Introductions Thread

Rue, this is Jorarulit, meet our bro!

Jora, we have also avatars here if you didn't notice...
 
Yeah, watch this one, he's one of them gay wf peepz :D
 
Ahh yes, now we're talking! Welcome mont, great to have you here
 
Ryuzaki said:
Welcome aboard. Can you give us some background on yourself? What kind of projects have you / are you / do you want to work on? How long have you been involved with Internet Marketing? You know. Give us something, gai!
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I was under impression this is the old gay webmaster community, but in a new place :smile: I'm 6'1, green eyes, handsome with a curios accent... I'm also smart and resourceful. /homo. In IM since 2008, right now building out a nice pbn using the custom crawler we coded.

Tucky said:
Yeah, watch this one, he's one of them gay wf peepz :D
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oh hey man!

Golan said:
Rue, this is Jorarulit, meet our bro!

Jora, we have also avatars here if you didn't notice...
Click to expand...
ole' faithful avatar is now in place
 
Hey all figured I could introduce myself since it's been about a year since creating this account...

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Made my first dollar online in 1999 with eBay - started an SEO career in 2010. Worked my way up from a lowly link builder to managing 20+ accounts and a team of 5. Worked internally at a travel site and then an insurance site for a few years, lived in Mexico for a few months to help with some startups, currently am marketing manager at an agency + run a network of affiliate sites with my girlfriend (she's design/development) on the side.

I used to mainly be into link building for client SEO, then kind of focused on CRO and analytics for a few years, and lately keyword research and local SEO + maps are my 2 main focuses. I also dabble into paid traffic (FB focus) and development projects from time to time. I own too many domain names and occasionally flip those as well.

Had a few smaller flips in the past but really want to start some brand building like Tavin and CCarter's threads on WF for a 5 figure flip some day.

SEO is still my number one hobby, nothing beats the feeling of ranking a project on page 1. If I am not on the computer doing marketing, I am most likely on the computer playing video games. I also like to travel, drink craft beer and explore my city when I have time.

I hope to start a case study / follow along thread soon with some kind of interesting SEO experiment project and hope I can motivate others while I use staying on top of the thread updates as a way to motivate myself.
 
Do you feel like all of this agency experience and growing the differing skill sets is priming you for huge success on your own projects? I've never had a peak inside of the agency side of the game. I always wonder if it's ABC 123 for a ton of clients and that's the cash flow or if they really know something special that the rest of us don't.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Do you feel like all of this agency experience and growing the differing skill sets is priming you for huge success on your own projects? I've never had a peak inside of the agency side of the game. I always wonder if it's ABC 123 for a ton of clients and that's the cash flow or if they really know something special that the rest of us don't.
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My agency experience has been priceless. I literally got paid a salary to learn how to link build from some really experienced guys at my first SEO gig. I know most people out there do the opposite and pay for training materials. Learning everyday is one of the best parts of internet marketing IMO.

At first it helped me step into the game and get my feet wet in dozens of different industries. Having that on my Linkedin helped me land my first internal gig at the travel website and scale my career from there. Client SEO is amazing and pays well but I still prefer a model where I have full control like my lead gen sites.

Everything I have been paid to learn has definitely helped me grow my own projects, but I still haven't hit that huge home run where I felt I could completely quit again and do it full time.. I tried it once and got rekt by the PBN update. This is most likely due to my weekdays being spent at my career. Even tho I do go all night and side hustle my weekends, spare time is definitely something I lack. And I tend to take on way too many projects at once... don't we all love shiny objects?

At my first agency the work for $500/mo clients was very cookie cutter.. X number of links per month, X number or new content pieces, X number of keywords tracked, send a monthly report, rinse and repeat. Today my agency won't work on anything remotely close to that low and all the campaigns are meticulously tailored to the clients budget, competition, and needs. I do far more than just SEO, i'd say i'm more of a general online marketer at this point. Not sure if I really know anything special except for how to get traffic :D ... and deal with clients who are often not the most tech savvy.
 
