This is my post #1000, yay!
Below is a little patchwork of fragments and thoughts on various topics. Hopefully this will help someone new to this make a couple of right decisions.
1) When you are on the internet, everyone you see is out there to make money. You need to understand how they make it, what they expect from you and how they can be useful to you. Most of the information you read is there to make people money, so don't just follow stuff blindly.
This relates to:
- Conferences, webinars, and courses are there to make their creators money from your attendance. That is why they will never run out of new classes, topics and announcements. Do not get stuck in studies forever.
- Industry news media is created to make money from traffic. Company spokespeople earn salary by making their companies look well. When the two meet together, be very suspicious of the advice they produce, most likely it's not practical.
No need to ignore everything and isolate yourself from all new information, but understand the agenda and money-making models and subtract them from everything you read.
2) Don't be too greedy and you will get rewarded more often than you think.
3) Imagine someone immoral and cruel somewhere far away reverse engineering everything you do. He will cut your costs in half and start making more money right away. Make a list of things he will cut, simplify, misunderstand, screw up, lie about and so on. This is your rival and he stops at nothing, so try to think like him and dissect your dear little business plan. What's your advantage over that ruthless beast? What will keep you in business? Maybe you should do some of the stuff he's about to? Because every day you get closer to meeting that guy.
4) I hope you are browsing Imgur frontpage at least once a day and reading the top 10-20 comments. It's a good way to stay updated with current trends and have a portrait of an "average" person if you are not a mainstream guy yourself.
Imgur Demographics - Imgur
imgur.com Site Overview
Fun part is that the community is more or less web-savvy, sarcastic to a point and admittedly resistant to advertising. Yet there are tons of marketed content getting viral there, so you may get some ideas on how to penetrate the minds better.
The linkbuilding and "traffic leaking" potential is obviously great there too, a little tutorial or myth debunking about something specific can go a long way.
5) When starting (talking about SEO/social) don't go around buying every tool out there, most of them serve similar purpose.
I have come down to these:
- Scrapebox
Here's a great recent thread on this swiss army knife of SEO tools: http://www.wickedfire.com/traffic-and-content/181828-share-your-scrapebox-tips-tricks.html
- Gscraper /way more endurable than Scrapebox memory-wise, but the interface is a maze (chinese did dis). I still love the power though/
- GSA SER - everyone has it but it's still an amazing tool.
- WordAI
I'm a fanboy for several years already. Paired up with a content scraper this can do wonders.
- Termexplorer
Great tool for competition research, since I'm mostly scraping related keywords with Scrapebox (faster & handier)
- SERPWoo
Start monitoring a niche before you build a site, you heard it - go.
- Notepad++
My favorite of all and the most frequently used one. As a non-coder I find it very handy to do stuff with text, spins, lists and so on. Macros are amazing too and you can record a bunch for things you do daily.
- Rank Tracker (by linkassistant)
Quite clumsy, but I am used to it. Best part is I can go deep (up to 1000 positions) and see how much "dancing" there is. Otherwise I've cut rank tracking down to minimum.
In any case, my point is there's no need to buy all kinds of new trendy stuff that you see. I have dozens of account-creators-social-network-posters gathering dust, because I just physically can't babysit them all. Oh and some tasks are meant to be done by people only, so hire helpers once you run out of hands.
6) Don't change your strategy too often. This concerns promoting websites more than anything else. If you have invested a lot of time into your baby website, don't just buy social bookmarks on Fiverr for it.
Give everything you do some time to take effect. Go either 100% legit or 100% spammy, because if you jump from one thing to another you won't ever be able to draw any conclusions and will learn nothing. Have several unrelated experiments.
7) Be attentive to people. This can't be measured but this is what many lack. If you are attentive you know your peers' weaknesses and strengths and you can communicate effectively. Personal details, reactions, statements - try to make portraits in your mind so that you know what you are dealing with and try to predict others. Plus it makes everyone feel good.
8) Do not go online drunk, even if you think you got it under control. The next day will be painful and awkward and you will end up wondering where your Skype groups went.
9) People skills are called "skills" because they can be learned and developed.
10) Eat your damn meat.
11) Use Google Trends to your advantage. It's an amazing tool that can help you find a newborn niche that will be easy to dominate with minimal efforts.
Go to Trends homepage and enter a general high-volume word relevant to what you are trying to explore. Switch the time frame to "last 90 days" or "last 30 days" and see if the graph grows. See below for the "rising" and "breakout" related queries - that's where the gems are and they often won't show anything when checked individually. You'll get some ideas while playing with it - this stuff makes money, true story.
12) These threads have have helped me one way or another and I would recommend anyone new to study them:
http://www.wickedfire.com/enlighten...eted-ads-get-highly-converting-campaigns.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/enlightened-members/152480-how-create-authority-site.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/enlightened-members/168063-flipping-website.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/enlighten...what-ive-learned-after-my-first-11-years.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/enlightened-members/176129-assembling-powerful-stealth-blog-network.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/enlightened-members/177893-traffic-leaks-final-level.html
13) Read between the lines and understand the "legalese" in everything. Most people have it hard to lie but they omit things without a second thought.
***
Big shout-out to everyone I ever talked to, messaged on Skype or exchanged PMs with.
Good luck bros.
Below is a little patchwork of fragments and thoughts on various topics. Hopefully this will help someone new to this make a couple of right decisions.
1) When you are on the internet, everyone you see is out there to make money. You need to understand how they make it, what they expect from you and how they can be useful to you. Most of the information you read is there to make people money, so don't just follow stuff blindly.
