Introductions Thread

Whatis this potato buzz all about? Do i miss something, maybe i should change my nick to best_potato_boss_from_golan_heights?

Or perhaps admins should ban new Potatos registration at the code level.

( @MrPotatoKing it was not against you, welcome to the forum! )
 
Thank you everyone, I like the attitude here & variety of perspectives. Going to take the advice that resonates with me & move forward.

I've adjusted the goals to be more ambitious, and will be sure to start a thread in the journey section.

As a side note:
- I talked to the wife & we've decided to up the investment on writers (with the goal of making this the #1 resource in our niche)
- Hired my first writer (we're starting with a test article & will go from there)
- Courting an established/known writer in this niche. No doubt in my mind that I'll get them on board (we'll start with a test article & scale from there if there's a fit)

Heading to work now, thank you again for the kick in the butt!
 
Hey everyone ! Wanted to write a short intro after I sign up but was too busy recently due to day job and family stuffs .

Got to know this forum through one of the member here while watching his video on YouTube.

Currently, I do have few sites running since 2019 . Beside posting contents regularly, link building and hope one day those sites can be my backup income in case one day I will be retrenched. Haha.

Hope can learn more from everyone here and will also do my best to contribute back to this community .

Have a good wonderful day ahead!
 
Welcome, @Zacify,

What are your existing projects like? Or rather, how are you monetizing them? Display ads, affiliate commissions, eCommerce?

Glad to have you around and hope you'll find the time to continue to join us in conversation or at least keep lurking and learning.
 
Hi @Ryuzaki , thanks. my main focus will be 2 of my sites are on Amazon affiliate but one of them with Adsense and another one on media net . Hopefully this year one of site can move on to ezioc or monumetric.

I do have another site on job listing with membership but not much luck. Only have small income from Adsense . Only good thing is Facebook group is growing .

Tried pod Shopify before during covid 19 lockdown. Did generate some sales through FB ads but I have stopped running ads. Hopefully can gain more traffics via social media or organic traffic with contents.
 
Hey there builders what's up?

I've been reading a couple of posts in Builder Society about 7 figure website flipping and sacrifices and just felt super inspired to write this and introduce myself.

So here we go:

My name is Andy, I'm 22 years old and last year I built my first 2 niche sites.

My first site was about retro gaming and I achieved ranking #2 for the main keyword and got arround 1k pageviews / month within just a couple of months.

This niche was monetized with drop-shipping and the earnings were pretty decent, the only thing that went wrong was the delivery process.

Orders from Aliexpress usually take about 15-30 days to arrive here in Spain. In addition to that there were many delays because of the global situation, so my customers weren't real happy.

This was my first experience with SEO and niche sites. I worked as a web designer previously for 6 months but didn't even have formal training on it (did an internship + my own side hustle).

I finally ended up shutting down the site for the complaints, stress and headaches it gave me constantly.

My second website was launched about May - April and was also a niche about hacking the PS2, which has been a very interesting topic to me since I was a child.

When I checked the SERPs and found out there were forums ranking I decided to tackle it without thinking about it twice.

The monetization part was the tough thing here, because I got about 2k pageviews / month. Adsense wouldn't accept it, and the rest of ad networks required more traffic, so I finally ended up doing drop-shipping again.

The products arrived within 10 days, and since the price tag was much lower I almost had no customer support, so it was very passive.

Now, about a year later I have been getting about $20 / month with that site and when the traffic started to decrease I switched to Amazon affiliate which now earns me about $15 / month.

I know the income was really low, but this helped me open my eyes to a new world. I love doing niche sites, and now I'm building them like a maniac.

I've done a site for Adsense which is 4 months old and now is getting about 100 pageviews (which I know is pretty crappy) but I have to wait for the sandbox.

Since January first I've been building another niche site for Amazon affiliate with about 50 posts + 7 categories and a very extensive homepage. It's only a month old and already getting about 40 pageviews / month.

I'm going to keep at it like a crack addict.

Just do it.

Hope I've inspired you, and will keep posting my progress as I start new niche sites.
 
@palmdreu, welcome to the forum. Thank you for this wonderful introduction.

palmdreu said:
I finally ended up shutting down the site for the complaints, stress and headaches it gave me constantly.
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Have you considered stripping down the offerings and placing a bulk order for your most popular products and handling the packaging and shipping yourself? Keeping stock could solve the problem altogether (while creating another one).

