Introductions Thread

hey all,

like others I’ve been a lurker for a bit and have interacted with a number of you off the forum. I’m ready to interact and provide any helpful things I learn as I continue my journey on building.

I’ve sold 2 affiliate sites in the past year totaling multiple six figures of proceeds on the sales. It’s small peanuts compared to others but has helped me understand what it takes to scale and sell. These were largely done over a 1 year timeframe. Now, I’d like to step out of the minor leagues and join the big leagues. Currently run 1 money site with 3 other sites as up and coming projects.

let’s do this.
 
@BearsAreCool, nicely done. I'm glad you're joining the conversation.

What would you say were the most important things to pay attention to to grow and sell these in a year's time? (keyword research? content quality? on-page? links?)

Congratulations on your success and the future success to come. Sounds like you're tee'd up with 4 more sites growing. Should make a nice pay day when you offload them.
 
Ryuzaki said:
@BearsAreCool, nicely done. I'm glad you're joining the conversation.

What would you say were the most important things to pay attention to to grow and sell these in a year's time? (keyword research? content quality? on-page? links?)

Congratulations on your success and the future success to come. Sounds like you're tee'd up with 4 more sites growing. Should make a nice pay day when you offload them.
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Good to hear from you Ryu. I’m the guy that will work non stop and pump out some serious volume of content. All backed by low competition keyword research with some on page. I’ve done some KGR stuff but I find that I have a better method of finding low competition, decent searcg volume but most importantly high keyword variability/variance. Some of the long tail KGR stuff you can rank but not for significant number of KWs. I like a blended approach.

My content is not always optimized for monetization to the exact precision upfront. I figure if I can scale and grab my pieces of digital real estate, I’ll have organic recurring traffic. With traffic means data points, then leverage those data points for broader monetization.

WhileI thrive there, I struggle mightily with being the digital marketing expert that can do some real savvy stuff. I’m a self taught kind of guy in this online world (for better or worse).

I’ve landed my 4th site (2 sold) on a large ad network (think AdThrive, Mediavine, etc) after dabbling in this just about 2 years ago. Display advertising is great and traffic is great and all but I need to learn how to make big money with limited volume to go to the next level IMO.
 
Excellent story and details.

Congrats on the two sales as well. It's not as easy as one might think to net those 2 sales so pat yourself on the back and know that what you do works.

The most useful questions I've had posed to me before, I'll pose to you now.

1) If you struggle with digital marketing, what exactly is the solution ? I feel that statement was bland, and I don't get the real 'root' of your self-spotted flaw her but what is the solution?

2) What other problems can you for see that may come up? Are you prepared with a solution for that?

3) Can you scale what you're doing with help? Or is it a solo adventure?

Welcome to BuSo.
 
Hi everyone, I'd just like to introduce myself. I was recommended to join here by @Poplanu

My name is Adam, I've been building my own sites for about 12 years now. I'm currently a partner at an invite-only affiliate network with a growing number of high-paying offers. I got to know @Poplanu as he is one of our affiliates.

Outside of that, I'm also an experienced website builder myself, focussing mostly on SEO traffic and graphic design related sites.

My main graphic design sites which earn as memberships are:
  • BrandPacks.com
  • DesignerCandies.net
  • TemplatesBooth.com
Feel free to AMA about running sites in the graphic design niche :smile:

Cheers!
 
@adammc you might consider pulling your sites from your intro. A lot of nefarious folks with a children's mentality floating about. Less so on this forum but never hurts to be circumspect.

And also welcome.
 
Welcome to the board @adammc

I think posting your brands in a manor like this may be looked at as 'promoting' and may require a membership (if you've not already paid it)

I checked out your different sites, very nice. You've done a great job at capitalizing off your own talents.

1 site subscription based and the others are 1 time fee?

DesignerCandies confetti theme was great.
 
@EyesExist thanks. The reason I have a one-time payment on two of the sites is because I'm still trying to reach a point where we can post content frequently enough to make it worthy of a subscription model.

