- Mar 22, 2013
- 9,150
- 10,490
So I don't think I ever made a journey thread about making money. Well here we go.
What to expect?
Don't expect anything. We'll be lucky to make a dollar or two.
Background
Years ago a buddy of mine wanted to do what I do and sell social media services, so I bought him a domain name and made him a site on my hosting. Eventually he gave up on it, and I was left with the domain. I kept it up and I'd make a sale or two here and there. The site had a normal HTML+CSS+PHP template on it, selling social media services, accepting only Paypal for payment. The site would pay for itself to renew the domain name and make a tiny profit every year, so I kept it up and running.
About a year ago I got tired of Paypal after they banned another one of my accounts, so the site couldn't take payments anymore. And it was wired in such a way that switching to another payment processor was a huge pain. It's not like the site had lots of regular customers or traffic. So I slapped a popup on it redirecting people to one of my other websites and left it at that, while I figure out what to do with it.
Well lately I've been thinking how I always talk shit about SEO here on the forum and praise spam, but I haven't really spammed in oh about 3 years. I just built so much momentum in the first few years of selling social media services that at some point I had more business than I could handle almost, and there was no need to spam and try and get even more clients. Plus my life was in chaos and I was trying to put order, and that took lots and lots of time too.
But now I'm in a good place overall, and so I'm gonna slap an SMM Panel script on this domain and spam it a little bit here and there whenever I feel like it. We'll see how it goes...
The script/template
I already have my main SMM Panel, but I can't use that script/template because it's 1 user license. But about a year ago I downloaded a nulled script for the same panel as mine, just an older version. Then I paid a guy to remove some webshell and backlinks and whatever malicious crap from it, and I used it on another little subdomain I have. And then a few months ago my hosting provider removed older PHP versions, but the script worked on PHP 7.0. So I paid a guy $40 to upgrade the site to work on PHP 7.4. It was necessary.
The script/template is coded in Laravel...
So now I figured I'll just copy and paste the folders from my subdomain to my main domain, import and nuke the sql databases, and we have our site. But it's never that easy. I tried that and it did not work, I got some 403 error or something. So then I tried installing the script like I did a year ago, but in the final step of the installation it failed, probably because a year ago I was on PHP 7.0, but now I was on PHP 7.4.
So I ran in circles for 2-3 hours, and then I realized that when I installed the script now, it never created the SQL database. I mean, I had created the SQL user and database and added them to each other or whatever, but the site didn't create the actual SQL stuff, like the tables and all that. So I installed the script again like before, then I downloaded the SQL database from my subdomain, I edited it to change what I had to change, and imported it on my new site. And voila, it worked.
But then I had the issues that certain things were not working right, because the site needed the PHP upgrade that I paid the guy $40 to do on the script months ago. So I went to my subdomain and looked in the files to see which files and folders were edited a few months ago, and I copied everything that was edited and pasted in the same files on my new site. And voila, it worked, it seems.
So anyway this is where I stopped. I think we have our site ready. I still need to nuke the databases and confirm that everything works properly. It's a minefield, anything could go wrong, but we may get lucky and it all just works. I also need to make the site pretty and make sure everything looks good bla bla bla. But I should be able to make it happen...
The plan
Once the site is ready to go, the plan is to just lightly spam it here and there from time to time. Nothing organized, nothing heavy, just sprinkle sprinkle little spam here and there. I'll actually probably even tell you Where I'm gonna spam, but I won't be telling you How.
The hook is gonna be a $1 or $2 free balance for new members. So we get John or Jane on the site and they wanna get something, we offer the $1 or $2 free balance. They're hesitant because we're totally suspicious and shit, but free balance no strings attached, they sign up and spend it. But now they want more = bank
We're not gonna be dealing with people creating multiple accounts and getting free balance over and over again, because we're not working at scale. We'll be lucky to make any money here, which means few visitors and few registrations on the site, which means easy to control things. So if I see 5 people registered one after the other, all with similar emails and whatnot, I won't give them all free balance. Anyway people that do this shit typically follow a pattern and you can recognize them. But even if someone does it right and gets free balances on multiple accounts, because I process all the orders manually, when I see that all the orders are for the same pages and profiles, I'll stop it and remove their balances. I keep a close watch on everything.
We're gonna track traffic with StatCounter, and the site tells me how many people are registered, so we're gonna track that too. And of course money we're gonna track the money (the entire reason we're doing all of this), that's easy.
Getting paid will be manual. From g*ypal to wise to payo to payeer to any crypto, I'll be offering a lot of methods that people can pay with. And all the payments will be processed manually. If we get any traction I may add automatic payments with crypto at least. But for that I'd have to pay a guy to implement the code, and I ain't paying for that. Let the site pay for itself. No freeloading here, site!
To Do's
I need to finish making the site and make sure that everything works.
