Introductions Thread

Looks like you have fallen a few times but keep on finding ways to get back up!
I'm curious about where your journey will lead.

PPC has always interested me, I know it's a legitimate business practice (as you have shown) but I just don't have the stomach for it. Pumping money in an algorithm feels too much like gambling.

Welcome, and good luck!
 
WinMore said:
Pumping money in an algorithm feels too much like gambling.
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Isn’t that what SEOs do? Isn’t what social media does? Isn’t that ALL marketing? You test and test until you find traction.

PPC is simply cutting through the filter and noise, compressing time. You can spend a dime or you can spending time, which is more valuable? Time you can never get back.

Imagine if you had an idea and went down the SEO route and had to wait 12-24 months to find out if it can turn a profit. Or you could spend $5k on PPC in a month or week to find out whether it’s profitable. Which would you rather choose?

You have to switch your mindset, cause losing 12 months versus $5k should make your stomach turn even more-so.

The people that win big know when to get rid of a dead project.

“Fail and fail fast.”
 
I totally agree with everything you said, it's 100% a mindset thing.
As I grow older I'm starting to value time more and more.
You can't really win if you don't take any risks anyway. And every time you fail you learn something.

I have started to spend money to learn faster, and while I'm still reluctant I do realize it's often the smarter way to go.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Welcome. You went in a direction I toyed with a long time ago. I did some CPA offers with PPC on Plenty of Fish and Facebook. I got disgusted pretty quickly when the manager at the company I was using killed one of my campaigns that was taking off and then ran the exact same campaign as a case study on his blog.

Are you at all concerned about having an asset of your own again of some sort? I'm mainly in the SEO space myself. I looked the past few days about firing up PPC again and immediately started thinking about how it's more akin to a day job of creating and optimizing campaigns, them burning out, and restarting. Not that SEO doesn't have the equivalent but I like that there's compounding efforts and my income continues to increase. It's a roller coaster but less so than PPC. But I know too if you're good at PPC you can print money.
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Yeah man, basically PPC actually taught me how vital are top-3 spots for revenue generation with any offer/product.
And yes, PPC was always supposed to be a churn/burn project with the Nutra offers, no point in extra optimization because you know you're get hit by Google any day.

The mistake I made was to only rely on PPC when it was making heaps of money, but now I have learned my lesson and I am fully invested in SEO properties now, and aiming for that top-3 across all my offers. :wink:

And you are right, PPC was a 9-to-5 for me because I had to do the same thing over and over again:
- Create New Accounts
- Warm Them Up
- Create a Website
- Set up the Cloaker
- Pray it spends money :tongue:
haha
So yeah, it was kinda hectic and I didn't see long-term passive growth in it, but it was good while it was minting money. :D

WinMore said:
Looks like you have fallen a few times but keep on finding ways to get back up!
I'm curious about where your journey will lead.

PPC has always interested me, I know it's a legitimate business practice (as you have shown) but I just don't have the stomach for it. Pumping money in an algorithm feels too much like gambling.

Welcome, and good luck!
Click to expand...
Hey man, that's life!
Like Rocky says: It ain't how hard you hit; it's about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward"

Honestly, if you learn PPC, it is the actual get-rich-quick scheme haha if you know your way around it from Day 1, otherwise you need to invest and learn for yourself as I did. :smile:

CCarter said:
Isn’t that what SEOs do? Isn’t what social media does? Isn’t that ALL marketing? You test and test until you find traction.

PPC is simply cutting through the filter and noise, compressing time. You can spend a dime or you can spending time, which is more valuable? Time you can never get back.

Imagine if you had an idea and went down the SEO route and had to wait 12-24 months to find out if it can turn a profit. Or you could spend $5k on PPC in a month or week to find out whether it’s profitable. Which would you rather choose?

You have to switch your mindset, cause losing 12 months versus $5k should make your stomach turn even more-so.

The people that win big know when to get rid of a dead project.

“Fail and fail fast.”
Click to expand...

100%. Double the rate of your failure, and decrease the success time in half. And always fail forward.

