Introductions Thread

Wow it's been 4 years since I last posted anything on here. So allow me to reintroduce myself:

I'm 32 years old and from the Netherlands. I've been doing online marketing for 11 years now and over the years I've been an entrepreneur, worked for agencies and worked for businesses other people owned as well. I've got experience in lots of markets (from fashion to nano technology) and countries (all English speaking ones, lots of European countries, some in Asia).

What I don't have XP with is being an affiliate myself, which is the road I've decided to take to finally free myself from a job. That's why I'm back on here. I'm thinking of sharing my affiliate journey here, both to help others learn and to learn from those of you who are already (financially) independent.

My journey through IM hasn't been easy at times: I've struggled with bad health, debt, a lack of useful/supportive friends, being underpaid because I started as a pretty young bizz owner and didn't know my value at the time, selling my 1st company too early.

These days, health's good, debt's pretty much gone and I feel I'm in a good position to make happen what I've always wanted.

Nice to meet you all :smile:
 
Glad to have you back. Sounds like you have a huge head start in knowledge to make this happen for yourself and are in a good position to do so. Looking forward to your questions, shares, and journals!
 
Hello,

Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Dave and I'm currently a 19-year-old college student. I've always been a kid who loved to work hard and hustle. Getting the best grades in class, being the best player on the team and most importantly, the hardest working guy among everybody around me. However, pretty recently, due to the type of people/losers I was surrounded with, that drive to always be the best kinda disappeared... until I got to college that is.

I go to a college with a high number of rich kids. I see them pull up to school with their sports cars, their brand new watches and their designer clothes. It wasn't really jealousy that I felt the first time, but more of an appreciation for the money that they possessed. I did not care if they earned their money or not, I still wanted what they had for myself. I come from a middle class family where I've always been told and heard the following:

''Money isn't everything Dave! There's other things in life.''

"(watching tv) Look at all these rich people, stealing from us. Fucking pricks''

''What's the point of being rich? Just get a good, stable job and you'll bet set for life!''

''hahahaha, I just wasted a full day doing nothing, silly me!''

Jesus fucking christ, while it might be true that rich people get obsessed with money (which is a good thing), my family and friends were/are obsessed with comfort. And lemme tell you, that obsession with comfort is fucking contagious. I wasted a good portion of my younger self just wasting time, watching tv and FANTASIZING. The latter really fucked me up without me realizing it. Maladaptive daydreaming is what I found out they called it. I felt the results of success without actually doing anything. My brain just could not realize that dreaming about getting 30k/month and getting the girls I wanted are not the same as actually doing it.

I continued fucking around till one day my brain just snapped while watching television. I felt like a fucking vegetable watching dumb shit on the television. I looked around me in the room and every single one of my family members was just on a screen, doing nothing productive. My dad regularly comes home from work and just goes on for 5 to 6 hours straight watching television or scrolling through Facebook posts. My mom does the same and my sister just passes 90% of her time on instagram and snapchat. My friends just smoke weed and just don't do shit.

So I went online for (3 month ago) answers to fix my shitty life. From there I started going to the gym 6 times a week while watching my diet at a high level. The gym has been a sanctuary for me. Then, while I was looking at ''how to be rich'' guides, I found a reddit post mentioning you guys (found you guys 2 days ago). I went through day 1,2 and 3 of the digital strategy crash course. I read the various posts regarding mental fortitude, most notably Riyuzaki's ''Psychological Barriers to Success'' (the maladaptive dreaming part really got to me, forced me to focus on the now) and CCarter's ''Implementation'' post (made me realize how my parents loser routines affect me even though I still love them to death.). I intend on making a case study to be updated every month or so so I don't withdraw from responsibility like a little bitch.

I am a complete beginner. No previous experience or skills at all. I don't care though, I'll absorb everything like a sponge and when I start getting ''unmotivated'' at some point, I'll make myself remember the loserdom I'm going towards to everyday I am not taking action. Fuck being middle class, shit sucks and is too easy. I want my own shit, I want to improve every single day to a better me till I die. I want the money those rich kids from my college have and I want to EARN IT from my sweat, blood and tears. I don't care how long it takes me. I'm too scared dying a loser.