I already have social media pages created for this site (Facebook page, Twitter account, Youtube channel) and I've had them for years. All the pages look nice and have some likes/followers/subscribers. So that part is pretty much already set. We look legit. I mean, we are legit lol but we also look legit. Still, I need to check those pages and update "About" sections and "Descriptions" and this and that, also make a few posts to refresh the pages a little bit. I probably didn't make any posts there in 1-2 years. We need to have some newer posts, it just looks better, looks like we're alive.
I'll probably make a video and post it on Youtube and then embed it on the homepage of the site, because anyone not familiar with SMM Panels, when they get to one they probably have tons of questions and uncertainties, which may just make them run away. So it may be smart to put up a video on the homepage with my angelic voice giving people an explanation of what everything is and how it works and all that. Plus it will put a voice to the site, giving some trust perhaps and making people more likely to engage. Not to toot my own horn, but I speak great English and I can at least make it sound like I know what I'm talking about
Once everything is ready to go, I'll lightly spam blogs and social media sites and wherever I can put my site in front of people, or a person, for free. Preferrably of course I'll try to put the site in front of people who may be interested in buying social media services. But this is social media, everyone is a potential customer. But of course you're more likely to sell social media services to a room full of DJs than to a room full of postmen. So I'll try to target my spamming as much as possible.
Set my prices. I'm gonna make the prices a little higher than on my main panel. This will mean the panel will be on the expensive side of things, but it will still be cheaper than many others, and it will definitely be cheaper than those sites that sell social media services that are like regular sites (not SMM panels).
What to expect?
Okay, so we can expect very little traffic, and even less registrations, and even less money. We can also expect me to slack off and not do any spamming for days/weeks at a time. But this journey thread is going in my main browser's bookmarks and so it will always be there in the corner of my eye, reminding me to do some spam.
In the end the best we can hope for is to get some returning customers and for our spam to provide some traffic in perpetuity. It's one thing to send 1 guy a private message on a social network, and it's another to get a sweet ass comment on a blog post or forum thread that's ranking or getting traffic some way and will continue getting the traffic for a long time.
Why am I doing this?
I'm starting the journey here to keep me going, and to show you noobs how it's done haha. But really it's all about dollars and cents for me. So money!
Also, I haven't promoted or spammed anything in years, and sometimes I miss it a little bit. I've gotten a little rusty for sure. It's gonna be fun
Also, when you don't get new customers, no matter how good you are your existing customers are slowly gonna get away from you eventually. They die, they sell their business, they change their business, corona shuts down clubs and they have no work, life happens, etc. And I haven't really promoted anything in years. So it will be nice to get some new people in. And I'm talking people who aren't resellers and already in this type of business. Just regular folks who buy the stuff for their own pages.
---
Okay, that's it. To be continued...
What to expect?
Don't expect anything. We'll be lucky to make a dollar or two.
Background
Years ago a buddy of mine wanted to do what I do and sell social media services, so I bought him a domain name and made him a site on my hosting. Eventually he gave up on it, and I was left with the domain. I kept it up and I'd make a sale or two here and there. The site had a normal HTML+CSS+PHP template on it, selling social media services, accepting only Paypal for payment. The site would pay for itself to renew the domain name and make a tiny profit every year, so I kept it up and running.
About a year ago I got tired of Paypal after they banned another one of my accounts, so the site couldn't take payments anymore. And it was wired in such a way that switching to another payment processor was a huge pain. It's not like the site had lots of regular customers or traffic. So I slapped a popup on it redirecting people to one of my other websites and left it at that, while I figure out what to do with it.
Well lately I've been thinking how I always talk shit about SEO here on the forum and praise spam, but I haven't really spammed in oh about 3 years. I just built so much momentum in the first few years of selling social media services that at some point I had more business than I could handle almost, and there was no need to spam and try and get even more clients. Plus my life was in chaos and I was trying to put order, and that took lots and lots of time too.
But now I'm in a good place overall, and so I'm gonna slap an SMM Panel script on this domain and spam it a little bit here and there whenever I feel like it. We'll see how it goes...
The script/template
I already have my main SMM Panel, but I can't use that script/template because it's 1 user license. But about a year ago I downloaded a nulled script for the same panel as mine, just an older version. Then I paid a guy to remove some webshell and backlinks and whatever malicious crap from it, and I used it on another little subdomain I have. And then a few months ago my hosting provider removed older PHP versions, but the script worked on PHP 7.0. So I paid a guy $40 to upgrade the site to work on PHP 7.4. It was necessary.
The script/template is coded in Laravel...
So now I figured I'll just copy and paste the folders from my subdomain to my main domain, import and nuke the sql databases, and we have our site. But it's never that easy. I tried that and it did not work, I got some 403 error or something. So then I tried installing the script like I did a year ago, but in the final step of the installation it failed, probably because a year ago I was on PHP 7.0, but now I was on PHP 7.4.
So I ran in circles for 2-3 hours, and then I realized that when I installed the script now, it never created the SQL database. I mean, I had created the SQL user and database and added them to each other or whatever, but the site didn't create the actual SQL stuff, like the tables and all that. So I installed the script again like before, then I downloaded the SQL database from my subdomain, I edited it to change what I had to change, and imported it on my new site. And voila, it worked.
