Introductions Thread

[lion1978]

The plot thickens.

Which plot?

 

[bernard]

God damn just use paragraphs

You're not so unique that you and you alone can decide not to use normal formatting lol.

 

[lion1978]

Wilkommen zuher freund, und meinem deutsch bist sehr slecht so ich will im english sprachen weider

When I read your post I thought well if there arent a lot of german affiliate sites in the german serps then you have a huge opportunity, the same thing goes for Denmark where I'm from only the market is a lot smaller.
Anyway I'll be looking forward to seeing your future posts.

 

[blackwar85]

Hello and welcome to the forum!

I used to be in a similar situation of not knowing anyone around me being an entrepreneur or working on an online business.

The decision to tell your friends or relatives is highly subjective because there can be so many different emotions and details at play here. How good of the friends they are? Are they generally supportive if you do something different or become jealous? I think the fact that you are hesitating might mean that they might not be that supportive of your endeavors.

I solved the problem by making new friends and acquaintances who are into entrepreneurship, marketing, or interested in self-improvement in general. Find the digital marketing or business-related forums, Facebook groups, or local meetups, post there. Be open about what you do, provide value, and I'm sure you will find 5-10 online connections from which you will get to know 1-2 people who you want to actually meet up and connect with for years.

 

[secretagentdad]

God damn just use paragraphs

You're not so unique that you and you alone can decide not to use normal formatting lol.

Pish posh. back to reddit with u.

 

[Ryuzaki]

All you plebbitors and phone posters are still required to have common decency!

@Niftymagpie123, I was looking at the open source OpenX ad server for a while but it looked to be a giant pain in the butt in terms of learning curve. There was also Bid.js and Prebid too.

Such a nightmare. Ultimately, I'm happy to give 25% to a company to manage all this with proprietary software that constantly optimize and roll out features without my intervention, that gets me access to all the big exchanges thanks to combining all of our ComScore's.

Sometimes I have the impression it is only possible to be a successful affiliate marketing sites in the English-speaking markets.

Simply not true. I'll let them reveal themselves if they want to, but we have a great member here who went full time focusing on affiliate sales in their own non-English country. Demand is demand, and volume is volume, no matter where you're at. You might need to deal in higher priced products, but it'll be easier if the competition is a bit lower where you are.

 

[ToffeeLa]

Hey Jan, welcome to the forums. (I had to laugh about the @CCarter comment - I had a similar experience at a meetup last year when someone almost fell over backwards with shock that I knew the name.)

I think with the German-speaking market, there is/was a great divide. I haven't really had much contact for some years, but it seemed to me that there was the massive majority 'believe in Moz and Jon Mueller and make sure you have your privacy and Impressum pages up to date' and then there was a hardcore of serious spammers in the money-making niches. But you're right to a large extent, a lot of German-speaking 'SEO' is 'web designer SEO' done by people obsessed with Typo3 or whatever the trendy CMS is these days.

I'm trying to remember some SEO names, but there were definitely a few from around the Munich area. And, of course, you had the SEO Oktoberfest, which was well-known in certain circles...

As far as friends and family, nobody will ever understand what it is that you are doing. And never, never, never get involved with starting up a site in combination with one of them. They will never have the skills, the interest and the Durchhaltungsvermögen that you already possess.

 

[Niftymagpie123]

Hi @Ryuzaki
I found that SpotX adserver was a pain not a cool experience

I used SpotX adserver when I got hired very quickly through a Media recruitment agency, just based on my CV and a quick phone interview for just a 2 months Ad Ops role, whilst they looked for a permanent Ad Ops manager, at a music broadcast company called 'https://www.boxplus.com/' who's parent company in 'Channel Four Television Corporation.'

I remember having to quickly within a few days shadow and learn from the old Ad Ops manager at Boxplus the SpotX adserver and also we visited the SpotX company for a training session which I did not find too helpful

Thanks to my own previous Ad Ops work experience and intuitive media knowledge I managed to successfully manage all the campaigns on my own for 2 months.
If I had any serious difficulties then I thankfully had a direct SpotX contact so I'd just call that person for helpful technical support : ) and later I was able to do a nice handover of everything I'd done in the 2 months for the new Boxplus Ad Ops manager to carry on managing.

With regards to OpenX
I have heard of OpenX but I don't have experience using it.

 

[Struggles]

Hey everyone,

Pleasure to make your acquaintance officially. I can't remember how I specifically found this forum - but I think it had to do with me researching SEO on YouTube and I ended up on the Digital Strategy Crash Course and bookmarking it. Since then, I've been coming back nearly everyday to read the forums. I feel like Reddit is just too clogged up and not interpersonal enough for my liking. Plus, ya'll write some of the most fire copy I have ever seen.