Alternatively you get the bulk order mailed to a fulfillment center and send them the order details to do packaging and shipping. Or you could send them to your local Amazon and do Fulfillment by Amazon and let them shop on there.
 
Thank you so much for the reply @Ryuzaki I thought about it, but I didn't feel like handling all the headache that comes with e-commerce.

I think affiliate marketing + display ads is my best bet, although I'm a total noob :smile:

Will have to keep digging to find gold!
 
Hi everyone : )
I'm very new to buildersociety just joined today.
I have several years of basic knowledge of some javascript web coding skills mostly through my work experience of working in some Advertising Operations (AdOps) teams using DoubleClick adservers, Adtech and some bespoke adservers for some international media marketing companies (Time Inc, Microsoft & GroupM) publishing houses (Condé Nast publishers) medium-sized & start-up media marketing businesses all over London.
I don't work in the Media marketing advertising industry anymore I've now been working past 3years in the Civil service industry. However everywhere I work in most businesses they are using some form of Digital IT technologies so I felt inspired to join an informative community where I can hangout read and keep up-to-date with all the latest media, marketing and tech trends.

I look forward to reading and learning more cheers : )
 
Welcome, @Niftymagpie123, That's quite the experience level!

Are these big companies still using waterfalls instead of header bidding? I was just thinking about how they would take on direct sale campaigns and work them into the system, especially when they promise X amount of impressions in X amount of time. Are they using weighted serving to make sure the impressions get trickled out in time or what? Or are the direct sales always more valuable?

It's such an interesting world. I started messing with waterfalls just using fallback ad code across a bunch of networks and was gearing up to run my own header bidding system (this is all very small time) before I wised up and just joined a network that does and optimizes all that with all the major exchanges.
 
heh

I love retro gaming niche. Really into old style shit 2d isometrics and muds.

If you still have the domain from that site you could probably get more value out of repurposing it than you would think. Especialy if it was ranking for arcade cabinet keywords at some point.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Welcome, @Niftymagpie123, That's quite the experience level!

Are these big companies still using waterfalls instead of header bidding? I was just thinking about how they would take on direct sale campaigns and work them into the system, especially when they promise X amount of impressions in X amount of time. Are they using weighted serving to make sure the impressions get trickled out in time or what? Or are the direct sales always more valuable?

It's such an interesting world. I started messing with waterfalls just using fallback ad code across a bunch of networks and was gearing up to run my own header bidding system (this is all very small time) before I wised up and just joined a network that does and optimizes all that with all the major exchanges.
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Hi Ryuzaki cheers for your nice compliment on my experience : )
I was very late starting my Media career due to various delays completing my BFA & MA degrees so I was very fortunate manage to on a one-stage interview receive the Ad Operations (Campaign manager) 6months internship at Condé Nast publishers at the iconic Vogue House in Oxford Circus, London that was awesomely my golden ticket to work in the Online Digital Media industry where I first learnt about Ad Operations and setting up all the big money-making ads in DoubleClick for publishers adserver (DFP) I then moved on to working in other Ad Ops team in media companies such as the ones I mentioned in my intro : ) However over the course of several years into my Ad Ops career it moved into Programmatic Adserving I missed the traditional Ad serving of setting up the advertising in DoubleClick (DFP & DFA) & Adtech adservers I overall did not enjoy managing Programmatic campaigns and I found that my role as an Ad Ops media professional became too much top heavy analytical I did not enjoy pulling data reports and analysing them every day : ( which is the main reason I had to make my big career life change to move out of the media industry and eventually happily found more better suited Administrative Civil service work. My best skills have always been Communicative Administrative & Customer service work and also when I was working in Ad Operations I enjoyed training people in the new Ad Ops technologies which was actually one of my best roles at Microsoft (MS) as a Training person teaching Sales & other Media professionals on how to use the new Ad Ops technologies. The awesome MS role was one of my last final Ad Ops lovely job in the super fast paced busy Media industry in London : )
I am not familiar with Waterfalls?
Have you heard about Programmatic Advertising & Video technologies?
 
CCarter said:
You got these fancy degrees and have never heard of a paragraph?

