Since there are actually people reading this now, here’s a little about me:
I started in the industry (making money online, or trying to anyway) when I was about 14 - 6 years ago - I wanted to be a designer. Of course this was the true beginning, just started learning that it was possible but still not believing it.
So the concept is easy, build sites, get traffic and monetize.
I built my first adult/porn websites (who didn’t) later that year doing the same shit everybody did, ripping content from other sites, spamming forums, blogs and sites for traffic - I made monies!
Registered my first Adwords account at like age 15 ;). Fucked around a lot, lost money, didn’t use it for a couple years.
Later after pursuing more knowledge a friend introduced me to black hat. Back when I started cloaking was pretty popular… You know, show the search engines awesome content and the users something completely different. We ended up building a program that grabbed content from other sites and delivered the bots there, I think I made a diet site that had 100k+ pages within a couple weeks.
Through all this I was required to learn PHP because nobody was there to code shit for me, nor did I have money to pay anyone, nor did I know the extent of the language at all. PHP was and has been the most useful thing I’ve ever learned.
Then the SEO era came. I learned the whole concept of building back links and relevant content (more content more better). So I built my first myspace layouts website, built tons of back links to it via adding properly chosen anchor text links into the “myspace code” so when people pasted it into their profile I’d get a backlink. I also put links in tons of directories as well as link exchanges with higher ranked sites. Used my newfound PHP skills and mod_rewrite skills and made “search” friendly URLs and a content management system. Did this for about 4-5 months, at which point it was pulling about 3-4k uniques/day which was awesome for my first time but obviously myspace traffic pays shitty on adsense (which is what I was using at the time).
Note: This is all through school. I was also in all sports and participated in most school clubs/organizations and was a HUGE video gamer, which explains the huge gap in years of learning all this.
Now the 2 years of explosive growth in a nutshell.
I heard about affiliate marketing via PPC back in late 2006. Freaken awesome I thought, I can buy traffic, send it to offers and make instant monies? Registered to my first affiliate network - AzoogleAds. This definitely wasn’t the explosive growth part.
Lost tons of money. I worked a job selling cell phones at this time, and I used most of that money to advertise. Lost thousands after thousands (literally), there were many times I was in debt at the age of 17-18, that’s pretty bad. But for some reason I never stopped, I even decided not to go to college because I just truly believed I can make it work. Kept working hard with some guidance from certain people that I met a long the way…
After about 6-7 of the craziest months of my life, I figured it out. The rest is history but the story is still being written.
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Here are the useful things:
Email: bluebobbo [at] gmail [dot] com
AIM: [same as email without the @ gmail dot com]