[CASE STUDY] Building an Authority Website Using 100% BHW Services

Mate, I am not an expert but in my opinion, You made a mistake in On Page SEO so that,s why you are stuck lower in Google Ranking
2nd You should Also Try Google Plus as a Good Sign of Social Signal,
3rd Try To Make a YouTube Video to relevant your Niche

well I really Enjoyed Your Journey and Still wanna Enjoy when you will come here with Good News (about Amazon Product Sale)
Good Luck for Your Journey.
Have a Good Day.

i loved the idea,
i will try this out in march and will post my progress

Keep it up Sherbert, congrats on the first few bucks! Still following you and waiting for the cash flow.

STATISTICS (7:00am EST)

30-Day Traffic: 716 (+60)
Yesterday's Traffic: 62 (+1)
Bounce Rate: 67.32% (-0.21%)
Twitter Followers: 819 (+285)
Facebook Fans: 727 (+15)
Pinterest Followers: 1168 (+570)
External Backlinks: 49 (+3)
Citation Flow: 14
Trust Flow: 9
Domain Authority: 1
Page Authority: 1
Spot in top 120 for keyword: #32 (+1)

Total Spent: $899.66
Total Earned: $4.01
Total Revenue: -$895.65

NOTES

Massive boosts in Twitter and Pinterest again. Traffic holding steady in the 60?s as well. Good stuff. I now have more Pinterest followers than my ?rival? site for this search term.

HANDS-ON

Some morning Twitter and Pinterest followings started my day. Traffic from these sources has been increasing. The multiple daily updates on Twitter has done a great job to assist with this. But what I want in the end is a solid presence in the SERP?s to be all I need for targeted traffic, with social media as a secondary source. Hit the Twitter limit pretty quick, but I had screwed around on it some yesterday evening as well. Pinterest all was good. I have been getting a lot of followers on some of my specific boards, and likes on my pins as well, so it?s good to know that all these followers aren?t just follow-and-forget.

Google time. I made a new Gmail account as a catch-all for this project, and for making a Google+ and YouTube page. I made the profile public, skipped all the following people and email crap, and set up my basic information. In the About section, I added links to Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud and MySpace for Profile links, the blog for my site as a Contributor link, and the home page as an ?other? link. In the Story section, I included my typical tagline, and adapted part of one of the blog posts as an Introduction, including a link to the home page wrapped in my search term.

Then I switched to the new Google+ and started a collection. It seems like it is very similar to Pinterest boards. Later on I will add Google+ to Hootsuite as well and ensure that updates for Facebook and Twitter occur on Hootsuite as well. I could use IFTTT, but that would get messy. Then I set up a YouTube account. I set my name, added channel art, a description, and connected my Twitter to my Google+. And that was really all I could do there at the moment.

Then it was article time. I grabbed a NatashaNixon article. It started at 404 words. I wanted to really hammer into this one to make up for my lack of article effort this past week. I put more of a light tone in this article. I don?t know why. It may be because I was feeling a little more confident about the site. Or maybe because knowledge?s article did the same and did so in an incredible way. Regardless, I did it. I took it to a solid 794 words.

I added headings, links, fixed some formatting on a few paragraphs, did a quick edit run through of the first half, added an image, fixed the alt tags associated, set a meta title and description that matched my (new) keyword, and set it as a Featured Post and a full article, then posted. Then I pinned it to an existing board, and threw it into Hootsuite for quick posting on both Twitter and Facebook. I'll be hitting up Twitter and Pinterest (a few times) later this afternoon and evening if time allows.

PLANS

Continuing on my postponing frenzy. I over-allocated myself for the week definitely.

THURSDAY: More Twitter and Pinterest followings, more Facebook group posting, re-do one of the other aged Tumblrs and re-write and post one shorter post there. Add links to the subreddit, start drafting out the massive tutorial, look into video production services on BHW. Order another SEO service, gather list of Disqus enabled comments in my niche articles.

FRIDAY: More Twitter and Pinterest followings (hopefully for the last time), Continue on the massive tutorial, re-write and post one article, post comments on the Disqus enabled blogs/articles, and a few more social media profile creations as well. Post ~20 links to the subreddit. Write down exact methodology for the new VA.

Hi Sherbert, great updates! Thank you.

Also, please keep doing your magic. Don't let any comments sway you from your path. Remember, most Commenters comments are their opinions - not fact. You don't know how successful they are, so best to keep on your path and only take on advice from real winners.