Here's what I'm working with:

I'm a 27 year old Digital Marketing Manager, and I've never had to do SEO before in a traditional sense (I'm more familiar with SEO from a social media standpoint). I've been learning the last few months after taking a job with a brand new e-commerce startup. I'm talking - brand new domain, no content, and essentially no marketing budget. We're a niche job board to put it into perspective.

Since I started here, I've written 42 blog posts, and only some of them are ranking, and not highly at that. I've been using keywords everywhere and trying to target long-tailed keywords when writing my content, but I haven't quite cracked the code yet.

Here is a snippet of our analytics for the last three months.

(Moderator: Please embed images, not link to them)

I've also managed to get us 7 links (from directories and guest posting), a PA of 13, and a DA of 3 according to MozBar. Yes, I know this isn't great, I'd like to get us to 20 at least.

Am I stuck in the sandbox?

---

Enough about that though, my marketing expertise lies deeply within social media. For reference, I have an Instagram network of over 250,000 followers that I mess around with on the side for side income along with a YouTube channel with 600 subscribers that I started in mid-September where I teach people how to grow their Instagram's completely organically, I don't hide all the secrets behind courses like all those shams.

Anyway, I hope to make some friends here that can talk marketing with me!

 

[NetZero]

OMG this was a great laugh lol I've been called a bot on games I play because I suck so bad.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Welcome, @Struggles. Thanks for the intro,

Am I stuck in the sandbox?

Hard to say without knowing if the site is new (this is pretty much the only time you run into the typical sandbox issues, usually starts letting up slightly more and more over the course of the first year, often with a relative explosion in rankings and traffic at the 1 year mark from indexation if you put in enough work in the early months).

We also don't know the niche or the kind of keywords or competition levels you're going after. It's hard to say much without more details, and definitely don't share more than you're comfortable with or than you should.

As far as friends and family, nobody will ever understand what it is that you are doing. And never, never, never get involved with starting up a site in combination with one of them. They will never have the skills, the interest and the Durchhaltungsvermögen that you already possess.

Not only will they never understand, most won't care to understand. My brother understands it but has no desire except when his money gets funny.

My dad asks me every time I see him, even after 10+ years of doing this full time, "Are you making any money? What is it that you do? Is it legal?" Part of that is him being a passive aggressive dickhead for not letting him run my life and for completely stunting on his career.

I recommend keeping it shallow and not revealing how much money you're making. That tends to breed jealousy and even hatred (even amongst your family and closest friends).

Your goal should be to make so much money that it hurts other people's feelings, and it will if you tell them about it, so don't.

 

[Struggles]

Welcome, @Struggles. Thanks for the intro,


Hard to say without knowing if the site is new (this is pretty much the only time you run into the typical sandbox issues, usually starts letting up slightly more and more over the course of the first year, often with a relative explosion in rankings and traffic at the 1 year mark from indexation if you put in enough work in the early months).

We also don't know the niche or the kind of keywords or competition levels you're going after. It's hard to say much without more details, and definitely don't share more than you're comfortable with or than you should.

Thank you for the response! Alright, so I think the domain is one that never had content on it before (waybackmachine has screenshots of a blank page just saying the site is under maintenance each year with no content until we bought it), my COO got it before I joined the team. The niche is healthcare, it's a healthcare job board, so I've been writing lots of articles about specific roles within healthcare.

 

[Lowrider]

Wilkommen zuher freund, und meinem deutsch bist sehr slecht so ich will im english sprachen weider

When I read your post I thought well if there arent a lot of german affiliate sites in the german serps then you have a huge opportunity, the same thing goes for Denmark where I'm from only the market is a lot smaller.
Anyway I'll be looking forward to seeing your future posts.

Thanks a lot. I'm looking forward to post here.

Hello and welcome to the forum!

I used to be in a similar situation of not knowing anyone around me being an entrepreneur or working on an online business.

The decision to tell your friends or relatives is highly subjective because there can be so many different emotions and details at play here. How good of the friends they are? Are they generally supportive if you do something different or become jealous? I think the fact that you are hesitating might mean that they might not be that supportive of your endeavors.

I solved the problem by making new friends and acquaintances who are into entrepreneurship, marketing, or interested in self-improvement in general. Find the digital marketing or business-related forums, Facebook groups, or local meetups, post there. Be open about what you do, provide value, and I'm sure you will find 5-10 online connections from which you will get to know 1-2 people who you want to actually meet up and connect with for years.

