[Journey] SMM Panel + Spam = Bank

[Scorpion Ghost]

I will switch to VS Code.

Okay I saw that coming from a mile away

But that's why you're TheCat and I'm TheScorpion. I just wanna crawl through things with no fuss

 

[mnunes532]

Why statcounter and not google analytics?

 

[Scorpion Ghost]

Why statcounter and not google analytics?

Because google analytics is a slow piece of crap, and because my brain appreciates simple things.

You open google analytics and you have no fucking idea what is what and what is where. Get the fuck outta here.

You open statcounter you see your clicks for today, yesterday, this month. You see your unique visitors. You click once, you click twice, you see the country of each visitor and which pages on your site they visited and when. Its nice and cozy and fast.

Plus i can have all of my sites under one Statcounter account and there are no issues. But having them all under one google analytics account, you may have to consider if you want google to know you own all of these sites. But if you split them between multiple google analytics accounts, then youre having to remember or write down which site is added on what google analytics account, and its all one big jerkoff.

 

[Ahmirof]

Good luck , interested to follow your income info path

 

[awesomewebsites]

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...

You must be a head working guy. Cannot imagine myself doing this much work on one site. I would have given up in step 1 or 2.

 

[Deleted member 15724]

Because google analytics is a slow piece of crap, and because my brain appreciates simple things.

You open google analytics and you have no fucking idea what is what and what is where. Get the fuck outta here.

You open statcounter you see your clicks for today, yesterday, this month. You see your unique visitors. You click once, you click twice, you see the country of each visitor and which pages on your site they visited and when. Its nice and cozy and fast.

Plus i can have all of my sites under one Statcounter account and there are no issues. But having them all under one google analytics account, you may have to consider if you want google to know you own all of these sites. But if you split them between multiple google analytics accounts, then youre having to remember or write down which site is added on what google analytics account, and its all one big jerkoff.

How would you know which traffic source is converting best, or converting at all?

 

[Scorpion Ghost]

You must be a head working guy. Cannot imagine myself doing this much work on one site. I would have given up in step 1 or 2.

Nah. You would have it all handled in Step 1 and wouldn't need to get to Step 2 and the rest.

But I'm no @BlogPro so it takes me a while, especially with Laravel that I hardly understand

How would you know which traffic source is converting best, or converting at all?

Um, well, when I check visitors in Statcounter I can see from where they entered my site. Given time I'll get an idea of how many people visited my site from where and what they did during their visit, and then I'll know, sorta.

 

[dustfinger]

Awesome! I need to open a journey like this to keep me going on dropshipping lol

 

[Scorpion Ghost]

I cleaned up the email account of the website, to remove all the crap from the previous website. It's still not finished though.

Took care of the login, register and reset password pages, and tested all the functions.

Took care of a little issue with the description box on the new order page.

Moved the API tab all the way to the right in nav bar

Removed sub tab from nav bar

Took care of the FAQ/TOS/Privacy policy/etc pages

---

Next I need to:

Finish cleaning up the email inbox

Take care of the homepage

Download entire site and run notepad++ to check for any mentions of the other site from which I imported database and some files, and replace them with current site

 

[Scorpion Ghost]

Cleaned up the inbox some more, but still more to go.

Took care of the homepage made it look good and all.

Set the prices.

Checked all the pages and made sure everything looks and works good.

Downloaded site and replaced all mentions of other site name with new site name.

Made sure all the pages that are not behind a login have unique meta descriptions and meta keywords (yeah, meta keywords, I am dinosaur )

Did a VK and a Twitter share, just to see how the page looks when shared, what's being picked up by sites in terms of photo and description etc (I guess our spam has begun lol)

---

So I still have to finish cleaning the email inbox.

Also I contacted a few people and asked if they can test my site, give me their opinions and if they find any bugs. So we'll see how that goes.

And basically we're done. The site is ready

I'm quite tired now, so I'll probably start lightly spamming the site tomorrow.

 

[Scorpion Ghost]

I finished cleaning the email inbox. Whatever is left in there are a few client emails and whatnot, where I'm gonna email them at some point to try and get them on the new site.

The few people I contacted to check my site had some good suggestions, some I implemented some I didn't, but that's done too.

I made a new post on the site's Twitter and Facebook and VK pages. More for appearances sake than for traffic, as the pages don't have very many likes/ followers.

---

That's it, I'm done. I can start spamming now. But not right now, I'm hungry and shit, so later

 

[moonshine7000]

I will be following this to track your progress

 

[Floccer]

What is the script you are using?

I have used smartpanel and smm matrix but not completely satisfied with either. Smartpanel is better from these two and might switch back using that if i dont find better. Both developers are not very quick with fixing things and might just fix somethings for just one person and not to all.

Dont want to use perfectpanel as that costs monthly and price depends on order amount

 

[Scorpion Ghost]

What is the script you are using?