STATISTICS (4:00am EST)

30-Day Traffic: 770 (+54)
Yesterday's Traffic: 59 (-3)
Bounce Rate: 67.01% (-0.31%)
Twitter Followers: 910 (+91)
Facebook Fans: 741 (+14)
Pinterest Followers: 1497 (+329)
External Backlinks: 49
Citation Flow: 14
Trust Flow: 9
Domain Authority: 1
Page Authority: 1
Spot in top 120 for keyword: #36 (-4)

Total Spent: $899.66
Total Earned: $4.55
Total Revenue: -$895.11

HANDS-ON

THIS HAPPENED LAST NIGHT: So I hit my 5,000 following Twitter limit last night. I popped the code into page six of the case study to scroll quickly down the following list and let it go about a quarter of the way, then pop in the code to unfollow those not following me: $('.ProfileCard-content').each(function(){var status = $(this).find('.FollowStatus').text();var unfollowButton = $(this).find('.user-actions-follow-button');if(status != 'follows you'){unfollowButton.click();}}); I tried to follow more, and was unable to. I will revisit this later.

THIS STARTS THIS MORNING EXTREMELY EARLY: I was able to follow a good 500 people on Twitter this morning, and of course more Pinterest. My hope is to be 100% hands-off on this process starting Monday.

At this point it was 5:00am and I had a bit of an idea. I tweeted a discreet link to one of the products being reviewed on the site on the adult Twitter I had been silently building a few minutes a day for the past while. The tweet was basically ?Someone buy me this! [LINK]?. Just curious what kind of traffic that can pull in. Then I went into the office and did some more Twitter and Pinterest followings. Twitter let me follow another 500 somehow. Again, Monday I will start 100% hands-off.

I will also not be purchasing any content-related services for at least a couple months. I want to start phasing the content machine down to one update every week. I?ve still got around 8 NatashaNixon articles I think, and seven great ones from Eternal1912. When those run out, I?m making a list of ten good posts from other sites, and I?m going to spin the ever loving fuck out of them.

Time for another SEO service. I?m going with The SEO?s Razor?s Speed Rank Strategy. I don?t know what the hell I was looking at in the infographic (I think at one point there was a wizard holding a huge tampon). But the promise seems legitimate, and he is highly recommended by several people. The package has two tiers of links, social signals, video creation, and indexing. He had a 10% off code that comes with another $20 worth of links, and I?m all about that life. Turnaround time is 18 to 30 days (drip feed included).

Did some research on video production. I have some experience in producing videos, and the video I?ve sketched out would take about 90 seconds or so. Based on the threads, the range is either shit quality or $400. I?m not going to pay $400 for a video I can make myself in a few hours, so that is on my schedule for when I have some time to spare to work on it. Oh and hey look at that, another hour had passed. Pinterest got hit again.

At this point it was 9am and I had roughly 25 visitors already. Shaping up to be the highest traffic day yet if I played my cards right. That Tweet from earlier only represented 4-5 of those visitors too. So with the above out of the way, that left the following still to do today: more Facebook group posting, re-do one of the other aged Tumblrs and re-write and post one shorter post there. Add links to the subreddit, start drafting out the massive tutorial, gather list of Disqus enabled comments in my niche articles.

I popped five comments onto relevant Facebook posts. All of them were articles from different pages on the same topic, so it was easy to just copy and paste. My narrowed-down niche is not very talked about on Facebook, apparently. I started liking posts I comment on with my page profile, this way I?m not re-commenting on the same link multiple times.

Then I logged into one of the other Tumblr?s I had received. It was a PR3, DA33. Good quality stuff. It only had three posts, so I quickly deleted those. I changed the title, description, avatar, and header image. Then I changed the username/URL to be specific to the article I was putting up. Then I added/connected my Twitter account to the Tumblr blog, so updates get Tweeted. Then I pasted in the article as a post, edited a couple of things, and added a line that included a link to my website. I posted, check to ensure it worked, added some relevant tags, and Tweeted about it. That should be good for a high quality backlink!

Then I grabbed about 30 links to sites that had comments enabled. Sadly, only about three of them were Disqus. The rest were either Facebook, Google, or their own site comments. Oh well, I?m going to hit them all regardless next week. My method will be: Read the article, put in an insightful comment, and drop a link to the site. They?ll be a paragraph or so each, so won?t look like shit or spammy. In the process of finding links, I noticed an affiliate network that one of the sites was a part of that I hadn?t even thought of doing. So I applied. We shall see how that goes.