The thing was that I knew that offers were converting with PPC, and I knew that a long-term SEO asset to have similar offers will be worthwhile, so hence I started my CPA with SEO projects

PPC to validate the idea, SEO to double-down and play the long game!

P.S Absolute fan of yours @CCarter *fangirl moment*
 
Hello everyone! Just joined the forum after lurking for a few weeks. Here's a bit about me.

Name - Mohit from Jodhpur, India. Though I spend some time in the US/Canada and SE Asia every year.

Role/skills - Buying. building and growing cash-flowing content websites.

Experience in Internet marketing - Have been buying/operating content sites for over 8 years now. Over the years, I have had people come up to me and ask for my help in helping them invest in websites, so I launched my Micro PE firm Blackbook Investments in 2016 and since then, have been helping investors invest in websites while themselves being totally passive.

Thesis - Content sites (affiliate/advertising) have immense potential and are usually much easier to build than say, a SaaS or Web app. You don’t need any coding skills to build content sites and they can be sold for a good 3-4x yearly multiple.

Target deal size ($) - $10k-$1m. Currently looking to raise a fund backed by angels/HNWs to buy content-based businesses on a deal-to-deal basis.

Excited to be part of this amazing group, and super appreciative of the people running the forum!

Hit me up with any questions/feedback.
 
Hey man, loved your introduction. [it's not as long as mine, haha]

I have never ventured into Display Ads before, not sure how much they cost but hope it's working out for you.
Do you have an in-house team or off-shore?

Good luck in your endeavors=)

I agree, this probably has to be the cleanest IM forum I've come across. Welcome to the group, haksxsx =)
 
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fatalityhawk said:
Hey man, loved your introduction. [it's not as long as mine, haha]

I have never ventured into Display Ads before, not sure how much they cost but hope it's working out for you.
Do you have an in-house team or off-shore?

Good luck in your endeavors=)
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Hahaha. Thanks!

For display ads, I don't pay for them, I get paid with them. I run websites that generate search engine traffic and receive revenue from the ads the visitors see and click on. Hopefully, that clarifies things a bit.

For my team, it is all remote, even the people in the US who work for me are all remote contractors. I prefer contracting workers rather than hiring employees because it simplifies the business structure immensely since I'm also in the US.

If you build your business systems and controls properly, then the advantages of hiring an employee over a contractor essentially disappear (from an operations perspective). I'm not a CPA, so there might be some type of tax advantage, but for simplicity, I choose to contract.
 
Oohh yeah, that makes much more sense :D

One question though, why haven't you explored the option to hire contractors outside of the U.S.?
Like experienced Central Europe and Asian countries have people with the same (if not better) language skills yet considerably lower hourly rate and MUCH LESS BAGGAGE. haha =D
 
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fatalityhawk said:
Oohh yeah, that makes much more sense :D

One question though, why haven't you explored the option to hire contractors outside of the U.S.?
Like experienced Central Europe and Asian countries have people with the same (if not better) language skills yet considerably lower hourly rate and MUCH LESS BAGGAGE. haha =D
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Oh, I absolutely do. Most of my team is overseas. I love the time difference too. It's nice to go to sleep and know that I have people waking up to help run the business.
 
Welcome aboard, @mohit, I'm glad you decided to start posting.

I agree that you can build content sites without knowing how to code at all, but you end up paying for it by needing more and more plugins to do what you want, which ends up destroying your page speed. I'm able to implement all of these various needs myself without plugins and their render blocking CSS and JS files, while having extremely fast page speeds. It's definitely something that can't be fixed as an afterthought either, once your site becomes reliant on those plugins.

That's cool about your firm. I know / know of a couple other people doing that exact same thing. Are you aware of the Income Store fiasco where they ran it like a ponzi scheme and the SEC ended up cracking down on them here in the US? They did the same but promised out ridiculous returns and of course started using new member investments to pay off old members while siphoning out millions for themselves.

I had sold a few sites a whiles back through a brokerage and once this company got popped, a spreadsheet started going around of all of their assets. I laughed because some of my old sites were in there and their top earner was my main project from many many years ago.

It's a small world out here in SEO. Glad to have made a connection with another professional.
 
