traffic Leaks by @CCarter and looking to test that for my Affiliate business too.
Meanwhile, currently, I am also finding it hard to navigate the YMYL niche with my personal websites, but parasites are working like anything.

So, in the long-run, I am looking to build Affiliate properties in other niches to save me from a future headache.

I may update this thread to document as I proceed along with my journey and if someone wants me to lol.

TL: DR
> Started a football website not knowing what the ABC of SEO is... failed after a year
> Used the knowledge to get into Nutra CPA, ranked cheap TLDs like pw, info, site etc for a quick buck, slammed after a few months
> Got into PPC ads for Nutra, with cloaking, made loads of $$, slammed after a parallel tracking update
> Discovered Parasites and Automation, a match made in heaven. Banking good money directing traffic to the site or the offer directly.
TBC

Peace out, lads.
FatalityHawk
 
Welcome. You went in a direction I toyed with a long time ago. I did some CPA offers with PPC on Plenty of Fish and Facebook. I got disgusted pretty quickly when the manager at the company I was using killed one of my campaigns that was taking off and then ran the exact same campaign as a case study on his blog.

Are you at all concerned about having an asset of your own again of some sort? I'm mainly in the SEO space myself. I looked the past few days about firing up PPC again and immediately started thinking about how it's more akin to a day job of creating and optimizing campaigns, them burning out, and restarting. Not that SEO doesn't have the equivalent but I like that there's compounding efforts and my income continues to increase. It's a roller coaster but less so than PPC. But I know too if you're good at PPC you can print money.
 
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