[JOURNEY]My 16 Years Long Journey from Just a Member to My First SAAS - PBN Network Manager

Hello fellow webmasters and BHW members!

Being a member here for the past 16 years was really a journey and I have decided to share with you my knowledge, my life, my ups and downs, struggles and stories. I learned a lot during this period of my life and the time has come to share all that with you. While I'm waiting for my VPS to deploy, I will start as I should - with my first days as BHW member.

I discovered this board by accident, registered and started combing through all "Get Rich Quick" methods posted by different members. I was creating simple 5 page websites for AdSense, "movie" websites with actual movies hosted who knows where, I tried earning money from YouTube uploading garbage. Yeah, with all those methods you could earn few hundred dollars, enough for me at the time but I wanted more.

My first bigger payments started with Pinterest and posting tons of pins to big boards. I was using like 30 browsers and scripts to post pins automatically and all that traffic went to my "recipe" websites where I was earning money from Ads. It was pretty laid back work and I could hit $1000-$1500 per month with ease. But that lasted just a few months and Pinterest started banning my accounts. I tried everything and I just quit doing this after some time. All in all, you can earn money doing shit but it will not last long!

Luckily, once Pinterest method died I started working for a friends startup and it lasted for about 2 years. It was more or less 9-17 job working in promising IT company. I learned a lot there, mostly about people relations since being a webmaster, this is one field that we don't work on. In any case, once that journey ended, actual owner recommended me to try working on Upwork for someone. Even though I didn't liked the idea I needed some cash and I decided to start looking for a new job.

- My Upwork Journey -
Yeah, I always preferred to work for myself and hated an idea to work for someone else but cash is cash and I needed it desperately. Finding clients was brutal at start and I started working for as low as $3 per hour. My God, when I remember that I was working 10-12 hours a day for a client being watched by a piece of software taking screenshots every few minutes and tracking my mouse movement! The most awful experience but hey, I had to earn so I just put my head down and pushed.

I was working there for some Israel company that was building links for Casino.com doing classical outreach, contacting website owners offering like $50 per article. I was getting paid by the hour but I had to contact like 50 websites per hour, respond back instantly and if I didn't get "enough" replies the guy would be unpleasant to me - to say the least. Here I noticed that big companies like Samsung were doing basically the same so just using Ahrefs I could find a bunch of their links and contact those websites directly. This improved my "conversion" but after a month I just quit working for this asshole. Of course, before calling quits I saved all the data from all workers with contacted websites, emails, prices, notes, etc. I didn't had a chance to use this info, but at least I felt a bit better knowing that I have something that can be used for earning $.

There were few more guys and projects on Upwork. In total, I was working on 35 different projects/companies, working on backlinks, website audit, OnPage SEO, pretty much everything related to SEO. My first highlight there was working for Glen Allsopp. My God, when he first contacted me I was shaking for 2 days I was reading his ViperChill blog at a time. He pushed my price on Upwork to $20 per hour. Even though I was not working for him for long, mainly because of my limited knowledge, he was very fair to me and I appreciate everything I learned from him during that time.

My first BIG client and my last on Upwork, was I guy that contacted me on Upwork 5 years ago. It was interesting project at a time and I actually applied to his project even though I didn't know a single word in German language. He was looking for German speaking SEO guy, and I applied. I didn't have to lose anything and we hit off pretty nicely. I learned over time that he is really passionate and hard working person, we started working on more and more projects. COVID started and we were pushing like 5 websites a week, he was working on content and I was pushing links. Few months later I started my own company!

Yeah, I registered my own company! I found a girl, got married, life was good! While my pregnant wife was reading books, I was working on links and websites for 12 to 16 hours a day. I was daily communicating with my client who become a very good friend over time. We shared a lot about our struggles, our lives, our relationships. We went through ups and downs, burn-outs, Google updates and we just pushed through all that. We shared so much and connected that our kids share the same name! I was crying when he told me that he named his son just like I named mine! Yeah, and I cry now remembering all that. Man, we are like 2000 km away from each other, never saw each other even on camera and we are so connected.