A few years ago I realized I had become annoyingly vanilla. I had stopped inventing and instead listened to how things were "supposed" to be done. "Corporate Client A wants this like that," they'd say. And so I followed the rules.

As most people here probably discovered long ago, the so-called recipe for success is flawed for most. I'd heard it said but the truth was hard for me to internalize.

I had become a hamster in a wheel. I needed to find a way out.

First I moved to Europe and then to Asia. The environment changes gifted me with culture and knowledge, but the escape I needed was not geographical. I needed to change the way I thought about things and approached the world. I needed to become a tinkerer again.

I moved back to the states and started returning to my roots. I carved out time to play and to experiment. All said and done, this is the story that epitomizes why I am here and what I hope to contribute:

When people ask me about my proudest achievement I always tell them about how one of my startups got acquired by a recognizable company or about my experience as a Division I All-American athlete who was recruited to play in the Olympics.

But in the back of my head I think about this time, twenty years ago or so, when I received a Most Helpful Member award on a forum called AskEarth. It's by far my proudest achievement.

In third or fourth grade my dad (who worked for IBM) gave me his old laptop. I figured out how to connect to the Internet via our squeaky modem that clogged up the phone line. Everything changed. I started buying 2600, exchanged letters with prisoners, and mail ordered a pamphlet of potion recipes.

I took it all in, pursued my interests, and tinkered in the world.

During this time I discovered AskEarth. If you don't know the place, it was like Quora, but from the good ole' days of the Internet. People cared for each other. Total strangers saved marriages (or at least consoled the people leaving them), talked people through financial crises, and much more.

I was obsessed. Always questioning, always inspired, always offering my best young-self advice.

AskEarth taught me how big the world is and how important it is to care for others. I learned to ask questions and to record what matters.

And then I stopped. I never spoke of AskEarth to anyone. I was the only person I knew who liked computers, and so I returned to regular life. I turned into the mushy vanilla person who looked for answers on different continents. I walked the earth but did not venture to change it.

Then, finally, I realized I'd lost touch with my soul as a curious creator and inventor. I started rethinking the way I work as a digital marketer. i jumped back into the forums I'd left long ago and gave myself permission to tinker, to learn, to build, and to care again.

AskEarth has been gone for years, but when I encountered a post by Ccarter I was immediately reminded of the generosity and open-world feeling I used to experience every time I logged in to AskEarth. I read his post and have literally thought about it every day for two weeks.

The knowledge and people here are what I've been seeking. I lost it for a bit, but I am a questioner and a builder at heart. I'm ready to absorb this great big world again and eager to experiment. And maybe, if I'm lucky, I can be helpful to others as well.
 
I've been lurking for about a month now and decided it was high time to just sign up already.

I'm currently in college with a double major + minor and am very involved on campus (student org prez & program manager for a web design/consulting/SEO service).

In my spare time (yay summer) I'm working on growing my portfolio of niche sites.

My background...

I started building sites in 2014 but didn't get into internet marketing & SEO until 2016. That's when I found WA and went through both courses there. I didn't have any success until the end of 2017 after having expanded my horizons by discovering Dean and Patel. I know, I know. These guys don't have the best rep among Real SEOs™, but I was determined and consistent enough to make it work.

Since early 2018, I discovered greats like Eli Aloisi and Glen Allsopp and soaked up everything I could find of theirs (even bought Glen's course). In late 2018, I broke $10K in one month because of a single 1,000-word review I happened to publish with perfect timing.

I initially discovered BuSo through a retweet by @GrindstoneSEO
https://twitter.com/x/status/1278752538234404866
I read that thread and was mind-blown cause it had been so long since I'd read anything SEO-related so unique. Shortly after, I started lurking around here and going through the DSCC. I've gained so much knowledge from that and other threads. I've probably learned more in the last month than I did all last year.

I'm currently working on my sites full-time to try and ramp them up before school starts up. Speaking of which, I should get back to writing that product comparison article and preparing those articles to outsource....

I'm excited to be here!
 
NeverStop said:
I'm currently in college with a double major + minor and am very involved on campus (student org prez & program manager for a web design/consulting/SEO service).