Who here thinks this is a bot? The GPT-3 API has come a long way
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I did not realise that BuilderSociety was a writing forum where we're been critqued on the quality of our writing skills LOL : P
My BFA was in Fine Arts (Drawing, design, painting & animation) and my MA was in Media Production (Camera work & storyboarding) originally when I was looking for new work in London I wanted to find work as Production Assistant in the TV / Movie industry however that was very difficult to find any paid / non-paid internship or even non-paid volunteer work to gain work experience was all very competitive :wonder:
After working in a Admin Assistant office role for a little while, eventually after applying for many different Media jobs I applied for the 6months paid Ad Operations internship at Condé Nast publishers which I thankfully received as my first Media paid work : )
 
Who here is old enough to remember Sensible Soccer for Amiga?
 
I think you are a bot since you aren't separating paragraphs correctly. On-top All of your answers add a ton of what looks like A.I. generated content afterwards that have zero to due with the question.

It's also worthy to note that you only answer the questions before the chunk of A.I. data or after. Never in between.

You see how visibly there are extra returns in my reply to indicate paragraphs, your content doesn't have any.
 
CCarter said:
I think you are a bot since you aren't separating paragraphs correctly. On-top All of your answers add a ton of what looks like A.I. generated content afterwards that have zero to due with the question.

It's also worthy to note that you only answer the questions before the chunk of A.I. data or after. Never in between.

You see how visibly there are extra returns in my reply to indicate paragraphs, your content doesn't have any.
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Hi CCarter,
No I'm not a bot I don't see how my style of writing using paragraphs or not defines anyone thinking that I'd be a bot LOL : P

My real name is Nilmini : )
Here's my facebook page:
[removed]

And here's my Linkedin profile:
[removed]
 
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Yes your formatting is an indicator of programming a bot. The give away is ALWAYS the punctuation. The way you are writing numbers like "6months" and "3years".

Those are fake profiles if I ever saw ones. 3 posts on the Facebook, one from 2018, then 2 from 2012.

LinkedIn last activity 2 years ago, and total is 10 likes.

Someone is trying hard and dedicated to the persona, but not hard enough.

Someone with that much experience at all those companies never was told how to write paragraphs? On a computer? Yet is in digital marketing??!? And most are them are American companies being thrown out.

Reading any book in English tells you how to separate paragraphs. ALL the content on this forum by all users use 2 returns for a paragraph.

I'm baffled why, but someone is trying to make this bot look like a real person. Time will tell.
 
10 out of 10 thread.

This could make for a hell of a rabbit hole.

DARPA level aged personas. Nice nice.
Time to go full schizo.
 
CCarter said:
Yes your formatting is an indicator of programming a bot. The give away is ALWAYS the punctuation. The way you are writing numbers like "6months" and "3years".
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I still don't understand how paragraphs, punctuation and the way I've written numbers makes me seem like a bot LOL : P
Most of my Media roles were in Ad Operations teams where it was a simple case of just set up the Advertising in the adserver and then I only had to send short emails to confirm that the advertising was setup I was never critqued on whether or not I'd written in paragraphs.

CCarter said:
Those are fake profiles if I ever saw ones. 3 posts on the Facebook, one from 2018, then 2 from 2012.

LinkedIn last activity 2 years ago, and total is 10 likes.
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Those are not fake profiles LOL : P
I have not updated my Facebook profile in 2 years because I rarely use Facebook anymore.
With regards to my Linkedin profile I lost my last job just over a year ago at the end of 2019 and since the pandemic horrible crisis of 2020 and all the lockdown restrictions that have happened I've not been able to find a new work for whole of 2020 and now sadly I've been jobless dragging on now in 2021: (

Right now I don't feel happy to hangout on BuildersSociety anymore :wonder:
My email is [removed] which I used to sign up on this forum.

I tried to look at my BuildersSociety account and I don't see feature for me to be able to delete my profile.
Can you please delete my 'Niftymagpie123' profile and please send me an email to my [removed] email to confirm that my Builders Society account has been deleted thanks.

Thanks for sharing your experience on writing paragraphs and how that defines a bot based on writing style that was all very intriguing to hear.
I have never on any online forum been accused of being a bot based on my lack of having paragraphs in my writing style lol anyways it is all good helpful feedback cheers : )

Going forward please just go ahead and delete my 'Niftymagpie123' BuilderSociety profile thanks.
 
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@Niftymagpie123, please don't leave us over this misunderstanding. We get all kinds of weird games being played here by people using bots and advanced content writing scripts and things. @CCarter is just trying to watch out for the good of the community. You're obviously real and very welcomed here. I'm very interested in your insight and experience working in the industry.

Niftymagpie123 said:
I am not familiar with Waterfalls?
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Ad waterfalls is an older technology from before header bidding (the standard now) was around.