Thanks. My goal was not to blame my friends. :-) But most people working in corporate jobs are quickly asking: "And how much money are you making?" But for me, creating an online business is first to focus on creating value in the lives of other people. And the result of the value creation is the money. And that might take some time.

Thanks for the great introduction,


Simply not true. I'll let them reveal themselves if they want to, but we have a great member here who went full time focusing on affiliate sales in their own non-English country. Demand is demand, and volume is volume, no matter where you're at. You might need to deal in higher priced products, but it'll be easier if the competition is a bit lower where you are.

Thank you. You are right. It might even be an underserved market with a good potential.

Hey Jan, welcome to the forums. (I had to laugh about the @CCarter comment - I had a similar experience at a meetup last year when someone almost fell over backwards with shock that I knew the name.)

I think with the German-speaking market, there is/was a great divide. I haven't really had much contact for some years, but it seemed to me that there was the massive majority 'believe in Moz and Jon Mueller and make sure you have your privacy and Impressum pages up to date' and then there was a hardcore of serious spammers in the money-making niches. But you're right to a large extent, a lot of German-speaking 'SEO' is 'web designer SEO' done by people obsessed with Typo3 or whatever the trendy CMS is these days.

I'm trying to remember some SEO names, but there were definitely a few from around the Munich area. And, of course, you had the SEO Oktoberfest, which was well-known in certain circles...

As far as friends and family, nobody will ever understand what it is that you are doing. And never, never, never get involved with starting up a site in combination with one of them. They will never have the skills, the interest and the Durchhaltungsvermögen that you already possess.

Thank you. I will try to find on my journey some people with similar goals and interests, that are supportive. Let's see how the German market will turn out in the end. But I'm looking forward, since it is a market with enough purchasing power and the SERPs might be a bit less competitive. I will report how it will go.

Not only will they never understand, most won't care to understand. My brother understands it but has no desire except when his money gets funny.

My dad asks me every time I see him, even after 10+ years of doing this full time, "Are you making any money? What is it that you do? Is it legal?" Part of that is him being a passive aggressive dickhead for not letting him run my life and for completely stunting on his career.

I recommend keeping it shallow and not revealing how much money you're making. That tends to breed jealousy and even hatred (even amongst your family and closest friends).

Your goal should be to make so much money that it hurts other people's feelings, and it will if you tell them about it, so don't.

Interesting. For the generation of my parents the "save" corporate job was the ultimate goal. I see myself as a transition generation that grew up the first 10 years without having the internet. Now I see all the possibilities it offers to me. And I don't want to miss and regret it. Now is my chance to take it. I don't have a wife and I don't have kids. I can spend most of my time working on my online business.

 

[blackwar85]

Thanks. My goal was not to blame my friends. :-) But most people working in corporate jobs are quickly asking: "And how much money are you making?" But for me, creating an online business is first to focus on creating value in the lives of other people. And the result of the value creation is the money. And that might take some time.

When your friends and family ask you the question of "And how much money are you making?" just reply as honestly as possible. If you make $50 or $100 a month while putting in 100% effort and savings then say it. Some friends & family will secretly laugh, but some people will admire your confidence like I would.

In my opinion, everybody can boast about their earnings when they make a lot, it takes no confidence to do it. However, it takes major confidence to reveal how little you make, because you are confident that the situation is temporary and does not define you.

Also, when you get to full-time or big money at some point then your lore would be so much greater because everyone knows where you started.

I remember when one of my acquaintances found out about my 6-figure exit. His first question was: "How is this possible?? You were just making $50/month a few years ago!". It was the best feeling ever.

 

[Sutra]

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

Neither did I. For the first 3 years it was just me. Took inspiration from a lot of people on the net, forums, youtube etc, but it was all in my head. After 3 years I went full time and then went to a couple of conventions for online marketing and that's where I met a ton of people. Found out some even lived in my area. hah. Now it's just normal everyday stuff, knowing people online and in real life who successfully do online marketing.

It's very strange at first when you're alone and everything is just in your head. But if you keep pushing forward, eventually everything that's inside will be on the outside.

 

[Lowrider]

When your friends and family ask you the question of "And how much money are you making?" just reply as honestly as possible. If you make $50 or $100 a month while putting in 100% effort and savings then say it. Some friends & family will secretly laugh, but some people will admire your confidence like I would.

In my opinion, everybody can boast about their earnings when they make a lot, it takes no confidence to do it. However, it takes major confidence to reveal how little you make, because you are confident that the situation is temporary and does not define you.

Also, when you get to full-time or big money at some point then your lore would be so much greater because everyone knows where you started.

I remember when one of my acquaintances found out about my 6-figure exit. His first question was: "How is this possible?? You were just making $50/month a few years ago!". It was the best feeling ever.