A day ago, I chose my niche, chose my domain name and made a superficial market research (A really shitty one, I'll improve it.)

GOALS
Financial goal: 100k/year (8500k ish/month) by the time I graduate college (in 3 years).

Amount of time put in by week: 20 to 25 hours MINIMUM. I'll need to balance college, a sales job (I've been told sales skills are useful everywhere in life) and a minimum of a social life (or just pussy tbh lol). I think it is possible if I am deadly efficient

Stakes: I've used a financial staking website to provide me with negative motivation if I starting bitching out later down the line. 150$ for every time I don't put in the hours. I'll also use the case study so that I expose myself to you guys and that if I stop doing my case studies, I'm a quitter, and thus, a loser.

Question: I've been reading on how SEO and websites are quite dead and how I should focus on getting money directly from social media platforms. Is SEO affiliate marketing a waste of time. I'm leaning towards yes, but I'm still learning.

This community is a godsend.

P.S : If there is a huge number of grammatical mistakes, I would like to know. I'm not a native english speaker, so I'll need to improve.
 
Yes and no.

Pure SEO is a waiting game and can take you 9-12 months to get some "okay" traction. What most people that concentrate on just SEO do in that time is just fucking around and watch their analytics all day.

If you plan on just doing SEO I can assure you 9-12 months of just content creation and outreach is going to destroy your soul and motivation when the results coming in are less than stellar.

Instead you need to be promoting their website like real marketers and a real business. That means getting a budget together and spending it on paid marketing, influencers, and generating traffic. Traffic leaks is one avenue. Social media is another avenue. Creating videos and posting on YouTube is another avenue.

There are literally thousands of websites in the Alexa Top 1000 websites that have the highest amount of traffic on them. Your audience is on those websites. As a marketer you need to get in front of your audience where they are and give value and grow your brand awareness.

No business can survive waiting 9-12 months for "approval" to get "some foot traffic" to their business. If you have a physical location you would need to announce to the neighborhood you are there. SEO is the equivalent of waiting till next year's yellowpages to come around and list you. Meanwhile you are sitting in your store all day doing what?

You need to get out there, pass out flyers, host weekend get-togethers for local meetups for free for different groups/industries/niches. Things that get your store's location known within the community. Think outside the box on how to generate foot traffic and brand awareness for free.

"If you can't make money without money, you probably can't make money with money" - Dan Lok

Once you find something that works double down on it, while using 20% of your time to experiment with other avenues of traffic, cause something else might pop and gain you a huge following and traffic increase.

My main point is you have to be marketing DAILY. You have to go to your customer and find them. Don't waste 9-12 months waiting for Google to send you traffic. You'll be wasting 9-12 months on the internet, meanwhile your competitors are creating YouTube videos and building brand awareness. If you go all in, go all in with whatever, but don't think it's as easy as creating 6-12 pillar content pieces, 12-40 supporting content pieces and waiting for Google. You are going to be extremely disappointed in that strategy.

Welcome to BuSo.
 
Thank you for the informative reply. Also, is there such thing as being too thorough regarding Market Research? I would like to avoid paralysis by analysis as much as possible, but I know how important Market Research is.
 
Davehut said:
Also, is there such thing as being too thorough regarding Market Research?
Click to expand...
Of course. You see it time and again (and nobody, including me, is immune). Interminable market research and fine tuning shit when you have no traffic.

1. Is there money in your market? Are people wanting to buy goods or services?
2. Are there barriers which they find problematical to achieve the goal that they are after?
3. Can you do something to reduce or remove those barriers?

Example: Customer persona - someone who thinks it might be cool to fly a drone in Sweden

1. Is there money in the market? Yep, drones can cost over a grand plus there are all kinds of accessories so possible options for multiple sales.
2. Possible customer knows nothing about hobby. Is it legal? Where can you do it, if at all? What kind of things can you do with it? What should you buy as a beginner? What do you need to know? Where do you need to go? Where can you find like-minded people?
3. Are there already sites and shops in Swedish or focussing on Sweden? Are they any good? Do they cover all the crap that the Yanks do? If not, are there gaps in the market? Is anyone listing local drone enthusiasts? Is anyone hosting amateur drone videos? Is anyone doing crazy stuff in Sweden with drones? Who are the commercial companies using drones and what are they doing?