In my spare time (yay summer) I'm working on growing my portfolio of niche sites.
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Hell yeah, that sounds fantastic. You're giving back to your community, you're working in the industry, AND you're growing your "get free of it all" projects for yourself. Perfection.

NeverStop said:
after having expanded my horizons by discovering Dean and Patel. I know, I know. These guys don't have the best rep among Real SEOs™
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Those guys are fine. I don't get the hate. Brian Dean came up with a lot of us here in the same circles. He's legit. So in Neil Patel. I don't know him but dammit does that mofo get so much done. I laugh at how he's done 10,000 guest posts around the internet all using his name and personal brand, knowing damn well outsourced all of it. He doesn't give a damn and it's awesome.

NeverStop said:
Since early 2018, I discovered greats like Eli Aloisi and Glen Allsopp and soaked up everything I could find of theirs (even bought Glen's course).
Click to expand...

Eli is great. His BlueHatSEO stuff was among the early people really looking at SEO at scale and trying to crack the matrix in a technical way. I like Glen too, he got in early and built an amazing resume. His new projects are entertaining.

NeverStop said:
going through the DSCC. I've gained so much knowledge from that and other threads.
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Glad to hear it. We jam packed that bitch full of value, more so than all the paid courses out there, if the reader is ready to work and think rather than be spoonfed.

I'm glad you decided to join us and start posting. Happy to have you aboard.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Those guys are fine.
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Yeah, I probably read too much "SEO Twitter" lol.

Ryuzaki said:
Glad to hear it. We jam packed that bitch full of value, more so than all the paid courses out there, if the reader is ready to work and think rather than be spoonfed.
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I'm shocked I'd never heard of it. Guess knowledge of DSCC is a competitive advantage so everyone's kept it a secret. :cool:
 
NeverStop said:
In late 2018, I broke $10K in one month because of a single 1,000-word review I happened to publish with perfect timing.
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I did this once back in 2016 although not to the tune of $10k, it was more like $3k. The main product in my niche got a major upgrade, the biggest upgrade in 7 years. A host of new products were released in January, so from October the year before I started writing review content for them. Because no-one else was targeting the products as they weren't released yet, I was ranking number one. As soon as the products were released, I was seeing hundreds of sales daily. It was good times but I got giddy and sold it the month after.

Welcome to the forum!
 
Cash Builder said:
It was good times but I got giddy and sold it the month after.
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Is the site doing better now, or did it peter out shortly after you sold it?

I ask because I nearly sold my site at that point and would likely have gotten ~$140,000 for it. But I was naive enough to believe I could easily repeat that success so I held on. It had a fairly rapid decline to where it's now worth $30K at best.

(In some ways I regret not selling it, but I recently discovered an insanely profitable angle to my niche so at the moment I'm glad to have the site still. It has some good age and DA so I can still revive it.)
 
NeverStop said:
Is the site doing better now, or did it peter out shortly after you sold it?
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The traffic held steady for the first 6 months after I sold it, then I stopped checking.

I just checked it with Ahrefs now, and the traffic is still good. Checked the serps for some of the old keywords I snagged back in the day and they are still at the top. The owner hasn't done anything with the site - no new content, the content hasn't been updated, and it's still the same products I wrote about that are bringing in 90% of the traffic.

Every product is unavailable on Amazon as they are so old, may have to ping him a message to see if he'll do me a deal to buy it back...
 
Cash Builder said:
Every product is unavailable on Amazon as they are so old, may have to ping him a message to see if he'll do me a deal to buy it back...
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I mean...assuming you can replace them with products that are available, you'd see an instant bump in earnings...seems like a no-brainer (if he's willing to sell). Obviously vet the niche/products with Google Trends etc., but if traffic is holding years later it must be evergreen.
 
Hey guys, I hope we're all doing well and surviving as best we can in these pretty strange time that we currently find ourselves in. Anyways, I wanted to start an intro thread just to introduce myself and say a virtual 'hi' to everyone out there.