That's a nice story. First they ask why're you doing something and afterwards they ask how you are doing it ;-)

Neither did I. For the first 3 years it was just me. Took inspiration from a lot of people on the net, forums, youtube etc, but it was all in my head. After 3 years I went full time and then went to a couple of conventions for online marketing and that's where I met a ton of people. Found out some even lived in my area. hah. Now it's just normal everyday stuff, knowing people online and in real life who successfully do online marketing.

It's very strange at first when you're alone and everything is just in your head. But if you keep pushing forward, eventually everything that's inside will be on the outside.

I think at the beginning it is important to take action to get some initial traction. Later you can try to build relationships with similar people in the industry.

 

[Stones]

@Struggles hey and welcome.

You might consider building the jobs board out for future growth.

How do people search for jobs in your niche? Is it highly specialised or is the common job title + city/town

Ranking for the head keyword "job title" is probably outside your time horizon.

A little bit of research should show that large jobs sites go after all the jobs searches in all the regions.

So you could build out a directory site of hundreds / thousands of pages.

Think:
job title + region
Job title + city / town
There is usually a structure to these the smaller populated section with in the larger.
So example URL structure might be.
Mysite.co.uk/jobs/doctor/up-north/
Mysite.co.uk/jobs/doctor/up-north/newcastle
Mysite.co.uk/jobs/doctor/up-north/Sunderland

The idea is to get the pages in the index for these long tail regional searches. Most jobs sites will populate the jobs you post into these pages depending on how you've set things up.

If you build too many of these pages on a new domain you may run into problems.

 

[kinsella7]

Hello, I joined the forum to better understand how to market my business.
I'm very focused on providing a valuable service/product to the customer and useful tools.
I'm slightly put off by tricks and misdirection and manipulation tactics, because I'm a softie, but I guess you need to be optimised and go in for the kill to be successful.

 

[simplebuilder]

Hello Builders.

My name is Ibrahim, and I am a 21-year-old from Khartoum, Sudan.

Long time lurker, I have found this forum while I was searching for CCarter, and I was blown away by the quality of the digital strategy crash course, which I skimmed through.

Last year I worked with different affiliate marketing and performance marketing companies, such as Clickbank (CPS - Cost Per Sale), where I have generated more than 500 sales. And MarketCall (Pay Per Call), where I had driven phone calls for businesses in the pest control niche and the medical insurance niche.

The internet marketing forum that I learned a lot from is Black Hat World(Which is a goldmine for traffic leaks ideas), but, unfortunately, it is turning into a low-quality dictatorship.

Before generating revenue online, almost everyone I know used to think that I was delusional, and there is no way to make money from the internet.

The thing is, I had the vision but lacked the execution back then due to school and internet access restrictions.

"Vision without execution is hallucination." - CCarter.

Anyway, I'm here to find like-minded individuals, learn from others, their knowledge, and their mistakes, and hopefully, be a contributing member of Builder Society.

Cheers.

 

[Ababilstar]

I'm also 21! And Muslim too. Nice to meet you.

However, can you share some traffic leaks resources that you found somewhere else (excluding the Final Boss CCarter ) ?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Welcome, @simplebuilder, BHW is fun to glance at every once in a while but there's like zero signal-to-noise ratio. Everything there is some variation of "thanks". It's almost pointless to read anything but the thread titles and the occasional opening post. People think we're dictators here too, simply because we delete "thanks" posts and ask people to use the "Like" button instead. You can't win! But at least we have a high signal-to-noise ratio.

I'm glad you joined us and I hope you'll continue to post and share your experiences and insights.

I did will with pay per call for a while with addiction and treatment before Google started the first inklings of the "YMYL EAT" stuff, years before that ever launched. You could clean up with database sites in those niches. That ship sailed, but I suspect database sites would still work well for less "critical" niches. The only problem is you have to have the right monetization to match it, because most of what you get on those is bot traffic.

Hi, @kinsella7, thanks for joining us.

I'm slightly put off by tricks and misdirection and manipulation tactics, because I'm a softie, but I guess you need to be optimised and go in for the kill to be successful.

Same here. If you haven't seen our free Digital Strategy Crash Course, we heavily focus on the fundamentals there with a bend towards helping newbies understand HOW to think and not WHAT to think.

Tricks and all that only last so long before people share the tactics around and the loopholes get closed because the companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) get embarrassed by the manipulation and make it a priority to stop.

That's not really a business, it's just a hustle that you end up losing. You can make a lot of money doing that if you can keep finding the next loophole but I've never seen anyone be able to do that. It gets harder and harder as time goes on and the platforms you're manipulating mature. There's still SEO tricks, and new ones being developed out there. I know of a guy doing $1k an hour on what appears to be a pretty sustainable SEO trick for the time being.