That took me about 10 minutes to write. If you know about the hobby already you can probably answer most of the questions. The rest should take you half a day to research and it may start your brain sparking...

(For example: the local drone company websites and social media presence are crap. Hmm, maybe I can work a partnership or offers specialised marketing services or make some connection which can help my site...)

Added: as a matter of interest (and I have nothing to do with this market) the leading Swedish EMD and first Swedish-language site to come up has a grand total of 85 backlinks.
 
Too add on to what CCarter is saying, actual real deal marketing is the fastest route to successful SEO anyways, so there's zero reason you should ever stop marketing. Don't wait for traffic. Go get it.

There's also zero reason to publish a piece of content that isn't optimized around a keyword you have a realistic chance of ranking for either. It may take 6 months to bake into the algorithm and wait, but that time is going to pass anyways and it only takes an extra 10 minutes or less to optimize a post. In a year's time, even if you care diddly squat about SEO, if you at least optimized each post around a keyword, you'll be getting some amount of extra traffic that's highly targeted for each piece of content. Chasing that snowball of passive traffic and income is where SEO's screw up. They need to chase "right now" traffic through marketing and the rest happens naturally.
  • Always be marketing any content you publish
  • Always be optimizing any content you publish
Welcome aboard. Just remember, it's not called "Internet SEO," it's called "Internet Marketing" and SEO is only a sub-set of that.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. You have a fun journey ahead of you and a bunch of excited, knowledgable, and helpful people here to support you. All you have to do is speak up. Catch ya around the forum!
 
Regarding what CCarter and Ryuzaki said above about marketing and SEO.
It's a good idea to start your first business/website in a field which you're passionate, a hobby, then market it using yourself personally. That makes it so much, much easier, to get traction with non-paid marketing. Being a noob at something and writing, talking, vlogging about it is a great starting point. Lots of people are noobs at something and feel intimidated to ask "experts". You can be the noob expert until you become the expert. Also, if possible use your own name and likeness or at least a persona and name that's close to the real you. Authenticity sells.
 
Thanks a lot for the replies guys. I'm currently in a niche that I am very interested in, but don't know much about. I'll start learning a lot about it and start executing.

Also, if you guys don't mind, from your experience, is it possible to have a pretty profitable internet business (high 4 figures, low 5 mid figures/month) just working 20-30 hours a week (college+sales job taking a lot of time)? It will be my only internet business till I either absolutely fail or make it.
 
Davehut said:
Also, if you guys don't mind, from your experience, is it possible to have a pretty profitable internet business (high 4 figures, low 5 mid figures/month) just working 20-30 hours a week (college+sales job taking a lot of time)? It will be my only internet business till I either absolutely fail or make it.
Click to expand...

Anything is possible I guess, but at some point, preferably soon, you'll want to ditch the sales job to only work on your biz full time.

When you find some success, as in maybe 2-3K a month, you'd preferably want to take a semester off and work 60-80 hours a week to take the next step.
 
I wouldn't stop your college momentum. I'd stop your sales job if the income from the site replaces it. But it's almost guaranteed that if you stop going to college, you won't go back. Have your degree as something to fall back on. Not everyone makes it in this game. Hedge your bets.
 
Greetings, Everyone. I am joining as a noob to all of this. I'm currently attempting to teach myself web design/coding and adding this place to my learning process. I'm tired of the 9-5 and want to experience life differently by building something to share and do it on my own terms. I have a long way to go, but hopefully, I'll be able to contribute back at a level that grows with my skills and experience.

I'm happy to join you all in the process and see what will happen. :smile:

-Waffles

----

Let me try this again. After looking at a few intros I realized I need to go a little deeper…

I am joining this group because I want to learn how to create a business that will generate an income for my family that doesn’t require me to slog to an office in the morning and work on somebody else’s terms. I dream of waking up with an easing sunrise instead of a frightening alarm. I dream of saying “yes” to my wife when she asks if we can take a long weekend next weekend to stay at the lake and swing in a hammock while watching our son play in the dirt with the roly polys. I dream that each day I can spend time building something fun and profitable. I dream of freedom to live life on my terms.