I have used smartpanel and smm matrix but not completely satisfied with either. Smartpanel is better from these two and might switch back using that if i dont find better. Both developers are not very quick with fixing things and might just fix somethings for just one person and not to all.

Dont want to use perfectpanel as that costs monthly and price depends on order amount

Indusrabbit, an older version that i found nulled online and paid a guy to remove the malicous crap from it. I think i mentioned it above.

But i only use this one for my secondary panel sites. For my main panel i use the original indus script that i paid for.

I knew a guy a few years ago who went on a spree of buying SMM panel scripts, and he had problems with each and every one of them.

I got lucky and was recommended indus by an acqueintance who was using the same, and relatively speaking (relative to how it can be out there with buying themes) i couldnt be happier both with the script and the developer.

Yeah that paying monthly or per the amount of orders you get is total noob bullshit.

 

[Scorpion Ghost]

Okay, so I started doing light spamming. Yesterday I did 8 spams, and today I did 8 spams.

Every time I send a message or make a post or a comment somewhere, I'll call it a "spam"

In terms of links, for now I'm using raw naked homepage URL, Bitly and Tiny .cc.

In terms of spamming, for now I'm spamming 2 social media sites.

For one of them I have a very old list of usernames that someone scraped years ago. I have no idea if the list was scraped with any targetting in mind, but I've had the list on my desktop for YEARS, and I want to run through it and spam all those usernames.

For the other I have a very old list I scraped a few years ago. The list was of the upgraded members of that site. These are members that paid the site to upgrade their accounts, so I figured they're at least comfortable with paying for something digital, plus they're able to pay for something.

By now both of the lists contain profiles that don't exist anymore, and for the second list profiles that aren't upgraded on that site anymore. But no matter, I'll do my spamming on these 2 sites for now, try and get these lists used up.

Nothing to report yet on visitors or registrations.

That's it for now...

 

[Proxy Cake]

Gonna watch this thread!

 

[OccultKingdoms]

The soul of a spammer. I'll do some good old spamming too.

 

[Yildiz]

You're encouraging me to spam as well haha

 

[beterbiffin]

Hi, I was hoping I could ask a noobish question. Is there a reason you're spamming SMM services instead of affiliate links to a targeted niche? Better returns? Easier? I would imagine the process of spamming either is generally the same. Sorry if the answer is obvious, im a total noob to spam. I'll be following, good luck!

 

[Scorpion Ghost]

Hi, I was hoping I could ask a noobish question. Is there a reason you're spamming SMM services instead of affiliate links to a targeted niche? Better returns? Easier? I would imagine the process of spamming either is generally the same. Sorry if the answer is obvious, im a total noob to spam. I'll be following, good luck!

Oh where to start.

First of all if I'm spamming an affiliate product I have to pray to the gods that the affiliate program or company will actually pay me when time comes. So I'm promoting, and I don't have guarantees that I'll be paid for my efforts in the end. It makes me sick!

Second of all, most affiliate programs don't allow you to promote their crap by spamming. If you do, they may refuse to pay you, or ban you. And that's another thing, they may just ban you regardless. They may ban you because you made so much money that they'd rather keep it than give it to you. So they ban you and give you some bullshit reason, and then cry me a river. Or maybe they ban you because their cigarette didn't light today, whatever, they don't give a shit, fuck you.

Third of all, what happens when the affiliate offer you're promoting dies for some reason? All that promotion you did is wasted now. Granted, you can be smart and make sure you have access to all the links you build, so you can change the destination URL if something happens. Still, risky.

Fourth of all, when I get a customer they can be my customer for weeks, months, years, forever! But when I get a customer for an affiliate program, that's their customer, not my customer. They reap the benefits of forever, not me. Fuck that shit son!

Fifth of all (relevant to the point above) - Of course, you may get an affiliate program where you get paid for everything they make from the traffic you send in perpetuity. But go to the pesky little privacy policy or whatever and find the part where they say that "We Can Change The Rules On You Whenever We Fucking Want And Go Fuck Yourself You Piece of Affiliate Marketer Crap." When you find it, realize that they'll drop your affiliate commission % whenever they want, they'll cancel the recurring payment thing whenever they want, and go fuck yourself!

Sixth of all, even if you make money and even if they pay you, you're gonna wait for that money. With what I'm doing the money comes immediately, before I even do any work (excluding the free balance). I prefer to get my money NOW, not later.

Seventh of all, affiliate marketing is like everybody and their dog does it. I'm a magician, I do special unique incomprehensible shit (ok this isn't a valid reason, but I get to fuck around a little bit on my own journey thread goddamnit )

There you go...

If you need more reasons, let me sleep on it and I'll come up with more.

Edit: Eighth of all, with what I do I get to get paid in any payment method I want (depending on the customer). Cards, bank transfers, paypals payoneers cryptocurrencies payeer the whole thing, as many as I can handle. With an affiliate program they'll give you one or two withdrawal methods, and that's it. I like variety and flexibility and having money in many places. Don't limit me down to one or two withdrawal methods man.