With header bidding all of the advertisers bid at once and the highest bid wins. With waterfalls, you take bids from one exchange and if they can't get you a bid at your "bid floor", you then pass it "down the waterfall" to the next worse exchange.

So if you say "I won't accept bids under $0.25" and the highest bid is $0.20 then you reject all the bids and try to get that from the next exchange. The problem is you sometimes don't get it at all and lose money and it's also way slower since you have to deal with one exchange at a time (rather than all at once with header bidding).

Niftymagpie123 said:
Have you heard about Programmatic Advertising & Video technologies?
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I'm seeing some really interesting stuff coming out of Mediavine with video ads. They now have it so every display ad can run a video ad. It loads fast, pays more, stays muted unless engaged, etc. They just created some new "Outstream Player" for these ads, which are apparently called "Oustream" ads because they're pre-roll but they aren't "pre" anything. There's no content after them.
 
Ryuzaki said:
@Niftymagpie123, please don't leave us over this misunderstanding. We get all kinds of weird games being played here by people using bots and advanced content writing scripts and things. @CCarter is just trying to watch out for the good of the community. You're obviously real and very welcomed here. I'm very interested in your insight and experience working in the industry.
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Hi Ryuzaki,
I very much appreciate your kind quick reply I feel much more happy to stay & hangout thanks : )

I am not experienced in my knowledge of people on forums using advanced content writing scripts for creating bots but yup I can now see that your colleague CCarter was doing a very good job taking very cautious care of your community : )
I did not see your nice welcome message just now so before I had a chance to see it I had actually sent an email to your team email saying to delete my Niftymagpie123 profile.
But now that I've seen your nice reply I have sent another email saying to please ignore my previous delete email as I'm happy to stay : )
I hope that you & your BuilderSociety team saw my 2nd email saying to ignore my email about deleting my profile?
I very much appreciate your nice welcome so thanks again and yup I am happy to hangout learn more & share knowledge and be part of your BuilderSociety community : )

Thanks for explaining about about waterfalls ad technology.
So I actually think that Programmatic adservers are an advanced bidding waterfall ad technology.
I have experience using 'AppNexus' Programmatic adserver from when I used to work at Microsoft for a year, I think that is one of the best user friendly Programmatic adservers : )
For Video Programmatic advertising I have some experience using 'Spot X' adserver but I did not enjoy that as much as using AppNexus.
 
Hey BuSo,

My Name is Jan. I’m 34 years old and living in the beautiful city of Munich in Germany :smile:

First I want to share with you how I found the forum:

I was watching a YouTube video of one of the biggest German SEO YouTube Channels. And the guy running the channel mentioned his favorite SEO @CCarter . Back then, I never heard the name, that why I googled it and stumble across the Trafficleaks.com site.

I googled the traffic leaks topic and found on google the Digital Strategy Crash Course and the Buildersociety forum. I liked also a lot the SEO avalanche thread. It’s something I need to give a try.

Now I’m here….

I started two years ago my first „authority“ site. I was always on and off. I have 3000 visitors per month and currently 55 articles (I’m in a B2B niche and the German market is way smaller.)

I build everything on my own and I want to change it in the future and outsource more. I didn't monetize my site yet. This month I successfully applied to a couple of affiliate programs

This year, I decided to go all in and put it as my top priority. I’m running my site as a side business to my corporate job. My dream is to it full time.

In my corporate job, I have the impression that I’m not living up to my full potential. I’m at 20%. With my site, I can bring in all I have and create something helpful for other people.

Reading a couple of threads here, motivated me even more.

I would like to use the forum tor report about my journey of building an affiliate site in a non-English market. Sometimes I have the impression it is only possible to be a successful affiliate marketing sites in the English-speaking markets. There are so few affiliate marketing sites ranking in the German SERPs.

However, I will do everything it takes to show that it’s possible!

What I'm struggling with is, that I don’t know one single person in real live making money online.

I didn’t share with anyone that I built my website, besides my parents. All my friends are working in corporate jobs and I can imagine they will not get what it takes to build an online business. It takes a lot of time, effort and persistent especially with organic traffic.

What are your thought on the topic? Is it better to share with friends about what I’m doing or would you wait until you have some success?

Happy to be here,

Jan
 
Welcome @Niftymagpie123

Always nice to see you.

And for those who think you are a bot let me asure you Nifty is not a bot, I've known her for about 6 years now and I vauch for her (unlike my own spelling)
 
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