I would echo the value of agency experience. I have worked client-side, agency-side and running my own gigs and in big big start-ups. But working in agencies is where I always found I learnt the most and to that end I work one day a week at an agency for no other reason than to keep some form of teamwork, social and educational stuff happening. Grinding all day on your own is surely productive, but is a bubble and you lose the whole perspective issue.

Welcome ChR0n1k to BuSo, hope you find it as inspiring as me. :-)
 
Thought I'd introduce myself and make a commitment to not merely lurk on a forum for once.

Not very new to IM in general. I used to do pretty well with blackhat SEO and escort service clients, but that was a few google animals ago. Haven't done better than break even at anything online since the May 2014 panda updated killed my client site SEO campaigns.

I've plenty to learn with regards to marketing, since now it seems the bar is raised above crap content written for the bots while the customers of my clients are only looking for the phone number to call. It seems I fell into a common trap laid by SEO, where one could be good at driving traffic while being piss poor at marketing.

Anyways, I'm a bit stumped for where to start, but this might be more of a mental block than anything else. I've got until this fall to at least get some momentum going, as I'll be going back to grad school then. I've read day 2 of the digital crash course and am still working through the suggestions for finding a niche. In my network of former clients and friends I have one that owns an escort service, and another that works for a company that does home remodeling, which would be useful if I could be better served driving traffic to either of them as part of some arrangement, as opposed to starting fresh with a site of my own.

My skill-set has developed in a way that finds me somewhere at an intersection of data science and machine learning, infosec, and of course online marketing. The blackhat automation stuff found in the last of the three is what has been of most benefit to the other two on the list; I'm hoping grad school will be an opportunity to further develop the data science skills toward something more profound than what is offered by the various toolkits out-of-the-box.

So yeah, hi everyone. Any advice is welcome and warmly received.
 
By Fall sounds doable. You could grind like a madman until then, so even if you have to leave it alone or at least schedule up some content to drip out while you're ignoring it, a lot of various aspects would be aging and gaining momentum as you've said. Links, content, the domain, social shares, etc.

You could work on something for someone else's sites but that leaves you in the same position of no control. I'd definitely at least operate my own site, even if I was sending leads to someone. That's an asset that can grow and stay with you or be sold to the same people you sell the leads to, etc.

Good luck and welcome aboard!
 
Thanks for the welcome and perspective. I don't know why this just occurred to me while reading your comment about content dripping while the property is being ignored; if anything I might be able to find some excuse to incorporate the site's growth into my graduate studies. Who the fuck knows, might be a thesis statement in there somewhere, since the field didn't become "sexy" until last year.

I'll know more after my first semester or so of the three I'm committing to, but it'd be great if my commitments, short term goals, and long term goals all aligned into some unified plan, and especially one that finally brought together everything I've been up to for the past 3 years. It'd depend on how interested the department is in Big Data/Data Science, and if any such site I develop ended up becoming a suitable source of whatever data I wanted to experiment with.

Otherwise, yeah, it'd be best to prepare for a two year stint in the old day job vs IM hustle routine.
 
Same, I got know about BuilderSociety thanks to CCarter. He/She/Them make the forum look like a super top-secret forum and it's definitely cool. I've been lurking in the shadows and I think I'll start posting more often.
 
Hello everybody!

I've been in digital marketing in some form or another for ages, but I've reached a point where my day job provides incredible flexibility, but not much else. Since I'd like to be making some extra money doing new and interesting things, using my digital marketing skills on some side project seems like a good idea.

I've had a bunch of side project websites in the works, but I've realized the industry (one I personally love and surveys suggested would be good to enter) is in a downward spiral and insanely cheap. So I'm just going to MVP them through this week, then move onto ideas that may be more beneficial.

I'm still not 100% sure which path I'm going to go down. Part of my day job is as an affiliate manager, so affiliate marketing sounds interesting. I know SEO reasonably well, so there's the possibility of whatever this years version of an authority site is. Or there's consulting with other businesses. I'm not entirely sure just yet.

I look forward to learning from you all, and sharing whatever I learn.
 
Welcome.

Out of curiosity, how does someone get a job as an affiliate manager and what type of questions do they ask you?

