I can give you a tip how to analyze journey information.
Problem 1: Even if person on a journey or method tutorial wishes to tell everything, they will not. Two reasons for that. They may feel some particular information to be too valuable to share. The other, most common reason for ommissions, is that they simply forget about it (they take it for granted that you would know that; you would not.). Or it get casually mentioned as one piece of information on a photo they share. You miss to see it and understand it's signisficance.
Practical example: There is a thread journey how a guy, starting from a clean domain, with no backlinking, managed to earn 8.000$+ a month. This makes you think,oh I can do that, just pump out 400 article and here is the 8K$.
What I failed to see at first is that on one of the photos his domain is about 43+ on ahrefs DR (domain rating) metric. This translates into that his content is so good that he is being naturally linked by good websites, which in turn increases this metric. Why is his content so good? Well, because he is 10+ years professional in the filed he used to make the website out of, and because he hired writers that are able, under his guidance, to write good enough in that topic. Can someones great experience in the topic be offset by you when doing your own topic but for which you lack such knowledge. Maybe, but it will be much harder than for him.
There is no mention of this realization throughout the whole journey thread. And if you don't see that, you can try to replicate what he did unsuccessfully and loose all the money in the process.
How can we solve this? Before you do anything, you need to clear in your head, most likely, by using pen and paper to completely analyze, what was achieved, what is the timeline, what is step by step process, what is missing information wise, what are the biggest problems, what costs money, how much money, if I want to do something cheaper what do I sacrifice and how it can endanger the whole process..... The mentality alone, which pushes you to act quickly, can damage your chances of success by causing you to miss crucial information because you tried to shortcut things. You can work hard, you can invest.... and still fail on account of 1 wrong judgement. This would basically summarize the difficulties of online marketing and it's complexity.
You seem to be more more theoretically oriented person than practical one, which is good for academic achievement, but can cost you dearly because of inexperience with skill based practices like this one. Best advice I would give my 30 year old self would be to start really small and try to rank 1 keyword, test simple method,... all with very specific goals in mind. Success or fail, you start to get these things under your fingertips, so to say. It's a slow process. It's good that you have a lot of free time
You will need all of it to succeed.
Best Regards,
Zatoichi
P.S. You need 5 years to learn to program in general, but you only need a month to program the small software you need for a very specific task to save you some time. For a second small program to do, you would need less time the for the first.