In the subreddit I went ahead and submitted six links. Three for random sites that rank low for my keyword, and three for links to articles on my site. Regarding the tutorial, I found a guide that I am going to spin the shit out of and turn into a full-fledged, solid PDF that will be given away to email subscribers. It?s all about the list. That?s it for today. It?s been a long one.

PLANS

FRIDAY: More Twitter and Pinterest followings (hopefully for the last time), Start on the massive tutorial, re-write and post one article, post a few comments on the Disqus enabled blogs/articles, and a few more social media profile creations as well. Write down exact methodology for the new VA.

Change of plans for tomorrow. Expect to only see the statistics section. A project has come up at the office that is going to require 100% of my attention tomorrow. This will be a good way to see what kind of traffic and changes occur on a full day of me not messing with this site and surrounding properties.

My overall game plan, roughly outlined, is as follows:

Get the social media following/unfollowing aspect handed off to the new part-time VA on Monday. Rewrite and schedule out two new posts per day starting Monday for the following two weeks. These will be scheduled weekly. 2x14=28 weeks of content ideally. After that has been taken care of, I will take the list of every article past, present, and future on the site, and every page as well, and work out a perfect Hootsuite schedule projecting out a few months, working with Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Throughout these couple of weeks of post creation and scheduling, I will be working on the email PDF. Once ready, I will create an email signup form, giving the PDF away when the visitor submits their email. Once that is all set, I will schedule out some email blasts with Aweber, setting it for a few hours after a new scheduled post has been posted. At this point, the following will be either automated or outsourced:

Twitter and Pinterest following and unfollowing
Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ updates
Blog posts (for at least six months)
Email subscriber updates

In between, I'll be posting comments manually on those blogs I mentioned, as well as other miscellaneous tasks as I see fit. It will be nice to let my creative juices flow after having 95% of my time expenditures from this project thus far automated or outsourced.

Also keep in mind that there will be two SEO services running simultaneously for the next month as well.

Things are going to grow.

STATISTICS (5:30am EST)

30-Day Traffic: 841 (+71)
Yesterday's Traffic: 71 (+12)
Bounce Rate: 67.78% (+0.77%)
Twitter Followers: 1014 (+104)
Facebook Fans: 750 (+9)
Pinterest Followers: 1850 (+353)
External Backlinks: 54 (+5)
Citation Flow: 14
Trust Flow: 9
Domain Authority: 1
Page Authority: 1
Spot in top 120 for keyword: #35 (+1)

Total Spent: $899.66
Total Earned: $4.63
Total Revenue: -$895.03

looks good, those are the 2 services I'm going to get for a new site aswell. You buy the second after seeing lightningbuzz recommend it also? lol

Depressing, but somewhat expected news. The site as of noon has received only 12 hits. This definitely shows that my interactions in social media and elsewhere throughout the project work phases have skewed the actual traffic results quite a bit. Hopefully my plan of action posted last night will assist in helping the rankings increase and the natural traffic get driven to the site instead of forced social media traffic from Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.

Am I giving up? Fuck no, I'm working harder. This case study isn't about learning how to build a website. I've done that shit hundreds of times for Local SEO purposes. But that is to rank for smaller, local terms. It's a totally different ball game ranking for global terms, and I am doing this so new members can learn along with me, so they can not make the mistakes and off-course runs that I am making.

When it comes time to duplicate this with another keyword (say, for example, the amazing keyword I got from Ste that is relaxing in the wings) I will be prepared to do things correctly without making the same mistakes. And yes, I will be doing a case study just like this for that as well. Passive income, that's the goal. I'd much rather have a steady, solid $10 per day than $100 each week in completely random, unpredictable spurts.

Some time presented itself later in the afternoon, so I decided to take it and run with it. Hit up Pinterest with a following blast, and then turned to Twitter. I had hit the 1,000 follower mark, which was nice, but I was almost at 5,000 following again. I opened a new tab and went to my followings and set the Javascript to auto scroll ever 1/2 second. I let it go for a couple minutes, then put in the code to unfollow those who don't follow me back. After another minute or to, I was down to 3,900 or so. Then I went and followed some people until I was back up to 4,200 or so before it blocked me.

So the massive tutorial I copied and pasted from another site is right at 15,000 words. For those keeping track, a full-length novel is typically around 60,000 to 80,000. My goal was to cut that down to around 5,000 words. There was quite a bit of information I didn't need in the guide, and other information I wanted to expand upon. So I dove right in. Remember, the goal of this is to give something of value that will urge email subscriptions and keep subscribers happy. I may even cut the PDF into six to eight sections and release it in posts as a full-fledged guide as well, but include extra information and things not on the posts in the PDF, plus it will be wrapped up in a much prettier package.