But then I had the issues that certain things were not working right, because the site needed the PHP upgrade that I paid the guy $40 to do on the script months ago. So I went to my subdomain and looked in the files to see which files and folders were edited a few months ago, and I copied everything that was edited and pasted in the same files on my new site. And voila, it worked, it seems.
So anyway this is where I stopped. I think we have our site ready. I still need to nuke the databases and confirm that everything works properly. It's a minefield, anything could go wrong, but we may get lucky and it all just works. I also need to make the site pretty and make sure everything looks good bla bla bla. But I should be able to make it happen...
The plan
Once the site is ready to go, the plan is to just lightly spam it here and there from time to time. Nothing organized, nothing heavy, just sprinkle sprinkle little spam here and there. I'll actually probably even tell you Where I'm gonna spam, but I won't be telling you How.
The hook is gonna be a $1 or $2 free balance for new members. So we get John or Jane on the site and they wanna get something, we offer the $1 or $2 free balance. They're hesitant because we're totally suspicious and shit, but free balance no strings attached, they sign up and spend it. But now they want more = bank
We're not gonna be dealing with people creating multiple accounts and getting free balance over and over again, because we're not working at scale. We'll be lucky to make any money here, which means few visitors and few registrations on the site, which means easy to control things. So if I see 5 people registered one after the other, all with similar emails and whatnot, I won't give them all free balance. Anyway people that do this shit typically follow a pattern and you can recognize them. But even if someone does it right and gets free balances on multiple accounts, because I process all the orders manually, when I see that all the orders are for the same pages and profiles, I'll stop it and remove their balances. I keep a close watch on everything.
We're gonna track traffic with StatCounter, and the site tells me how many people are registered, so we're gonna track that too. And of course money we're gonna track the money (the entire reason we're doing all of this), that's easy.
Getting paid will be manual. From g*ypal to wise to payo to payeer to any crypto, I'll be offering a lot of methods that people can pay with. And all the payments will be processed manually. If we get any traction I may add automatic payments with crypto at least. But for that I'd have to pay a guy to implement the code, and I ain't paying for that. Let the site pay for itself. No freeloading here, site!
To Do's
I need to finish making the site and make sure that everything works.
I already have social media pages created for this site (Facebook page, Twitter account, Youtube channel) and I've had them for years. All the pages look nice and have some likes/followers/subscribers. So that part is pretty much already set. We look legit. I mean, we are legit lol
but we also look legit. Still, I need to check those pages and update "About" sections and "Descriptions" and this and that, also make a few posts to refresh the pages a little bit. I probably didn't make any posts there in 1-2 years. We need to have some newer posts, it just looks better, looks like we're alive.I'll probably make a video and post it on Youtube and then embed it on the homepage of the site, because anyone not familiar with SMM Panels, when they get to one they probably have tons of questions and uncertainties, which may just make them run away. So it may be smart to put up a video on the homepage with my angelic voice giving people an explanation of what everything is and how it works and all that. Plus it will put a voice to the site, giving some trust perhaps and making people more likely to engage. Not to toot my own horn, but I speak great English and I can at least make it sound like I know what I'm talking about
Once everything is ready to go, I'll lightly spam blogs and social media sites and wherever I can put my site in front of people, or a person, for free. Preferrably of course I'll try to put the site in front of people who may be interested in buying social media services. But this is social media, everyone is a potential customer. But of course you're more likely to sell social media services to a room full of DJs than to a room full of postmen. So I'll try to target my spamming as much as possible.
Set my prices. I'm gonna make the prices a little higher than on my main panel. This will mean the panel will be on the expensive side of things, but it will still be cheaper than many others, and it will definitely be cheaper than those sites that sell social media services that are like regular sites (not SMM panels).
What to expect?
Okay, so we can expect very little traffic, and even less registrations, and even less money. We can also expect me to slack off and not do any spamming for days/weeks at a time. But this journey thread is going in my main browser's bookmarks and so it will always be there in the corner of my eye, reminding me to do some spam.
In the end the best we can hope for is to get some returning customers and for our spam to provide some traffic in perpetuity. It's one thing to send 1 guy a private message on a social network, and it's another to get a sweet ass comment on a blog post or forum thread that's ranking or getting traffic some way and will continue getting the traffic for a long time.
Why am I doing this?
I'm starting the journey here to keep me going, and to show you noobs how it's done haha. But really it's all about dollars and cents for me. So money!
Also, I haven't promoted or spammed anything in years, and sometimes I miss it a little bit. I've gotten a little rusty for sure. It's gonna be fun
Also, when you don't get new customers, no matter how good you are your existing customers are slowly gonna get away from you eventually. They die, they sell their business, they change their business, corona shuts down clubs and they have no work, life happens, etc. And I haven't really promoted anything in years. So it will be nice to get some new people in. And I'm talking people who aren't resellers and already in this type of business. Just regular folks who buy the stuff for their own pages.
---
Okay, that's it. To be continued...