So as the title of this thread might suggest, I'm a backend web developer (Ruby/Python) developer and recently I had a moment of inspiration if you can call it that and I decided that I wanted to start an ecommerce business.

Two weeks ago I was walking back from the beach, through a cemetery with my wife and we were talking about funerals - I jokingly said that people would struggle with finding any words to say about me, stories to share or jokes to tell - all they'd be able to come up with would be "he led an unremarkable life and leaves behind a wife and daughter".

And I've been thinking about that ever since.

Don't get me wrong, I love my life and I'm happy but I realize that it is unremarkable and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

So I started to think about online business ideas as I've got a hankering to do...something!

After ruling out becoming the worlds most popular OnlyFans model (I'm sure the world would go wild for my beer gut and bald, wrinkled head) I started to think seriously about what's realistic and I came up with 3 serious contenders:
  • Ecommerce store (I've spent the last 13 years building these for other people)
  • Start a web development shop (again, I've been working on clients websites since I was 21)
  • Build a SaaS application (no idea what it would be built around)
Each of these has various pros and cons, methods of driving visitors to the site and ways to make money from it.

Starting the web shop would be the quickest path to a job replacing income as it'd only take a few projects a month, however, I'm really not a people person and the idea of cold calling businesses scares the shit out of me.

I'd love to write a SaaS app but this could be a longer term goal that I'd have to do along side my job (as I also need an idea too).

Ecommerce would be amazing, I've got cash to buy stock and a rough idea of what I'd sell, however, I think this one has the highest risk and could take a while to get to a place where I'm able to leave my current job to focus on it.

I'm lucky in that my wife has said she's behind me whatever I choose to do.

This needs some thought and scotch.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to getting stuck in with the forum and e-meeting you all.
 
Welcome aboard @relentless,

I'm not saying you should go the web shop route, but I can tell you that you'd get over the fear of phone calls by the 4th or 5th one. It's a small hurdle that gets obliterated by "exposure therapy" aka just doing it.

I'm pretty fascinated by eCommerce too. The idea of niche products with a handful of variations on Shopify and going to town with paid ads is exciting. Probably just because it's something different than what I currently do, which is publish on authority sites with an SEO focus.

Are you thinking of building out your own shop or doing something like Fulfillment by Amazon?
 
Build an app. Charging for software is op.
 
Wow, thanks for the warm welcome guys.

Ryuzaki said:
I'm pretty fascinated by eCommerce too. The idea of niche products with a handful of variations on Shopify and going to town with paid ads is exciting. Probably just because it's something different than what I currently do, which is publish on authority sites with an SEO focus.

Are you thinking of building out your own shop or doing something like Fulfillment by Amazon?
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100% my own shop, although I would be interested in trying to leverage the Amazon marketplace (although I've heard some horror stories about working with them).

secretagentdad said:
Build an app. Charging for software is op.
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Just need to find the right idea and this will be moved higher up my list of oportunities. Current ideas are around Facebook Ads automation based on what a professional media buyer would do or a product to compete with TrainingPeaks which doesn't really have any serious competitors.
 
Building an ecommerce store is fun. Have a look at Baymard and Nielsen for some conversation oriented design patterns. Think checkout, singel product pages and so on.

My guess is that you’ll stick with RoR, but Next combined with GraphQL and the Shopify api is great too. Especially the Shopify Light plan. The monthly cost are low, and the light plan gives you access to their api. You can then host your store on Vercel or Netlify for almost next to nothing.

And from experience the after sales support is the most important factor. Think things like easy returns, email and phone support and going the extra mile every time. But I’m stating the obvious here, something I’m rather good at...

Wishing you the best on your endeavors!
 
DanSkippy said:
My guess is that you’ll stick with RoR, but Next combined with GraphQL and the Shopify api is great too. Especially the Shopify Light plan. The monthly cost are low, and the light plan gives you access to their api. You can then host your store on Vercel or Netlify for almost next to nothing.
Click to expand...

That's a pretty interesting idea, but you're right, I'll be sticking to RoR for now.

I'll be honest, if I go down the ecommerce route I'd use Shopify and then just develop any custom apps that I need - the focus of this option would to code less to take care of the operations side.
 
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