I pasted and formatted the old guide and wrote a good 500 or so words in new formatting before getting bored and stopping for the day. My wife had just gotten home at the same time as me and we haven't seen much of each other this week, what with our ridiculous 70 hour workweeks. More to come, and definitely at least a depressing statistics update. I'm looking forward to handing over the social media aspect and focusing on SEO, writing and automation in the coming weeks.

Good updates Sherbert.

Sorry to hear that you had a negative experience with Kratos. That swayed me away (I was literally just searching for his thread to buy it).

Glad you're not going to be spending so much time on socials.

Hope you update experience with seo services that you actually pay for. Not very interested in hearing about services that people give you, as the truth will come for what you pay for.

Fingers crossed for you.

George

STATISTICS (7:30am EST)

30-Day Traffic: 889 (+48)
Yesterday's Traffic: 52 (-19)
Bounce Rate: 68.50% (+0.72%)
Twitter Followers: 1056 (+42)
Facebook Fans: 758 (+8)
Pinterest Followers: 2025 (+175)
External Backlinks: 57 (+3)
Citation Flow: 15 (+1)
Trust Flow: 9
Domain Authority: 1
Page Authority: 1
Spot in top 120 for keyword: #44 (-9)

Total Spent: $899.66
Total Earned: $4.65
Total Revenue: -$895.01

NOTES

Well shit. A few things went south.

1) I lost like ten spots in the rankings for my main keyword overnight.
2) I discovered that traffic takes a sharp nosedive when I am not churning out social media shit.
3) My bounce rate has been on a climb for a few days now.

I need to create value. I received a comment on one of my articles that was someone confused as to what the article was trying to convey. After stopping and really reading it, I completely understand what they are referring to. As a result, more article edits will be taking place. But first, I am going to spend a few days getting the automation end down and building some backlinks, as well as working on new articles and the long PDF guide. My top five goals for March:

1) Make social media hands-off except simple Pinterest posting (Hootsuite for updates to Facebook/Twitter/G+, VA for follow/unfollow)
2) Increase number of high quality backlinks via letting these SEO services do their thing and manual links of my own
3) Write at least 20 articles out, and stretch them out once per week, to make the writing hands-off for a while.
4) Finish the PDF guide completely, prep a beautiful PDF, start an email subscription section.
5) Skim through current articles, add more images, enhance article quality (some of the blurbs need another run though at least)

The mixture of these five things should allow for increased value and rankings by the end of next month. I will also be doing SEO-related work based on some mistakes I have made on this site thus far. For example, I haven?t done much in terms of tagging posts at all, and my categories suck. I plan to spend some time fixing these up and adding descriptions to categories, tags, images, etc.

HANDS-ON

First I went into Google+ and created a business page attached to the Google+ page to connect with Hootsuite. I filled it out completely, similar to the actual account Google+ vs the business page last week, and then joined ten related Google+ communities. Curious, I posted a link to the home page on one of the communities that had over 1 million members, and added the tagline, then +1?ed. Then I hooked the Google+ page up to Hootsuite and let it be for a while to do some other tasks.

I wrote a detailed, complete step-by-step guide for the new VA, who I am paying $25 per week to run a Twitter burst once per day and a Pinterest burst three to four times per day. Then I did a Pinterest burst of my own, and ran a complete unfollowing of all Twitter users not following me back blast on the entire account, bringing my total followings down to 726 from 4,000+. Then I took a few hours off to decompress, took a hike, out for a nice lunch, and a few other tasks.

I had 33 posts on the website. I decided to do a post self-audit to see where I needed to make serious changes. This consisted of making a spreadsheet with the following columns: Article Title, Link, Final Text Edit (i.e. is it completely ready), Old Keyword, New Keyword, Image Description (yes/no), New Images, Old Category, New Category, Old Tags, New Tags, Old Word Count, New Word Count.

Here is what I discovered:

1) Upon really reading through some of the blurbs that I got from Natasha Nixon, I realized just how badly written they were. All articles followed the exact same concepts and templates. I don?t know why I thought I could get away with posting these on my site as Blurbs, add some links and call it a day. The quality was terrible. But I should have expected that with $75 for 16 400 word articles. I should have never let these articles compromise the quality of my website. Shame on me. PLAN: Several of these articles can be combined and rewritten to make larger, more intuitive and informative articles (for example, one is [KEYWORD] Do?s, another is [KEYWORD] Don?ts. These can be combined as a Do?s and Don?ts post). That will be done. The rest will be removed from the site, edited, and used as guest posts or backlinks.

