Thanks for the input, you are probably right.
I simply thought everyone of the successful guys here probably has his "baby" he once (successfully) started with, as a solid base, that made the train start moving..
Seeing as I'm stoned off my face and bored I'll tell you my 'rags to riches' story but remember it could all be bollox and I could actually be secretly wanting you to pm me and start asking questions so I can rip you off (you need to prepare for this). Don't like to put figures either as people either think you're poor or think you're showing off but oh well lol
I'm from the UK got a good education but left school at 16, missed loads of school from 14-16 as I started getting really bad anxiety, didn't really understand the anxiety until I was about 23, from 16-23 I worked a few shitty jobs,sold a bit of weed here and there, just wasting my life.
Got to 23 nearly 24(2013) and I started doing matched betting and arbing online, was making £1-1500 a month for 3-4 months but then started having my accounts banned.
Was helping my mum out aswell at this point for free in return for living there, she had a sideline thing selling antiques/books etc on amazon and ebay (doesn't make much with it) so I knew how to list well on there.
At this point I'd just quit smoking with e cigs, I was ordering most of it on ebay. Back then I used to think it was too hard to compete with big shops/websites on price but then I started seeing so many people with like 100 feedback having the cheapest prices.
So I start looking for where it comes from which was easy, its not like trying to buy xbox's where you have huge companies just thinking you're a bit of a dick and ignoring you. Its probably the first major industry that Chinese companies have dominated rather than just getting contracts from microsoft etc so all I had to do was email the manufacturer and they sent me a price list straight away.
Didn't realize how taxes,overheads etc worked so well at this point so I was getting so excited thinking it was going to be really easy to get rich. I was already helping my mum out like I said but her 'lost in the post' rate is less than 0.5%, mine was at 3-4%, also had a lot of problems with it being a fairly new item and electrical, people sending back items that took me 1 second to 'fix' etc.
I scrape together all my savings which was £954 (I'm friends with this original sales guy and was chatting with him about it the day).
Get the items and start listing, was making £500 or so a month straight away, only thing holding me back was cash flow. Had £1k and the delivery was taking 10 days-2 weeks on average.
Start building up the cash flow and get to about £2000 a month, at this point I realize I've been a complete plank and just assumed the manufacturers price would be best, it wasn't lol. I find trade companies selling me some stuff a fair bit cheaper which bumps it up to more like £2500 a month.
At this point cash flow is still my main issue, some items I'm selling faster than I expected, others sell slower etc. I didn't realize themes existed for making websites, I just assumed that I'd need to spend £1k+ to get a decent website.
Get to the point where I have some make me a website, paid £900 and got completely ripped off, just basically a theme with a logo slapped on (didn't realize I'd been ripped off until a month or so later).
But now I've got my website, this is still nearly 2 years ago, wasn't anywhere near as much competition for e cigs even then in the UK so a fair few of my products were coming up on the 2nd-4th pages with no links.
Must be about this point I stumble upon bhw and start reading about all this seo shit. So I start going on my merry way ordering random crap, wasted a fair bit of money, some worked to an extent, most didn't. Partly my own fault, for example I thought when people were saying to add some web 2.0s that they were meaning 2-3 per keyword/url.
This is somewhere inbetween 6-9 months and at this point my ebay account gets warnings for e cigs being against their rules, literally hadn't even realized the entire time as they were just turning a blind eye (their bots go in stages of wiping literally everything out and ignoring it, not sure why lol).
Then at this point I'd already read a little about ebay stealth, was completely bottling it thinking that as soon as I logged on to it my main account would immediately get obliterated.
Start doing this and suddenly all my competitors are getting obliterated, I'm starting new stealths and they're having items removed about once a day but every time ebay was following the exact pattern of 3 warnings,one 1 day ban,one 3 day ban,one 7 day ban,one 30 day ban, and never perm bans, I've had 7-8 30 day bans on my main account and its still alive. So I was just hitting the 7 or 30 day ban then letting them cool off whilst selling accessories that I could get away with.