For $19-$29/month, my market can get access to sites like elements.envato.com, so I have a really tough fight on my hands. With a one-time lifetime payment, people join to access one or two specific resources, but justify the higher cost by getting lifetime access to other content.

It also means there's no ongoing upkeep. On BrandPacks, for instance, most of our customers are monthly members, and if I don't post new items every week, I get dozens of complaints & people cancel very quickly.

In regards to promotion, I highly doubt this is a place where my customers hang out Just thought it'd be interesting to show sites which aren't your typical /10-best-vibrators-for-tall-women/ style affiliate blogs.
 
@adammc there's about 5k members here.. Probably 92% or so are lurkers and they shop. You'd be surprised at who's here.
 
adammc said:
running sites in the graphic design niche
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Here's a question then!

The graphics in the social media online creators are often fairly shite and third-party stuff that integrates with video software can also be fairly expensive and not all that.

Have you ever thought of getting more into the social media graphics or the titling/lower thirds/effects/elements side of things with video?

(Social media: people like relaythat and tailwind create
Online video: people like invideo and wave
Third party video plugins: people like NewBlue)
 
ToffeeLa said:
Have you ever thought of getting more into the social media graphics or the titling/lower thirds/effects/elements side of things with video?
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Yes, it's on our to-do list to create more social media packs, however the buyers are more often than not unfamiliar with Photoshop & Illustrator.

Adobe Spark licensed a bunch of assets from us recently, it seems they're trying to make a comprehensive tool for creating social media graphics. Definitely check that out if you haven't already.

As for lower-thirds, definitely not as it's out of my area of expertise. Though, if you are good at them, they sell extremely well on marketplaces such as Videohive.
 
Hello there,

Thought I'd introduce myself here. Hopefully I can get stuck into some of the conversations on here with like-minded individuals.

I'm currently building a few authority niche sites. Previous experience includes selling a couple of small websites (low 5 figures). I also own multiple websites that each bring in $xxx a month. These sites are all affiliate based (some are only one page and only rank on well on Bing due to exact match domain), so I'm now building a few websites that will be monetized via ads.

So yeah, let's chat! :smile:
 
I joined this forum some time in the distant past but then forgot about it. I've been studying the law of attraction and a lot of other metaphysical stuff lately. It's weird and fascinating at the same time how you're led back to where you need to be. I look forward to learning more and sharing my knowledge with this community.

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Welcome Timmy! I'm currently working on an authority site as well. I look forward to reading more of your journey.
 
Okay but what are you doing currently in regards to business? What are you working on?
 
Hi everyone! Hope everyone is doing great and staying safe!

I am a veteran marketer with 10+ yrs of experience in digital. Joining BUSO today to hopefully provide useful information and also learn from other successful builders!

A little about me: Lived in 10+ countries, know 4 different languages and have friends all over the world! Started digital marketing 10 years ago due to intensive travel schedule and it was just something that interested me. I am excited to jump online everyday and do new awesome things. I love it!

Anyway, I live by the following principles:
- Karma is a bitch
- Money is not everything and certainly is not the way to happiness. We all need money but it's not everything.
- "I know that I don't know" - Socrates
- Time is the most valuable thing. I try to use it wisely

Some top level digital marketing things I know:
- Google is not as smart as people think
- I go with data. I don't care about opinions or theories

Glad to be here and look forward to posting!
 
Those are some good axioms. I agree with them and had to learn some of them the hard way.

The Socrates quote was something I always knew in my intellectual and academic endeavors, but when it came to SEO I would let my ego get in the way and not want to accept any info from guru types. There was a point in time where I ran into an on-going problem I couldn't solve and realized I had to seek knowledge and wisdom from other sources.

I never found the answer out there but I found the start of the breadcrumb trail that led me to the solution and learned in the process that a lot of people know a lot of things I don't and that being humble is not only right, but strategically makes more sense, too. Walling off your mind is about the dumbest thing possible, and I was doing that.