My name here is Waffles. I can remember in about 2003 I found a few websites that promised to help you earn money online after paying for their ebook. I saw infomercials of dudes driving Ferraris and living in huge houses throwing money around like confetti and living on their own terms. I barely understood what the internet was then and had no interest in it, other than the money part, and assumed it was probably all a scam. I knew people were making tons of money on the internet but it just seemed so distant and foreign to me. It was scary. Five years later I still didn’t even understand what a blog was. I was a complete noob. Still am, really.

Fast forward to 2013 and by the recommendation of my father-in-law who is a network engineer, I started teaching myself about networking and Cisco products. Eventually, I became a network engineer myself. It’s a good profession and I enjoy many aspects of the job. I enjoy the challenge and troubleshooting and fixing things. I enjoy feeling like my work is useful to someone else and helping them with something they don’t understand. But, the one thing I still seek and still lack, is freedom. I am still on someone else’s schedule. I go to work and help build other peoples dream.

I am ready to build something for myself. Build something that supports my dream. With enough work I know I will make it happen. And one thing I have learned over the years and through learning networking is that it is much easier and effective to learn something when you have the support of other people. When you can bounce ideas and questions off of other people who can redirect your ignorance into learning.

I look forward to learning, discussing, and building with you all.

-Waffles
 
Welcome aboard, Waffles.

You've got a dream, now you need a plan!

Have you thought about the direction you might go in this wide world of internet marketing?

Seems like at some point you could create a site about networking and Cisco products, either getting Adsense clicks probably on colleges and certification stuff (probably a decent CPC), generate leads for a certification program perhaps (much higher conversion value for you)... who knows. I wonder how hard it would be to rank for these kind of search terms. Of course paid advertising could bypass all of that if you can turn a profit on it.

There's so many things you can do. We talk a lot about SEO but that's just one angle you can take.

Have you got an idea about how you might proceed?
 
Ryuzaki said:
Seems like at some point you could create a site about networking and Cisco products, either getting Adsense clicks probably on colleges and certification stuff (probably a decent CPC), generate leads for a certification program perhaps (much higher conversion value for you)... who knows. I wonder how hard it would be to rank for these kind of search terms. Of course paid advertising could bypass all of that if you can turn a profit on it.
Have you got an idea about how you might proceed?
Click to expand...
I think my two angles right now would be like you say, networking; or my other knowledge in fitness. I currently also run a women's fitness boot camp. It's a kind of franchise. However, I am not the owner. But I've thought about creating a boot camp workout site that helps other boot camp owner/operators create workouts for different levels of clients.

I just finished Day 1 of the Crash Course so I have a long way to go to really understand all your lingo and the way your thinking about the problem. That is actually one thing I really liked about Day 1 "We're not going to tell you exactly what to do, only how to think and what to think about." Being able to know what questions to ask and how to steer my mind will be a big help for me to figure out exactly where I will take this action.

I just read Forums>Garden>Stop Fucking Around.

It gave me a motoboner.
 
Welcome to the board. Bottom line. get shit done and Try marketing that makes sense without fear.
 
Background
I'm 27 years old and have had a couple side projects for the last 4 years. My first attempt was a local cleaning business where I subcontracted cleaners and used the website to generate customers - it functioned perfectly fine as a business and made a small amount of money but I was too inexperienced to deal with the cleaners and/or customers. The whole thing makes me cringe when I think back.

The second was my first affiliate site which was based around hobbies (sports, gardening, hydroponics, etc) with the idea of becoming a resource for how to start hobbies and where to buy products. Kind of like Meetup but just info-based. Firstly, I didn't give it anywhere near the attention it deserved and, secondly, it was too big a project for me (also it was built on Joomla... Grim). I wanted to steer it in the direction of self-improvement for mental health and almost like a real-world application for dating/relationships - better yourself by becoming genuniely interesting to get the girl/guy (anti-Tinder?). I think there is definitely a gap in the market for something like it, alas, it just won't be me filling it. Think you need money and manpower to have a decent crack at it. Neither of which I have.