I once promoted a Bikini Butt affiliate product on Clickbank, haha. The affiliate manager played it up pretty well, sending out entertaining emails to affiliates. From there I wondered about the process of getting a job like that.

And as a sidenote, I was in Florida visiting my mom in September 2001. I was supposed to fly back home on 9/11. Of course, that didn't happen. Was a pretty crazy feeling flying home when flights were finally taking place again...

Airport was a ghost town. My flight had a total of 3 people on board. Myself, some white dude, and a guy with a turban, haha. That was a tense flight.
 
I got the job because the former affiliate manager (who managed affiliates for all three brands in our company) was promoted, and when he realized I handle all of the marketing for 2 of the 3 brands and generally know the niches much better (we have some issues with internal communications), he said it was my responsibility. Now that I'm doing the job, it's really not that tough. It's been a bit tricky for me simply because we were changing platforms right when I moved into the position, so I've been responsible for more technical aspects than I'm told is normal.

Half of my time is recruiting (find a site that aligns with our goals, reach out to the owner, do whatever negotiations are necessary) and the other half is promoting (sending out emails to affiliates with new products or product specials to promote). For one of the two brands I manage, recruiting is easy because we're the biggest and oldest in our niche. For the other brand, it's a bit harder because it's our newest company in a fairly established niche so people aren't too aware of us yet.

That doesn't sound like a very fun flight at all :/ I had a flight the night before, definitely felt lucky I got home when I did.
 
Ah, interesting stuff, sounds like you have to wear quite a few hats. Must give you good experience in different aspects of IM.
 
It's good and bad. I'm kind of an expert-generalist. For example, I know how to install, design/setup, and troubleshoot WordPress, but my PHP skills are rusty. But since the companies are ecommerce, it does mean I'm reasonably well versed in pretty much anything IM related. Affiliates, SEO, PPC, social, content, A/B testing, anything WordPres, email marketing, event coordination and promotion, mobile optimization. The goal now is to focus and use some of those skills for my own projects since there's really no upward mobility at work.
 
Welcome! I too have an extremely flexible work situation and have been pursuing the personal side to make a transition away from the boss-having lifestyle.

Sounds like your general knowledge if applied in a focused manner on a single project could really take off. Ill be around if you want to ever shoot a PM or anything. Welcome to BuSo!
 
Thank you much animalstyle! I honestly believe I have the knowledge to make something work, but between my current feelings of massive burnout and actual diagnosed ADD, I think the hardest part for me is motivation/accountability. I just need to remember to channel my frustration with my current situation into whatever I decide to work on.

Avatar-related side question: have you ever made it out to see the Daft Punk sunrise set at the trash fence at Burning Man?
 
@pdxdvr Sounds like you've got to learn to channel that energy!

I've never been to burning man, no. Just looked up that set though, looks cool.
 
Welcome! Sounds like a lot of us have flexible jobs. I know @Trankuility doesn't start his till 11am :tongue:
I found this to be as a double sword situation. In one hand, the job is flexible enough that you can pretty much do anything. On the other hand, you don't have your back against the wall sort of speak to make things happen faster.
 
@The Kloser haha truth. The urge I've felt throughout my life to procrastinate and seek instant gratification is something I've worked to eliminate (not there yet but have come a long way). The flexibility of my job exacerbated those challenges and I failed/gave up countless times. Was very frustrating, to say the least, haha.
 
@animalstyle I definitely do need to figure out how to channel my energy. I actually cancelled all of my plans this weekend so I can just do what I want and hopefully overcome some of this burnout. That's been the hardest part the last few weeks, realizing I'm burned out in the industry I'm in and that all of the side projects I've started in the last few years are in the same industry. If you do make it out to Burning Man, skip Daft Punk, it's just a prank to get new people to go on one of the worst hikes ever :wink:

@The Kloser you're speaking my mind! I've actually commented to my lady that if I was just fired I would have all the motivation in the world to get something up and running, but since I have a consistent paycheck for fairly minimal work, it's not as urgent. Time to change that mindset though.
 
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