1000th Post: 10 Lessons I learned in SEO and IM in 9 years in the business

Great post.

Damn this is beautiful and wise. Great job!

Nice share for newbies. I think my number one thing that I've learned is don't take people's word that something doesn't work. Like you said, domains are $1. Google isn't psychic, it's an algorithm, and there is definitely more holes than is commonly accepted. Also, number two takeaway is that posting any real spoonfed method on BHW is the equivalent of killing it and all those who use (that exact) method. I really get annoyed when people do this for some thumbs up and basically ruin it for the people using it. Sharing is good, outlining precise methods is like throwing a steak in the middle of a herd of lions.

Freevy said:

Thank you for motovation and for your tips.

What do you think about affiliate marketing ? Building affiliate sites? It's a stable way to earn money ?

In your opinion, what are the most stable ways to earn an online income?

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Affiliate marketing is fine, as long as you cannot (or do not want to) make your own products. I made a couple thousands as a Clickbank affiliate before, I think it was in 2016 (stats for this period not available in my account anymore, so cannot post exactly).

Few things I did not like about Clickbank, and as far as I know are still the same:
1. You have a control over landing page, but not about the sales page. Most Clickbank sales pages are just terrible, year 2000 stuff.
2. You do not have control about the quality of the product. The average refund rate on CB is officially 10%, but in reality it is around 20%, or even more. In my opinion that just says that most of their products sucks. My average refund for all products I sell is 4% for last 12 months, and I have some products where I hadn't have a single refund ever! No way you can get such stats with Clickank
3.You help building someone's else reputation and brand, and not yours...

All of it being said, affiliate marketing is a good model, and you can definitely make a nice website that can generate regular income. The key is to stick the the lessons from my original post: choose a niche you love, work hard, 80/20 rule, optimization, think outside of the box, etc.

baldane said:

very nice share and motivational post

what is your site address

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Seeing one of mys sites won't help you anyway. Seeing a successful site/network of sites is one thing, but what matters is understanding rules to stick to when you want to make such a site/network. That's the info in my initial post.

Harlet said:

Nice share for newbies. I think my number one thing that I've learned is don't take people's word that something doesn't work. Like you said, domains are $1. Google isn't psychic, it's an algorithm, and there is definitely more holes than is commonly accepted. Also, number two takeaway is that posting any real spoonfed method on BHW is the equivalent of killing it and all those who use (that exact) method. I really get annoyed when people do this for some thumbs up and basically ruin it for the people using it. Sharing is good, outlining precise methods is like throwing a steak in the middle of a herd of lions.

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I agree with you, to certain point.
The reality is that real "holes" are quite rare nowadays. In the past they sometimes lasted months or in rare cases even years, while now they last for hours, days, or weeks at best.
That's why I do not suggest looking for them anymore (see lesson 2). But as you said, if they are shared, they die very even quicker as they would without being shared .

Still, I believe there are "holes" in a way that there are some fairly legitimate ways of ranking websites, or even making money online let's call them "blueprints". This can concern everything, including blueprints in PPC campaigns, which can be sometime set up in a matter of hours, and you can start earning, or at least testing which will result in earning soon...
The different between a "hole" and a "blueprint" is that the second one requires some real work, and either substantial budget or time and effort. And therefor even if these are shared online, they won't get saturated quickly, or maybe they won't get saturated at all. At least that's my opinion.

This is good motivation example. Thank you sir. If we enough work we can earn money.

Kikerinka said:

I agree with you, to certain point.
The reality is that real "holes" are quite rare nowadays. In the past they sometimes lasted months or in rare cases even years, while now they last for hours, days, or weeks at best.
That's why I do not suggest looking for them anymore (see lesson 2). But as you said, if they are shared, they die very even quicker as they would without being shared .

Still, I believe there are "holes" in a way that there are some fairly legitimate ways of ranking websites, or even making money online let's call them "blueprints". This can concern everything, including blueprints in PPC campaigns, which can be sometime set up in a matter of hours, and you can start earning, or at least testing which will result in earning soon...

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There are quite a few holes that aren't plugged on Google if you want short term but many many that aren't plugged on other sites. I've made a lot of money off holes but then I'm a developer and it's fun to look for ways to break the system. Blueprints are evergreen, but sharing 'cheats' only breaks it for everyone (see kindle bots)

Congratulations for achieving such fit its a post of encouragement to other mate behind

Great read with some solid advice.

my two favourites - make the most of it when you’re on a roll and don’t waste time on enemies.

Harlet said:

There are quite a few holes that aren't plugged on Google if you want short term but many many that aren't plugged on other sites. I've made a lot of money off holes but then I'm a developer and it's fun to look for ways to break the system. Blueprints are evergreen, but sharing 'cheats' only breaks it for everyone (see kindle bots)

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I guess from a perspective of a programmer you can find many holes I cannot . Would you mind explaining a bit the Kindle bot hole? I remember that there was here once a service where you paid a guy 250 (or something like that), gave him a book, and in a few days you got lime 1K from kindle pages read. Is that what you were referring to?

davids355 said:

Great read with some solid advice.

my two favourites - make the most of it when you’re on a roll and don’t waste time on enemies.

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Thank you, glad to see that such an experienced member like You found my post interesting. Good luck, hopefully you'll stay on a roll for a long time

important lessons. can you mentioned what kind of SEO steps you have followed on this journey

Golden advice , thanks for penning it down and sharing it. I have learned for it

Welcome to the 1,000th post club! And thanks a lot for taking the time into writing this lines based on 9+ years experience in the business. Deeply appreciated!