I was talking to an acquaintence who bought a property in the centre of town, doid it up and put it on the market for £2 million so he's doing alright for himself. I mentioned that although I hadn't succeeded in the projects I enjoyed it and it was fun to me blah, blah. He said "Nah, fuck that. You have to treat it like a job". That was in October and it shifted my perspective.

I initially started these projects because I wanted to get out of the rat race before I'd even entered it. I didn't have any understanding of what having a 9-5 job actually meant so I didn't have that grounding in place to utilise for motivation - you know what I mean if you've had to do it. I wanted money so that I could make the most of my time whilst I'm alive but now my motivations have changed somewhat from living a life of luxury to my own self-improvement. I don't want to the "had so much potential" anymore and want to be someone that realises their potential.

I have come a long way mentally in the 4 years and I feel like if I stop this journey before I get that proper yes, look what I've created then I'll never forgive myself.

Foreground
This now brings me onto my current project which I began at the end of last year but if you remember google was de-indexing pages randomly for some reason so nothing was indexed until about April. The niche is pretty large which may prove my SEO downfall but it's popular enough that I should be able to produce content in a lot of areas.

Recently I've found a writing style that I think is pretty great but I've only written info posts really, I wanted to try and gain some sort of following before monetising began. My biggest weakness is promotion, I get super anxious about it. Before starting something like this, you don't realise the emotional energy it takes to create even basic articles/websites - it feels that way for me at least.

I wasn't getting anywhere with SEO so to combat both this and the anxiety of promotion I set out a goal on the 1st July that I'd have 1000 new users (87/week) and 50 new subscribers by the 1st October. Currently 368 new users so I'm 100 over my weekly target so quite happy with that, no subscribers but this traffic is mostly through Reddit so I'm hoping that other traffic sources may be more generous with their email addresses. This week I'm going to start dropping links in Quora and see if I can sort out some HARO submissions if anything comes up as I don't have any decent backlinks yet.

Pinterest is something I've been trying to master but nothing's taken off even though this niche is ideal for Pinterest. I read Pinterest case studies about people generating like 40,000 monthly visitors and I get a solitary tear running down my cheek at the possibilities. Going to try and get my follower count up so I can get on some group boards.

Currently in a good place mentally when it comes to this project. I would say that my determination is relatively strong at the moment. I come back from my job and work until about 12am, chipping away. I've promised myself I won't start anything new until I can objectively say this website has succeeded. I haven't put anything concrete in place for determining that but I think you know what I mean. The niche is large enough that traffic can be generated and money made, it's just a case of finding out how and doing it.

Anyway, think that's plenty of words now so hope that was suitable.

Catch you on the flip side.
 
Supermulti said:
I've promised myself I won't start anything new until I can objectively say this website has succeeded. I haven't put anything concrete in place for determining that but I think you know what I mean.
Click to expand...

You need a solid number/goal. Otherwise $1million or $1K might fall into the same "vague" range. That's where projects fail, they don't have proper KPIs (key performance indicator) to measure. Realistically the most important KPI is revenue, that literally should be #1. Another good one is traffic and subscribers. However since you didn't start off with revenue it means you are subconsciously staying away from it, I've seen this thousands of times.

I can assure you that if you measure revenue magically that KPI will start growing since you'll focus your mindset to work on things that drive revenue and not necessarily increase in traffic or subscribers.

Really ask yourself - by Oct 1st what would you rather have, revenue or traffic? You want to treat this like a job, you have to treat this like a brick and mortar business. Having foot traffic into your store means nothing if no one is buying anything. Use revenue targets as your goals and you'll end up a lot happier versus these "just SEO" projects that never get anywhere because people are worried about the weak KPIs instead of the one KPI that ALL business need = Revenue!

Welcome to Buso.
 
CCarter said:
You need a solid number/goal. Otherwise $1million or $1K might fall into the same "vague" range. That's where projects fail, they don't have proper KPIs (key performance indicator) to measure. Realistically the most important KPI is revenue, that literally should be #1. Another good one is traffic and subscribers. However since you didn't start off with revenue it means you are subconsciously staying away from it, I've seen this thousands of times.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. That makes a tonne of sense and I will have a rethink about my 1st October goal, it will also be a good indicator if my new writing style works to actually convert people into buying customers. Awesome.
 
