New Journey - Learning The Ropes

[Athylus]

Hey all, welcome to my small journey. I am a 25 year old software engineer, about to graduate for my bachelor in about 3 months. Then I want to work part-time and slowly switch to my own gig. Most of my expertise is in Python programming, but I also have a firm grasp of lower-level side of things. I can make websites myself, databases, serverside, clientside, etc.

So today I start this journey just to get a sense of all the tools that I can use, and see whether I can generate traffic. I don't want to make money, I want to learn more about traffic. My interests are in computers, software, bikes and martial arts.

What did I do:

• Bought a domain name at namecheap, set up hosting.
• Made the beginnings of my website.
• Website is an application that helps people find stuff, but there will also be information available.

What I want to do:

• Finish the site.
• Launch the site.
• Write one article for each different category I have on my site.
• Analyse my traffic and explore ways in how I can generate more.

Mind you, I'm a complete newbie at IM, SEO, etc. I've done some keyword research with ubersuggest and freekeyword, and I found some 300-6000 volume searches, I will use those to write articles. All is done in my native language.

Posting goal is 3 times a week.

 

[Athylus]

I set up a goal, and that is 1000 visitors per month. Let's go!

Also, my web application is DONE. Now I just need to fill my database with information, which is a pain in the ass to get. So I've been working on my custom web scraper today that gets me the info I need.

 

[Athylus]

Ran into some problems, namely some API that I can't use for free. I have to provide billing information but have no credit card. No problem, I'll switch over to another one.

Got a domain name, updated my PHP code to be more secure against malicious attacks and updated my index page to load faster.

Wrote an article for my index page and I have 9 more planned articles.

Also set up SSL for free for 90 days. I'm wondering if anyone here has interest in an automated process that renews free SSL for websites?

 

[K R Y Σ]

What sort of hosting do you use for your website ?

 

[Athylus]

I bought the standard hosting package from Namecheap. Starlet or something it's called.

 

[Athylus]

My website is now life. There is still much work to be done. I decided on advertising products by using product buying guides and also to gather user's email addresses so I can use that to make money.

Also wanted to link this website to google analytics and came across an old website. I was pretty surprised... check this out.

It's a website for downloading videos from a platform. Wonder if I can monetize that?

 

[Athylus]

Both sites are online! Not sure why my previous post image doesn't show. So this weekend I want to write 5 articles for one of my sites. However I expect that site to not get any visitors at least until corona crisis is over. That gives me a lot of time to give the finishing touches. Also added both sites to analytics.

 

[Athylus]

Made a planning. Wrote a privacy policy page, made sure I'm mobile compatible and SEO optimized. Goals:
- 10 articles (1 done)
- Contact page
- Email gather
- About us page

Then apply for a native affiliate program and adsense. I want that done before 1 july, because I don't expect stuff to sell until corona is over.

Second website I have two more services in mind that I want to add, it shouldn't be too hard. Then I'll SEO optimize, and make an 'upgraded' package that can be accessed through content locker. Deadline 1 may.

 

[invictus73]

I don’t know much about this, but I hope that everything works out!

 

[ger81948]

I bought the standard hosting package from Namecheap. Starlet or something it's called.

I have my hosting with Namecheap and they give me SSL's for free. Have you checked with them? Good luck.

 

[Athylus]

I don’t know much about this, but I hope that everything works out!

Thanks! It's pretty much the same as you. I have two websites, one will be affiliate and the other will be content locking.

I have my hosting with Namecheap and they give me SSL's for free. Have you checked with them? Good luck.

Yes, I only figured that out recently. And it's easy too, the SSL config is right there at cpanel. Thanks! 50 free SSLs at the click of a button, insane.

Since I am making everything custom (no CMS) things are taking more time, but I like the control and I like engineering. Keeps it fun for me, even though it is not as efficient as it is effective. Going to switch my content locking page to a flask application, and I already laid out plans for my second of third functionality. Once I get my custom CMS down I'll be done quickly, and updating will be a breeze. Then I can port over those methods to my affiliate blog.

Funny thing is, I think google sandbox is real. My content locking website started getting traffic 3 months in or so, you can see it going from 0 and skyrocketing to 2k (lol) monthly in a couple of months time. No backlinks.

This was last year. I'm not sitting at 3k. When I add more functionality I expect to go to almost 10k, but we'll see.

 

[Athylus]

Alright, I tripled my services. I expanded from one social media platform to three. But it's not enough to go from 2-3k to triple 6-10k. Probably because there are more dominant websites for insta and facebook. Either way, I applied for adsense and ogads. Of course I made a privacy policy page, about us and contact page.

As for my other website, a blog, I have been an idiot about that. Because I like programming so much I made everything from scratch. HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc. But I'm switching to wordpress. And I might switch niche, I have a niche that doesn't matter whether you rank on first page or 5th page, because people are willing to scout the internet for ages for solutions. I can't provide the solution, but I can point them to the right direction (books, supplements, etc). That's how I can use amazon affiliates to make money. Only products I believe in of course.

 

[Athylus]

I dropped the affiliate blog, the niche is not enough traffic for. So I doubled up on my SaaS services. Those two extra websites I mentioned? I upgraded them, and linking to them now from my main domain. Also used google pagespeed for optimization.

Got accepted by OGads network too!!! So now I can look into content lockers for these three websites.