Now we're 10-11 months in and suddenly I've jumped from around £3k net to £5-6k , cash flow again starts to hold me back a little because I'm selling so much faster but quickly improves after a month or 2. I kind of slacked for 2-3 months here, should of pushed harder but after nearly a year of literally spending zero £ on 'fun' I felt like I could relax a bit, was still doing everything myself here but was only really taking 30 odd hours a week still. I was spending another 20-30 hours a week trawling wholesalers catalogs looking for the best prices and new products etc.
Then the ebay bans/warnings are getting more frequent so I start thinking fuck ebay I'm going hard on my website. Sign up to a 'white hat service' from a mod on here, it said IIRC 'don't build any other links,buy our diversity pack and its safe' turns out it wasn't safe lol. Wouldn't of minded so much if it had actually ranked me but I got stuck on the top of the second page, wasn't even anymore than a medium comp keyword and I was paying 500$ per month for 3-4 months+the diversity pack.
So my websites now fuked, gone from around £400 net profit a month to £30 if I'm lucky, tried selling on niche forums but it had a lot of other small sellers on there not bothering to pay the UKs lovely 16.6666% sales tax so I couldn't really compete with them.
Gave up on the website shti here and I'm back to ebay, a little amazon but at this point the profits crap on there too and for some reason there was loads more fakes (normally 10x more fakes on ebay than amazon).
For 4-5 months my net profit is varying from £2k-7k depending on what sort of mood ebays bots were in.
I'm still reading bhw on and off at this point though and try a few other things for sort of for fun, building a couple of instagram accounts but decided that was bollox after them just not converting and seeing others on here with millions of followers struggling to make all that much money.
Then I start reading posts from a guy called lightningbuz on here a year ago, particularly this one (hes nothing to do with me btw, only ever pmed him once):
http://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-to-rank-a-quick-guide-for-newbies.781273/
I don't really know why as I already knew basically everything in that guide but it seemed to click for me then, must of reread that post 3x a day for a week and all the replies. I cbf with starting my main e commerce site again though so I start 1 review type site for vaping and 1 for amazon affiliate site in a different niche.
I start with the amazon one mostly, following the guide above but I was making my own pbn sites straight away also, the site starts ranking for medium comp keywords within 6 weeks or so but the pay is just nowhere near as good as ranking a e commerce site because you're adding another worthless step into the 'sales funnel', e commerce site they click me in the SERPs and buy, affiliate they click,click again,realize they're on amazon and hopefully buy.
About this time I pay someone to do all the packing for my ebay/amazon sales so that only needs 10-15 hours a week of my time and I'm focusing on the seo shit.
At the same time I'm doing my vape site, paying big £s for decent content on this site, I hate writing and I'm dyslexic as fuk if you're not noticed yet. Feels like I have to 'review' all the big well known products that have already been out for months+ but they're obviously ranking nowhere so I think fuk that and start doing just new products being released, I'm good friends with some of the sales guys from the big brands so I'm finding out about products as early/earlier as any of the bigger review sites. I have a .co.uk domain, theres very few blackhat guys in the niche, most affiliates doing e cigs are with the affiliates from the trashy brands that stick their logo on the most basic £2 e cigs available,charge £40 for it and offer affiliates 75%.
I'm doing the advanced stuff with crap profit margins and crap affiliate offers. Most of the time a new product comes out I'm sending pbns straight at it, most are ranking top 3 in 2-3 weeks then dropping back down to 6th-7th (because the big well known authority sites are getting such better ctr than me I guess).
Then I'm getting decent traffic, people keep asking for banner ads. I sell that and it makes decent money. Now we're about January this year, lots of new EU laws for e cigs about to come in May, likely that affiliates will be made illegal in the UK. I sell the site and go back to my e commerce site,start ranking that and live happily ever after.
Now looking at buying offline businesses, ranking them and learning PPC(never got round to it as against the rules for e cigs), looks so easy to grow offline businesses, 95% have fuk all idea about IM and either don't bother or get mugged off by agencies.
Wouldn't recommend reading this post but:
Read the thread I linked to above
Spend minimal money
Follow it exactly
Look for good niches, I like newish ones with lots of new products as above, why compete with old keywords/urls/articles when you can find new ones and start on a more even field.
Once you know the basics and keyword/niche research start building your own pbn and rank for fun
Try selling your own service/product, generally so much better profit for the same rankings
edit:matched betting is good for start up cash(google it) also, not sure if you can do it from Germany or not though