One thing I see people get backwards constantly is thinking about "how much traffic can I get," which is meaningless.

I learned this lesson as a young lad when I boasted about how I was making $2k+ a month on this one education / rehab / addiction site on like 3,000 visitors a month, if I recall correctly. I tried to stunt on this guy that had like 50,000 visitors a month and was making ~$500. It was silly banter for fun, but he pointed out that we were in different niches with different styles of websites. His was a tech forum with banner ads, mine was a lead gen property.

Later this lesson was expanded when I started getting out of pure SEO and into real marketing. I found out real fast that chasing massive traffic meant nothing if the quality of the traffic was super low (like "hacking" the mind of Reddit users to get a click to your site). Even though I had Adsense and even a crafty Amazon link to drop cookies, when I hit #1 on r/all and got like 30,000 visitors in a 24 hour period, it only turned into about $800 and that was because I was dropping Amazon cookies on thousands of people and getting commissions on random stuff they were buying and the very rare Adsense click. If I had gotten 5,000 visitors on a more targeted sub-reddit to a page meant to convert sales, I'd have made way more money. I only managed to make any money due to baiting them into clicking the Amazon link.

But if I was using CPM ads I'd have gotten paid for every page load and I could be pulling down trash Reddit and Facebook traffic all day long. Lots would be out of the primary advertising regions but it'd still be fat cash and I wouldn't have to worry about targeting their intent or state of mind during the click.

I said all that just to come back to the main point, which is not to worry about swinging your e-peen based on traffic numbers. What you want to do is start at the money conversion. You want to design your site around it, design your content around it, so that everything leads to the conversion, whatever that may be. Then, when you start promoting your content, you naturally are promoting it to people that are going to convert. That might mean they pick up the phone and dial your number, they type their info into your lead generation form. It might mean they have to do nothing but load the page, in which case traffic quality doesn't matter (but the curse is you need gobs of traffic to make real money).

Most people start at the top of the funnel and chase traffic and then try to figure out how to make money on the traffic.

"Start at the conversion and work backwards" is the best advice I ever received.
 
Ryuzaki said:
What you want to do is start at the money conversion. You want to design your site around it, design your content around it, so that everything leads to the conversion, whatever that may be.
Click to expand...

Thanks very much for your reply, really appreciated. I'm definitely going to modify my approach.

Please could you explain how you would have done this for one of your old sites? I know it's basic but I often complicate things more than is necessary. For instance, do you just think to yourself I need to write this kind of content to get people to click on this link and buy the product. For this post I need to target these people. Do you have a framework, or something similar, or is it more intuitive once you've got experience of the niche/business in general?
 
Supermulti said:
For instance, do you just think to yourself I need to write this kind of content to get people to click on this link and buy the product. For this post I need to target these people.
Click to expand...
I'd just add, related to what @Ryuzaki and @CCarter have said but from the point of view of content and concept, what is the point of pain that you are addressing?

Your website is an online business, whether sales, lead gen, affiliate referrals or information. What problems can you address which your potential viewers are unlikely to be able to do online (or only by overcoming what they perceive as hurdles)? Are all the things that they might need available to buy online? Are they able to find all the services that they need online? Are they able to find trustworthy information and recommendations about their needs online?

Any time you hear someone say, "I can't find decent ..." after an internet session is a point of pain and opportunity.

Welcome to the forums.
 
Supermulti said:
Please could you explain how you would have done this for one of your old sites?
Click to expand...

First let's detour and think about the sales funnel and how it might look on a content site:

What is a garden hoe?​
v​
How do you use a garden hoe?​
v​
What should I look for in a garden hoe?​
v​
The best garden hoe brands​
v​
The best garden hoes​
v​
Garden hoe coupons​
v​
The purchase​

With SEO, you'll find lots of sites that try to just be "best ____" and "____ reviews." This can work okay but Google also penalizes them with the "thin content" penalty. You'll see sites that skate by being just "coupon sites." Lots of advertisers don't like these because they don't add any value, they just skim off the top of an "already done deal." Some like it because they're coupons are selling points in a flooded market where they may not have gotten the sale otherwise (and have inflated their prices to have huge coupons).

