Introductions Thread

Hey Guys,

I hope all is well with everyone. I'm not new to the game...been around for a long time and got my start in 2001 with mortgage leads....made a ton of money leveraging email marketers to the tune of 1000 leads per day. Then...if any of you have seen the Big Short...well it really hurt the mortgage lead guys. I found this forum when searching for the CCarter Big brand checklist or something to that effect...from another forum.

What I'm trying to do now:

I am in car sales at one of the elite Mercedes dealerships in the entire Northeast...and the country for that matter. We have one of the largest AMG centers and I can pretty much get someone anything they want. When I got into the car business, I was never dedicated to it....I always wanted to get out and get back to the online game, but with 4 boys, I don't have the capital to endure. I have been a sales manager, a finance manager, and I am usually the top salesman at every brand I've been to...Infiniti, Audi and Porsche. Now that I have finally decided that I will stick with car sales, I want to dominate and take it to the next level.

I have always been the top guy without trying hard, just capitalizing from the people that walk in the door. That is a losers game, because you place your success in the hands of your boss and the dealership marketing efforts. A real car sales Boss has his own leads, his own customers, and never has to rely on a single person to walk in the door. This is what I want to accomplish.

My goal is to be the go-to guy for people who want a new or pre-owned car...not just Mercedes and not just in Boston, but the entire country. On high end cars especially, I can ship them. If I don't have it...I will find it for you. If I can't be the guy that sells it to you, that is ok too....I will still help you find your car...and maybe you will refer me someone else down the line. There is never a bad thing that can come from helping someone. Ever. I want to be the brand and create a powerhouse business within my business.

I hope to learn a lot from this forum. My head is spinning from so much info overload. I know enough to be dangerous, but I think my difficulty is coming up with a solid blueprint for achieving my success. If any of you have thoughts on how to leverage the ideas here into success in the car business...I'm all ears!
 
A man with a plan, experience, and the ability to make a proper introduction. I like it! Glad to have you around. Sounds like you're about to have a foray into giant databases and lots of API's constantly updating stock around the nation.

I've seen a lot of sites too that gather the leads from people wanting to find their bluebook value, etc. People getting closer to selling (and subsequently buying).
 
I do lead gen in a luxury niche :smile:. Welcome aboard!
 
eyerish said:
If any of you have thoughts on how to leverage the ideas here into success in the car business...I'm all ears!
Click to expand...

I am going to assume you know something about cars (obviously) and what potential car buyers want and what there worries are when it comes to choosing what car to buy, so an idea here might be to start a luxury car brokership site, basic business idea you drive people in with you content and marketing, you should be able to produce killer content if you just write it as if you are saying it to a potential customer, then you have a form on the website where they can either tell you exactly what they want and you get it for them for a percentage of the car cost, or you can help them find the perfect car suited to their individual needs and wants, ofcourse on the last part I'm talking about those who are not sure as to what car fits their needs, you already know what to ask them to figure out what is right for them, and since you are an independent broker who takes your commission from them they will trust you a lot more, than a dealership representant.

sorry for any misspelling and lenghthy content, just let my mind roll free for a second.
 
Welcome! I think you will be making a killing online considering all car dealerships and car salesman are pretty much been focusing on offline referral/cold calling for lead gen. I'll start with the crash course. I know it is a cliche suggestion, but it is a must read. When you read it, make sure that you take notes and mirror the actions outlined to your vertical. JUST DO IT!
 
Hey guys. Thanks for all of the replies! Lots to do here, but mostly...I'm selling myself...not inventory. Itr is a losers game to try and battle the huge publicly traded auto databases, cars.com, autotrader and the like. Instead, I'm selling myself, my ability to get them anything they want, and the expertise to get them the best deal without having to deal with an idiot in a showroom (unless that idiot is me!).

Step 1. Without really building or branding anything is to reach out to anyone and everyone who can refer me a customer and offer a $100 referral for each and every vehicle that your guy buys from me. I have already started on LinkedIn and now have over 1100 followers. My main focus is auto brokers, fleet managers, shippers, livery/cab drivers, uber/Lyft drivers, and anyone who wants to make extra money referring me. I don't discriminate and all 50 states can possibly make sense one way or another. The broker idea is a good one...but for now, I think Mercedes amd Sprinter/Metris vans should provide a good amount of business if I touch enough people.

Step 2. Crash course. Everything else. Blog, Twitter, IG, review sites, snapchat, youtube, you name it.
 