Anyway, lets get back on a journey! I was working on a links for his websites and decided that I need to build something for myself since it is not that secure to be dependent on a single client. I have a family and I need to take care of them so I have decided to build my own PBN. My goal was to hit 100 websites for start and building those websites, adding good content with images, building links and what not took me a year. I wanted to start posting test articles just to see how it will perform and my God, posting 100 articles manually is just a waste of time! So - I decided to build python script that will help me do it. Yeah, it was faster and I could post 100 articles with ease but I had issues with posting featured images so I had to waste my time again going through articles back and fort so I just decided that this is shit and I need something better! So, here are we now, I started building my own SAAS!

- My SAAS Journey -
With a little knowledge in coding I started creating something mainly from necessity to provide a good service for a client. I just wanted to be able to post articles, and one function lead to another and another. Now, after 3 weeks working on this project I believe that I'm on a right path to create PBN Network Manager. I want to create one place, one dashboard from which my clients would be able to manage, maintain and update 100s - even 1000s of websites at the same time!

Right now, I have finished working on a article creator, article manager and few smaller functions. Now, this is my basic idea:
- Article Creator - creating single article
- Bulk Creator - creating batches of 100 articles

- Once that is done I want to finish article posted and article scheduler.
- Link Scheduler - I want to be able to add links to sidebar or footer with a scheduler, automatic removal, etc so if I sell sidebar links, I can limit the number of shown links and also the script will remove links automatically as scheduled
- Article Spinner - pretty obvious what this should do

Since I'm deeply invested in this project, I have decided to share everything with all of you. To be honest, this is a big deal for me and a big step so let me know anything you want.
Of course, if you have an idea what functions I should add - feel free to share that with me!

I will do my best to update this thread whenever I find some free time!

All the best,
Emil aka gtsemil

That’s solid. PBN management is such a pain once you scale, so a proper tool for that would be a game-changer. Curious how you're handling stuff like hosting diversity and tracking—it always gets messy. Following your journey for sure!

Great read.

Best of luck

jas reed said:

That’s solid. PBN management is such a pain once you scale, so a proper tool for that would be a game-changer. Curious how you're handling stuff like hosting diversity and tracking—it always gets messy. Following your journey for sure!

Click to expand...

Well, my plan is not to host websites. You can use service like LaunchCDN and host your websites there. My idea is to manage WP blogs, add content and manage links from one dashboard through WP plugin. I don't want to get into hosting for sure.

Assclown said:

Great read.

Best of luck

Click to expand...

Thanks! Stay tuned I bet that this will be a bumpy ride

All the best for the journey.

Really interesting journey, I'll be following

That's really a inspiring journey I wish you best of luck, i also really want to build my own private PBN Network with Quality Authority. I confused about Off-Page SEO for each domain for my PBN how to make them good as when i push my website it will really push ranking.

Hey! Are you building PBN's specifically for local SEO?

Absolutely inspiring journey, Emil! From grinding with $3/hour gigs to building a SaaS that solves your own real-world pain points, this is the kind of story that shows what persistence, evolution, and passion in the SEO world really looks like

Good luck with your journey, it's always interesting to follow a new SAAS growing

Thank you all for the kind words! I hope that my intro didn't bore you

When talking about my PBN, I was building websites for German audience and for global in English. I was not focusing local SEO or anything, just 100 blogs where I could post articles for a clients.

Now, when you talk about Off Page SEO, its totally up to you what you want to do, but creating links for 100 websites takes time unless you use some tools. In any case, my main problem was creating content, updating and creating 100 websites - not links.

Whole point of creating this PBN Network Manager is to help you create content for all your network. My idea is to be able to create and update content on your websites with ease. Once you fully automate creating content for the network, you will have more time working on links and anything else. I spent a year creating content for those websites, and with my tool, you can do it in a day - maybe few days. That is the whole point, to fix one problem at a time - content creation.