Nice share bro.

Kikerinka said:

I guess from a perspective of a programmer you can find many holes I cannot . Would you mind explaining a bit the Kindle bot hole? I remember that there was here once a service where you paid a guy 250 (or something like that), gave him a book, and in a few days you got lime 1K from kindle pages read. Is that what you were referring to?

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Yeah, that idiot and the group he worked with was almost directly responsible for the patching of kindle bots which had lived peacefully and made me $5k/month for years and years. People using it too greedily, cheaply made bots, it made it too frustrating for legit authors and caused people to harass Amazon until they fixed it. There were publicly named/shared bots that became the "weapon" against us. It used to be easy, now it's practically impossible. I know they are still out there because I see them, but I've not been able to crack it again. Any kindle botters out there still alive on BHW? Anyway there are holes for developers but there aren't that many left for regular folks for sure.

I love lesson 9 about choosing your battles. I've been focusing on that more and more lately in my offline job.

Thank you guys for your kind words! Very happy to still see new members enjoying the original post!
To some questions:

nik2016 said:

important lessons. can you mentioned what kind of SEO steps you have followed on this journey

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I followed so many strategies during the nine years... In 2012 I reached top position with public blog networks (you could rank for almost anything and for relatively cheap, and very easy, the ROI was huuuuuge, but the strategy didn't work for long).

Later. in 2013-2014 I followed a blueprint posted here by an Australian member, with a little twist any my own on/page strategy (here we used tools like Article marketing robot, bookmarking demon, X-Rummer, and other), and this required much more work, but with the blueprint I managed to rank for many strong keywords in my niche, and the ROI was still great...

Later, in 2015-Mid 2016, I had some successes with niche guest posts (even on blog farms!), combined with on-page strategies, and very long articles. This strategy didn't work all the time, but I reached no 1. for some decent keywords with it, and ROI was still acceptable.

From 2017, however, I am not buying any links (with an occasional exception).
Not that they do not work, the thing is just that serious links got too expensive, and in my niche it will be almost impossible to reach a positive ROI with link building campaigns, at least as far as my calculations go...
Now I focus purely on content, site structure, on page indicators, and more than anything else on optimization for conversions, and time on page... this is a big thing now.
I am not doing that bad even without links:

Harlet said:

Yeah, that idiot and the group he worked with was almost directly responsible for the patching of kindle bots which had lived peacefully and made me $5k/month for years and years. People using it too greedily, cheaply made bots, it made it too frustrating for legit authors and caused people to harass Amazon until they fixed it. There were publicly named/shared bots that became the "weapon" against us. It used to be easy, now it's practically impossible. I know they are still out there because I see them, but I've not been able to crack it again. Any kindle botters out there still alive on BHW? Anyway there are holes for developers but there aren't that many left for regular folks for sure.

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I think you should be still grateful for your run. It won't happen often that you bot a legitimate company, and it pays you 5K a month on an ongoing basis .
The method is dead, but trust me that things could have ended much worse. If Amazon wasn't such a giant and a million here or there wasn't just peanuts in their view, they'd have easily sued you and you'd have ended up repaying the money (or even worse).
BTW, I hate Amazon (it's good for nobody except buyers), so props for taking something out of them!

BHSEONewb said:

I love lesson 9 about choosing your battles. I've been focusing on that more and more lately in my offline job.

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That's it. Negative energy will do no good to anyone. We have to focus on things we can control, rather than wasting our lives being upset about things we cannot even change .

Nice work bro, thanks for your lessons, hopefully I'll learn something of them.
Good luck with your money sites.

Absolutely fantastic post

If I took everything away, and you had to start over from scratch today, where would start? slowly building an authority website? But what side project would you have to build some income until your authority site ranks and starts bringing in cash?

Thank you for all your kind words guys. One reply below.

nefariousn said:

If I took everything away, and you had to start over from scratch today, where would start? slowly building an authority website? But what side project would you have to build some income until your authority site ranks and starts bringing in cash?

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This is an excellent question.
If you really took everything away, and I had to start from scratch (but with existing knowledge, and data from Analytics and GWMT), I'd do the following:
1. Buy new website in my niche, a brandable name, and design it accordingly (can be done in a day)
2. Create several digital products which I successfully sell today, and know that there is a decent audience for them (I can do three products in a week, if I am really focused).
3. Create several landing pages and sales pages for each of them, with my existing knowledge about optimization for conversions, and data from Ga GWMT (this will take another week)
4. Start running Adwords campaigns and bring targeted traffic to these landing pages.

I ran Adwords campaigns before, and know that after a few weeks or so I can get as low as 3-5 cents per click, after some optimization.
For a $20 eBook, this means that you can turn profitable with a conversion rate as little as 0,2% (one in every 500).
But I already have the knowledge in optimization for conversion, and even in my experience with Adwords, I should get close to 1%, after some optimization and tests...

So, in a month, if I managed to generate 3000 clicks from the campaigns (100 day, more than doable even for just a few winning products), I'd be spending $120 on ads, and earning $600. If I can generate 6,000 clicks... you do the math.

I'll let the campaigns run, live from the money, and work on building the website into an authority. Meanwhile I'll build also top quality YT channel, for the same brand...

That's what I would do, if you took everything away, and I wanted to live from IM as soon as possible again .

Your biggest asset is your knowledge. You can lose (and I lost many times), but your knowledge grows with every project...