Hi Guys, My name is Mark Thompson.. Not the one who sends promotions every day!

I've been a full time online marketer for over 12 years, build loads of online businesses and funnels and I currently live in Southern Spain

I used to have over 1million pages indexed in google, lost all them, rebuilt them, lost them again (got to hate those penguins and pandas) However i love those hummingbirds, I recently noticed how the quality of the content at the top of google had improved so started to investigate.

Happy to say I am back in love with seo and I currently have my team working hard auditing every blog we have and preparing a new plan for us.

I'm currently working on my personal blog doing the same thing to see if good SEo and topically relevant content does what it should do..

Good to be here
 
Welcome. Always wanted to visit Spain. Both the southern and northern areas.

With those ups/downs you had in IM, what was the most important lesson you learned?
 
I'm new to the forum and am currently reading through the Digital Strategy Crash Course. I recently signed up for SERPWoo, which is what led me here.

I work full time as an SEO for an awesome, beer related ecommerce company. At home I'm working on creating an SEO blog focused heavily on data driven marketing and technical SEO. The plan is to write about SEO tools with csv export, analytics, web server logs and using google sheets and excel to interpret the data. (If anyone ever needs help with excel or google sheets, I can help!)

I'm envisioning multiple phases of the site. Phase 1: Informational, makes affiliate revenue from tool set signups. Phase 2: Offer SEO consulting, continue to make affiliate revenue.

I also just launched an amazon affiliate powered heavy metal merch site because, I wanted to.
 
Welcome, @ryandiscord . Keep us updated on how your personal projects are going. I'm particularly interested in the Heavy Metal Merch site, as I also use Amazon quite a bit.

Are these your first personal projects or have you had any others in the past? How did they go?
 
Hello all,

I'm new to this forum, discovered through moneyoverethics website, then CCarter twitter, and now there.

Started to work full time on internet about 13 years ago, I'm a tech guy and can work on almost everything which is possible to do online. Already developed and managed for clients network ads, marketing tools, email platform, or for myself SEO (in the good/easy days... years ago), bots/scrap/other...
Now stopped to work for clients, I want to only focus on my own projects, and make everything possible to get all the money from them. Focusing today on Twitter, and other platforms in the next weeks.

See you on others threads !
 
Agreed, why make others wealthy when you have all the skills to do it for yourself. Welcome to BuSo!
 
Thanks guys! The merch site is my first amazon project. It's powered by their product api which makes adding product super easy. It's got a couple of sales. I built it in January. Still building it out.

I had a heavy metal / hardcore vendor reach out to see if I was interested in wholesale. We discussed affiliate and dropship instead, so there may be some opportunity there. Either way, I'm excited to see that it's already getting attention within it's niche.

I'll follow up as it progresses.

I have other sites, one that I abandoned years ago because I wasn't experienced enough of a web designer at the time to streamline it. I had a local coupon site a couple years before the big coupon sites became popular. For the amount of work I put in it, did a good job with google adsense. At the time I had extremely limited web design knowledge, looking back it would have been a lot easier with a cms or at least a database. With sites like groupon, replicating something like that now would probably be difficult.

I made an automotive themed click bait site, i had more fun designing than creating content for it. I'm passionate about cars but, I created that for all the wrong reasons. The idea was to create a garbagey social driven site that shared mindless car burnout videos and high horsepower cars and hope people would share it. I lost interest real quick when I realized the top players in that niche relied on ripping and reuploading other peoples videos.

I also had a local Mustang forum, it was a city level forum that competed against a popular state level forum. There wasn't much of a business goal, I just made it because I wanted to. Made some money in adsense, had fun for a while, a lot of the members where also members on the state level forum. Having lost interest in the community over time, the forum activity died off, then eventually got exploited by a massive amount of crappy spam links. So I pulled the plug on the forum and just left the blog. I had a mustang part vendor reach out for advertising, so that is a small yearly check. So over the years that's paid for itself.

All of the sites have been fun to make and definitely a learning experience. Nothing crazy revenue wise, yet.

Ryuzaki, how has your Amazon affiliate experience been?
 
My first real jump into Amazon was a couple years ago. I made a site specifically for one type of product that sold for about $80-300 a pop. I started ranking with it and doing well and then Google started slinging out those "Thin Content" penalties, whether you had thin content or not. I still think they classified it based on your outbound link ratio for Amazon or other affiliate products versus other links. They had no real reason to penalize this site on that basis.