The problem is, the tricks are to the point where they require as much, if not more, effort than running a regular sustainable business that'll carry you forever.

 

[simplebuilder]

I'm also 21! And Muslim too. Nice to meet you.

However, can you share some traffic leaks resources that you found somewhere else (excluding the Final Boss CCarter ) ?

Hi, nice to meet you @Ababilstar!

If you're building a niche site or a news site, Reddit is a good traffic source.

It used to work well for affiliate promotions (Here a tutorial that used to work: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/g...e-traffic-to-affiliate-links-500-day.1038002/). Unfortunately, it has been spammed to death using this method, and Reddit mods caught on and blacklisted Twitter links (https://www.reddit.com/r/modhelp/comments/915chi/spam_twitter_posts/)

So, it may not work well for direct affiliate promotions anymore. Good luck!

 

[Hash Brown]

Congrats on leaving the brainless hell scape which is BHW.

You will learn infinitely more here, BHW hasn't been worth reading since 2015. They like to ban everyone who is remotely interesting or has an IQ over 65. It's a tard farm designed for the site owners and mods to milk the marketplace with crappy re-sold 1960's SEO.

 

[simplebuilder]

Welcome, @simplebuilder, BHW is fun to glance at every once in a while but there's like zero signal-to-noise ratio. Everything there is some variation of "thanks". It's almost pointless to read anything but the thread titles and the occasional opening post. People think we're dictators here too, simply because we delete "thanks" posts and ask people to use the "Like" button instead. You can't win! But at least we have a high signal-to-noise ratio.

I'm glad you joined us and I hope you'll continue to post and share your experiences and insights.

I did will with pay per call for a while with addiction and treatment before Google started the first inklings of the "YMYL EAT" stuff, years before that ever launched. You could clean up with database sites in those niches. That ship sailed, but I suspect database sites would still work well for less "critical" niches. The only problem is you have to have the right monetization to match it, because most of what you get on those is bot traffic.

Exactly! BHW quality is getting worse every year. Reputable members like t0mmy, LightningBlitz, Sherbert Hoover, Leith. etc., Has either got banned or left the forum voluntarily.

Also, their marketplace is getting worse, and they allow some sellers to use fake reviews. Almost everyone who points that out gets the banhammer (e.g., https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/sarkar-seo-biggest-seo-scammer-fake-accounts.1259467/)

BuSo is undoubtedly much better than BHW in terms of quality. It is focused more on long-term ventures. BHW is more about hit-and-run marketing methods and short-term monetization avenues like PPI (Pay Per Install), Instagram spam + CPA, content locking, etc.

I mean, each year, there is a new trend over there. This year it is Google ads threshold accounts.

Aside from simple landing pages, I've never actually built websites for pay-per-call offers or did SEO for them.

My traffic source was Google ads. I stopped doing pay per call for now because the price for calls from call-only ads is relatively high, and getting a positive ROI is challenging, so I am looking for another monetization avenue.

Congrats on leaving the brainless hell scape which is BHW.

You will learn infinitely more here, BHW hasn't been worth reading since 2015. They like to ban everyone who is remotely interesting or has an IQ over 65. It's a tard farm designed for the site owners and mods to milk the marketplace with crappy re-sold 1960's SEO.

Thanks. It still has some value. But it is dwindling year by year

 

[kinsella7]

Thank you for replying. I've been on a Fake Guru expose kick on YouTube, and I'm guessing there are tons of them that sell a dark side version of your course for ONLY 1,997 - free knowledge you can find online, but with ridiculous claims of guaranteed success, no work, no investment in your business to start etc.

That crowd has left a really bad scammy connotation in my mind with anything to do with affiliate marketing, dropshipping and the like. I dare say "Make money online" "9 to 5 is for losers" "Work from anywhere" "Passive income" are all concepts associated with scams nowadays.

I would be completely lost without the course, haha. I'm working through it, taking tons of notes. It's incredibly valuable and I'm very gateful it exists. Plus, it has made me come up with ideas for businesses that haven't got anything to do with my original niche. Problems I can solve for users/customers/peasants(lol), in a mutually beneficial way.

Is thinking "build it and they will come" a bad way to think about this? Like, maybe in stead of creating something bigger, very high quality; you can make many lower quality websites in a shorter time, making more money? Maybe my main idea that I'm passionate about doesn't have enough of a market, for example. Research can't account for everything. But I don't want to dedicate my time to making lots of stuff I don't care about. Even if my main website/business fails, it would be a learning opportunity, experience.