That's how lots of people think about it when they're just doing SEO. But those are usually short-lived projects. We're looking to do something bigger.

Often you'll want to cover all of the top-of-the-funnel crap that doesn't really make you money directly, but it serves two purposes. It masks the fact that you're only there to make money from search engines and it disarms the users into thinking you're a bigger operation than you are, builds trust, educates, etc. This isn't a bad thing, it's a testament to how much one person can do online by grinding or outsourcing and automating.

I used to work in the rehab niche a bit. Take the case of lead generation through pay per call. It's one thing to slap your number in the header and footer and hope for the best. What I did (and this doesn't work that well anymore in these kind of YMYL [your money your life] niches), was to try to get closer to the bottom of the funnel where people are close to making their decisions.

So I found a bunch of publicly available data on rehab locations, mixed it all together and got organized, created a database that I could then turn into state-level (as in USA states) pages with every addiction treatment facility in the state. I figured people searching for "rehab facilities in NY" are pretty close to being admitted themselves or for a family member. I then listed the overwhelming number of options, the phone number prominently with a call to action about letting us help them determine which location is best for them based on length of stay, out or in-patient, insurance acceptance, detox needs, etc. Worked like a charm.

On the site I mentioned above that was making $2k on 3k pageviews per month, it was in the same niche but for people wanting to be on the employee side. They needed degrees, certifications, all that stuff, so I wrote about it all. But what I didn't do was tell them where to get the degrees and certifications, but I stressed how important it was (it was mandatory). Guess where that information was to be found? In the advertisers websites that were targeting me using Adsense and paying $5 a click. And when you do this right, (content compulsions and ad placement) you get a very high click through rate too.

That's two examples from my past about building around the monetization method, plus some general ones you'll see people in the SEO industry trying to do. It's what we're all trying to do, but the question is how well do you do it, and can you get qualified traffic to the pages. That's often SEO traffic, but if your ROI is high enough you can break into PPC campaigns and start printing money. I knew a guy who stopped caring about his pay-per-call site and started running Adwords ads with click to call ads on mobile, direct to the advertisers. He made enough money doing that that he turned it into a physical vaping shop, which did so well he basically forgot about the pay-per-call and let it die (should have paid someone to keep it running).
 
ToffeeLa said:
Your website is an online business, whether sales, lead gen, affiliate referrals or information. What problems can you address which your potential viewers are unlikely to be able to do online (or only by overcoming what they perceive as hurdles)? Are all the things that they might need available to buy online? Are they able to find all the services that they need online? Are they able to find trustworthy information and recommendations about their needs online?
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Hey, thanks for the message.

The website is in the interior design/home decor niche. The main issue I'm trying to solve is people not understanding how to style their homes, confidence in their ability, where to get certain pieces of furniture from, etc. That's really the basis of it. Plenty of styles, plenty of furniture and the majority of it will be bought online.

I'm confident money can be made as there are obviously some big players but the information is often presented in dull formats. Hoping to stand out by changing this.

Ryuzaki said:
First let's detour and think about the sales funnel and how it might look on a content site:
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Awesome, thank you very much for the reply. I've been doing this to a better extent with this current website compared to the last one. Something I think I need to change about my content production strategy is producing the funnel in one go rather than jumping onto a different sub-niche and different part of the funnel. Thanks again, definitely food for thought - improvements on the way!
 
Hi all,
Started doing e-commerce since the 90s, PPC 2002 and been self employed the last 30yrs.
Always wanted to build some niche sites and found this place in my interweb travels.
Have a few dormant domains that hopefully can be put to good use.
Lots of great reading material here and plenty of inspiration which is what I'm looking for.

Cheers
 
Sounds like you have plenty of experience and success shouldn't be too hard for you if you apply all you already know, on top of building the content and acquiring the links. Just don't get sucked into the spam game. I've lost a few years to that. You make money in the mean time and get left with nothing to show for it and no on-going income stream. But your PPC skills will be priceless in terms of exposure and driving traffic and getting natural links and everything else. Good luck!
 
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