My current main project relies heavily on Amazon for monetizing the product side of the site. On the blog side, where I'm just trying to attract traffic, links, and social shares and funnel that juice over to the product side, I even just started testing out Amazon CPM ads. I'm real pleased with Amazon in general. They make life easy, like Adsense does. The difference on this current project and the other is about 200 more published pages and tons of outbound links to countless other sites, and it's not largely just reviews of products but tutorials, tips, tricks, etc. The product mentions are secondary. It's going well.

My favorite aspect is that you can get paid for anything and everything anyone buys. I've sold lots of items outside of my niche, including an iPad and most recently, a pearl bracelet and flak jacket in one order. That's always fun. My favorite part is promoting on Reddit just to get a couple hundred thousand visitors and thousands of Amazon cookies dropped and seeing what crazy stuff people order.
 
Did your site link directly to Amazon or did it go through a cart first? I wonder if my site dodges that outbound affiliate link issue because it redirects from a checkout. Either way, I've been considering disallowing my checkout in robots.txt for that very same concern.

Your new project sounds like a good mix of content, you shouldn't have to worry about thin affiliate pages with that. Do you do anything to beef up or spin your product pages? Amazon's policy is a little unclear to me about whether you can add content.

I haven't tried their CPM ads yet, I'll have to look into that.

Yes, I love that aspect too! My site sells metal merch yet, I've seen orders for Disney baby clothes. I haven't tried dropping direct affiliate links yet. Can that be done in a way that doesn't annoy people? Or are you sending them to your content then getting the affiliate click after?
 
I was linking straight to Amazon. Now I run through a series of no-follow 302 redirects.

I'd disallow the checkout regardless, to all robots.

I don't do e-commerce style pages, so I don't know how Amazon feels about that stuff. An analogy for how my stuff works currently is I might be talking about the best techniques for casting your fishing rod, and mention a heavy bauble or lure and link to that with an aff link. I will have a "reviews" section but all in all it's not that direct for me. On my previous site that caught the "thin content" penalty, those were reviews of several items per page, like "best fishing lures for businessmen," and it was all 100% unique content.

Yeah, I always send them to my domain and then they click the product link if they are interested. Again it's not product reviews for me but "how-to's." On Reddit you can't drop Amazon affiliate links directly. It's always a funnel process. Otherwise, Amazon would probably consider that cookie stuffing anyways.
 
Okay, I'm definitely going to disallow checkout.

The ecommerce style affiliate is allowed under their product advertising API, there are specific guidelines to how the product must be presented. For example, you could refresh the API every hour or present the time in which it was last refreshed, I believe it has to be within 24 hours. A benefit of doing it through the product advertising API is you get a 90 day cookie as opposed to the 24 hour from the direct link. Granted it's likely harder to get people to checkout than to click one link.

Your way is a great way to force you into creating unique content. Even with the product API, they encourage you to create additional content. Otherwise when they review it may be disapproved. Also you don't want to those Panda penalties!

Okay, that makes sense, definitely less spammy. Redditors tend to catch on quick to that too.
 
Good to see you Ryandiscord.

I was in the Amazon game years ago, making auto-gen sites off a custom plugin I built and populating my Wordpress sites with pages of products and spun content and ranking for some long tails organically. Man, those were some days when cookies lasted longer....

Good to have you on board and good to hear people are still working with Amazon APIs
 
Thanks! That sounds very similar to the platform I'm working from. Except that you made it yourself, which is impressive! I have a wordpress plugin that pulls in the content. There is a built in spin option I have been avoiding. I can't sell a heavy metal t-shirt as a t-blouse! I may spin if I can find a better way to control it, even with an external tool of some sort.
 
Hey everyone,

I'm late to the intro game, but I've been an SEO for sometime now. I feel like I've reach a glass ceiling in terms of growth and understanding the entire marketing, SEO, making money, etc. so that why I'm here to try to break through.

I'm ready to get start my own project and scale the shit out of it. With that being said, I hope I can learn more from everyone who goes beast mode around here and join the ranks.
 
Thanks for introducing yourself. What kind of project are you considering?
 
I was considering dropshipping or outright e-commerce at first, but I'm most likely going to start with a simple affiliate site to begin with.
 
Hello everybody,

This turned out to be a pretty good thread.

I could recommend TRP and two books I've found to be blunt and to the point:
How to Win at the Sport of Business - Mark Cuban
How to Get Rich - Felix Dennis
 
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