This relates to:
- Conferences, webinars, and courses are there to make their creators money from your attendance. That is why they will never run out of new classes, topics and announcements. Do not get stuck in studies forever.
- Industry news media is created to make money from traffic. Company spokespeople earn salary by making their companies look well. When the two meet together, be very suspicious of the advice they produce, most likely it's not practical.
No need to ignore everything and isolate yourself from all new information, but understand the agenda and money-making models and subtract them from everything you read.
2) Don't be too greedy and you will get rewarded more often than you think.
3) Imagine someone immoral and cruel somewhere far away reverse engineering everything you do. He will cut your costs in half and start making more money right away. Make a list of things he will cut, simplify, misunderstand, screw up, lie about and so on. This is your rival and he stops at nothing, so try to think like him and dissect your dear little business plan. What's your advantage over that ruthless beast? What will keep you in business? Maybe you should do some of the stuff he's about to? Because every day you get closer to meeting that guy.
4) I hope you are browsing Imgur frontpage at least once a day and reading the top 10-20 comments. It's a good way to stay updated with current trends and have a portrait of an "average" person if you are not a mainstream guy yourself.
Imgur Demographics - Imgur
imgur.com Site Overview
Fun part is that the community is more or less web-savvy, sarcastic to a point and admittedly resistant to advertising. Yet there are tons of marketed content getting viral there, so you may get some ideas on how to penetrate the minds better.
The linkbuilding and "traffic leaking" potential is obviously great there too, a little tutorial or myth debunking about something specific can go a long way.
5) When starting (talking about SEO/social) don't go around buying every tool out there, most of them serve similar purpose.
I have come down to these:
- Scrapebox
- small & precise scraping
- downloading backlinks (addon, Moz API)
- scraping proxies (hint: look for lists of proxy sources)
- scraping related keywords (super-cool when you find the right sources/depth levels combinations)
- scanning for broken links
Here's a great recent thread on this swiss army knife of SEO tools: http://www.wickedfire.com/traffic-and-content/181828-share-your-scrapebox-tips-tricks.html
- Gscraper /way more endurable than Scrapebox memory-wise, but the interface is a maze (chinese did dis). I still love the power though/
- proxy checking
- scraping
- link list checking, filtering, de-duping etc. (can work with over a million URLs unlike Scrapebox)
- GSA SER - everyone has it but it's still an amazing tool.
- all kinds of link building. Hints: this is for posting, not for scraping; check only the platforms you need, don't confuse the tool.
- Things that most people get wrong here: proxies, content, captcha, anchor ratios, everything else.
- WordAI
I'm a fanboy for several years already. Paired up with a content scraper this can do wonders.
- Termexplorer
Great tool for competition research, since I'm mostly scraping related keywords with Scrapebox (faster & handier)
- SERPWoo
Start monitoring a niche before you build a site, you heard it - go.
- Notepad++
My favorite of all and the most frequently used one. As a non-coder I find it very handy to do stuff with text, spins, lists and so on. Macros are amazing too and you can record a bunch for things you do daily.
- Rank Tracker (by linkassistant)
Quite clumsy, but I am used to it. Best part is I can go deep (up to 1000 positions) and see how much "dancing" there is. Otherwise I've cut rank tracking down to minimum.
In any case, my point is there's no need to buy all kinds of new trendy stuff that you see. I have dozens of account-creators-social-network-posters gathering dust, because I just physically can't babysit them all. Oh and some tasks are meant to be done by people only, so hire helpers once you run out of hands.
6) Don't change your strategy too often. This concerns promoting websites more than anything else. If you have invested a lot of time into your baby website, don't just buy social bookmarks on Fiverr for it.
Give everything you do some time to take effect. Go either 100% legit or 100% spammy, because if you jump from one thing to another you won't ever be able to draw any conclusions and will learn nothing. Have several unrelated experiments.
7) Be attentive to people. This can't be measured but this is what many lack. If you are attentive you know your peers' weaknesses and strengths and you can communicate effectively. Personal details, reactions, statements - try to make portraits in your mind so that you know what you are dealing with and try to predict others. Plus it makes everyone feel good.
8) Do not go online drunk, even if you think you got it under control. The next day will be painful and awkward and you will end up wondering where your Skype groups went.
9) People skills are called "skills" because they can be learned and developed.
10) Eat your damn meat.
11) Use Google Trends to your advantage. It's an amazing tool that can help you find a newborn niche that will be easy to dominate with minimal efforts.
Go to Trends homepage and enter a general high-volume word relevant to what you are trying to explore. Switch the time frame to "last 90 days" or "last 30 days" and see if the graph grows. See below for the "rising" and "breakout" related queries - that's where the gems are and they often won't show anything when checked individually. You'll get some ideas while playing with it - this stuff makes money, true story.
12) These threads have have helped me one way or another and I would recommend anyone new to study them:
http://www.wickedfire.com/enlighten...eted-ads-get-highly-converting-campaigns.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/enlightened-members/152480-how-create-authority-site.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/enlightened-members/168063-flipping-website.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/enlighten...what-ive-learned-after-my-first-11-years.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/enlightened-members/176129-assembling-powerful-stealth-blog-network.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/enlightened-members/177893-traffic-leaks-final-level.html
13) Read between the lines and understand the "legalese" in everything. Most people have it hard to lie but they omit things without a second thought.
***
Big shout-out to everyone I ever talked to, messaged on Skype or exchanged PMs with.
Good luck bros.