Now, latest update:
- I have redesigned few functions, now when user saves his article, article and images will get stored together so once user deletes his article - everything is removed
- For easier navigation on the server, every article/image is stored under user id (it was all stored in one place before so... tons of garbage )

I spent 2 days fixing this stuff but I have finally finished article-creator and article-manager. I almost started to cry because of the issues with terminal and cPanel node.js communication. My God, how they do their best to make everything so complicated...

In any case, one small victory for today! Everything is working now

emilex said:

Thank you all for the kind words! I hope that my intro didn't bore you

When talking about my PBN, I was building websites for German audience and for global in English. I was not focusing local SEO or anything, just 100 blogs where I could post articles for a clients.

Now, when you talk about Off Page SEO, its totally up to you what you want to do, but creating links for 100 websites takes time unless you use some tools. In any case, my main problem was creating content, updating and creating 100 websites - not links.

Whole point of creating this PBN Network Manager is to help you create content for all your network. My idea is to be able to create and update content on your websites with ease. Once you fully automate creating content for the network, you will have more time working on links and anything else. I spent a year creating content for those websites, and with my tool, you can do it in a day - maybe few days. That is the whole point, to fix one problem at a time - content creation.

Now, latest update:
- I have redesigned few functions, now when user saves his article, article and images will get stored together so once user deletes his article - everything is removed
- For easier navigation on the server, every article/image is stored under user id (it was all stored in one place before so... tons of garbage )

I spent 2 days fixing this stuff but I have finally finished article-creator and article-manager. I almost started to cry because of the issues with terminal and cPanel node.js communication. My God, how they do their best to make everything so complicated...

In any case, one small victory for today! Everything is working now

Click to expand...

The PBN Network Manager focuses on simplifying content creation and management for large PBNs, making what took me a year possible in just days, with recent updates improving article and image handling.

Congrats op.

Thanks everyone for your kind words and support!

To be honest, when I started working on this my goal was to just make posting convenient for me. Just a few weeks in I realized how much work this actually is! My God, yesterday I decided to simplify article creation process so instead of having article generator (for making 1 article) and separate mass generator for making multiple articles, I have decided to put that all into one generator. So now, you can create from 1 to 100 articles from the same page.

In order to make it work I had to create separate "worker" who will just take content from OpenAI and save that through controllers and separate parser that will parse through received data. I was working yesterday from 8AM to 4AM, and continued today from 8AM and I still work on image generator. It gets 10 times more complicated when you want to do it in bulk and if you want to make sure that you actually can use and parse everything. Its a lot of work but I will soldier through it

As soon as I finish this one thing I will share few images. I really can't wait to hear your thoughts!

I'm now exactly one month into this project and I must say that I'm slowly wrapping up my project. I have finished article creator and all major functions that I have planned for my SAAS. Here are few images from my dashboard so that you can see how everything looks right now.

Inside article creator you can create 100 articles at a time and post it to exact category directly to your WordPress site(s).

I have created article configurator, where user can choose article size, tone, type, readability, number of images.
In structure, user can choose headings, Quotes, FAQ, TOC, Conclusion.
Right now user can choose just GPT-4o (I have not yet implemented other models), AI Content Cleaning, AI Banned Words.

Lastly, user can choose different publishing modes:
- to save article
- to post all articles in creator to the project (every project is a list of different websites), here user can post 1 Article to 1 Website in the project or post 1 Article to all websites in the project
- Post all articles to single Site

Also, there is classic Schedule posts with frequency to post X article(s) per day, per week or per month.

Lastly, I have created "Sponsored Post" where user can add URL, Keywords and About for the sponsored article where prompt is created as a plug for the sponsor in the theme of the article. Main idea is not just to put URL/keyword to the sponsored website, but to create paragraph inside the content in the theme of the article with URL/keyword. For this reason, there is a choice to use this as second, third, forth or last paragraph in the article.

Any ideas what I can implement here in the article creator to make it even better?