And yes, Google isn't as smart as people think. That's what got me into the mess I'm talking about above. I expected Google to be operating on cosmic levels and responded accordingly and messed up some technical SEO stuff. Google is still exploitable, but you can lose a lot of time trying to find the holes instead of just making clean progress.
 
Ryuzaki said:
never found the answer out there but I found the start of the breadcrumb trail that led me to the solution and learned in the process that a lot of people know a lot of things I don't and that being humble is not only right, but strategically makes more sense, too.
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Same here. Its hard to be humble, especially when it comes to SEO. Who do you believe or trust when everyone spews their "opinion" or things they "heard" or "think" work! Rarely do people back their claims up with data.

Nowadays with all the SEO tools - its easy to spot the fakes from the real SEO's. It's also easier to do your own analysis and come up with data driven conclusions.
 
I've been self employed for about 3 years, running a real estate photography business with a focus on high volume. It's been great!

I'm in the process of starting an ecommerce site. I'm self hosting (woocommerce / GCP), holding my own inventory, and will be doing all the fulfillment myself for awhile. Planning to "launch" a MVP this January.

Here's my question: how important is social proof when running ads on facebook? I.E., do I need to build up posts/likes/comments on the brand FB page before the ads will convert?
 
Welcome aboard, @lwalthour. Congrats on your successful photography business. I've wanted to do an eCommerce play myself, possibly through Shopify. Too busy, though. Seems exciting, especially with the low ramp up time thanks to PPC advertising.

I wish I knew an experienced answer to your question but I don't. I would think though, if you're advertising on Facebook for conversions, I doubt those people are first going to visit your brand page to make sure you have social validation first. They're going to click your ad, end up on your site, and convert from there.

Of course, depending on what you're selling and the price, a lot of it is going to include a "brand-wide" experience of checking you out on Instagram, Facebook, your site, Youtube, etc. It certainly won't hurt to have all of that up and operating. Social proof will always increase your conversion rate, though having it direct on the site and lander is going to have more of an impact in most cases (depending on price and what you're selling!).
 
Hey there, just joined. I’ve been in digital marketing for 10 years and now I run my own publishing company and e-commerce store. Even though I’ve been in the game a while, I’m always looking to learn and share tips.
 
lwalthour said:
Here's my question: how important is social proof when running ads on facebook? I.E., do I need to build up posts/likes/comments on the brand FB page before the ads will convert?
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Simple answer is no. You should send the traffic to your product page - not FB brand page. You want to make it as easy as possible for the user to find what they are looking for.

Social proof will increase your conversion rates, but is not necessary when first starting out. If you have a good enough website, useful product and good support - you shouldn't worry about that.

Every starting business doesn't have reviews. They usually ask their friends and family for that sort of thing, just to have something to begin with. Overtime though, you should setup a review system and generate reviews consistently so you get social proof and increase conversion rates.

FB doesn't care how many reviews you have. That will not affect how much you pay for ads. You just need to be careful which audiences you target and how much you spend.
 
Welcome @Curcia_Lee. Always good to have more experienced members at BuSo.

I've heard a number of webmasters saw an uptick in sales in the last 10 months did your e-com store benefit from the Corona virus?

I also noticed e com sites with a brick and mortar presence saw a major boost in organic visibility as their customers moved online and started searching for the brand name. Did you experience this or recognise it in your competition?
 
Stones said:
Welcome @Curcia_Lee. Always good to have more experienced members at BuSo.

I've heard a number of webmasters saw an uptick in sales in the last 10 months did your e-com store benefit from the Corona virus?

I also noticed e com sites with a brick and mortar presence saw a major boost in organic visibility as their customers moved online and started searching for the brand name. Did you experience this or recognise it in your competition?
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I definitely saw an uptick, and a lot of that has to do with the products I sell. I describe them as “positivity products” and lots of people are looking for something to lift their spirits. I didn’t see a huge increase in organic search traffic. There are no brick and mortar stores selling what I do, so there was no corresponding customer shift to e-com.
 
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