2) Eighteen of my posts have the same exact keyword. Eight more have another keyword. The rest have sorry excuses for keywords. It may have seemed proper when writing, as usually I had spent a good bit of time editing and was just ready to be done with the post. No. I need to really sit down and do some research and find some long tail keywords, and spin these posts to be about the long tail. Take over some smaller keywords so I can hit the big one. PLAN: Gather a long list of popular long tails, apply them to the current posts where applicable, try to have a different keyword with each post.

3) I have three categories for the posts on my site. One is my exact keyword, and is for longer articles. One is for shorter articles. The other is featured articles. That?s it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Sometimes it feels like my knowledge of SEO was truly close to nothing. PLAN: Re-work my categories into applicable sections of the site instead of basing it on article length and overall happiness with the content. I was literally categorizing these posts based on my own level of laziness. Include proper name, slug, image, and solid, long, SEO?ed description for each category.

4) Tags. My god. I had one tag, total. It was my main keyword. That was it. For a span of eight articles, I didn?t include any tags at all. This is unacceptable. I must have gotten too wrapped up in the social media aspect of it, as I?m sure some of you were able to see. I liked watching the numbers rise a little too much. Glad I?m getting that off my hands so I can truly put some focus into getting this site up to par and competitive in this landscape. PLAN: Add tags out the ass. Relevant ones based on the articles. Much like the categories, include proper name, slug, image, and solid, long, SEO?ed description for each category.

5) Images. This needs some work. I had a featured image for each post. I was proud of these images. They were compressed and optimized, and then smushed to lower the size more. Each one was the exact same size pixel-wise. But guess what? People don?t want to read walls of text. I?m sure that has affected my bounce rate. What would you do if you found a site about something you were interested in, and every article was 1,500 words of drivel that had no exciting imagery. Shit. PLAN: Get some more images to add to the site. Add descriptions and captions to each image, and alt tags to match the posts that they are attached to. Do the same with the new images, and compress as well.

So. Where to go from here? What to do with a cluttered, damaged site? It?s easy to get 20,000 words on a site. It?s a different animal to get 20,000 relevant, exciting words. A detailed plan coming tomorrow, as well as hitting the bricks hard.

Hi Sherbert,
Have you checked with keyword density? Each page should target a keyword. If you have 2 articles with same keyword, they both be eating each other up.
I hear keyword density around 1.5% is good. But if you have it in the wrong place, its more heavily weighted so this density % needs to be tweaked. Eg if you have your keyword in Heading, its weighted more than in the body of your text. If you have your keyword in your domain name, then you need to decrease the keyword density a lot more too.
Also, I think if you are using tags, its going to increase your keyword density, so you might overoptimise it.

Have you read PHPBuilt's thread on idiot proof guide to authority site building? http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...diot-proof-guide-authority-site-building.html

There's a firefox plugin I use for checking keyword density quirk https://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

I hope these helps! Please keep updating, I am following your case study. I've never used wordpress before, so I'm still on page 1 of your case study!

Your thread in its entirety, can be a great tutorial.

There's an old Chinese proverb that says, "Tell me, I forget. Show me, I remember. Involve me, I understand." The second part is relevant to images.

While having more images is great, relevancy matters. Majority of the websites we see, have irrelevant stock photos that add nothing to the text. In fact, they have a negative impact on conversions.

I've always admired David Ogilvy, the advertising legend. With your attention to detail, you may find his research interesting. Here's the link to a Kissmetrics article that showcases his research on the best practices to using images within content.

The study may be a few years old, but it continues to be relevant today.

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/shocking-truth-about-graphics/

Sherbert Hoover said:

STATISTICS (7:30am EST)

5) Images. This needs some work. I had a featured image for each post. I was proud of these images. They were compressed and optimized, and then smushed to lower the size more. Each one was the exact same size pixel-wise. But guess what? People don?t want to read walls of text. I?m sure that has affected my bounce rate. What would you do if you found a site about something you were interested in, and every article was 1,500 words of drivel that had no exciting imagery. Shit. PLAN: Get some more images to add to the site. Add descriptions and captions to each image, and alt tags to match the posts that they are attached to. Do the same with the new images, and compress as well.

So. Where to go from here? What to do with a cluttered, damaged site? It?s easy to get 20,000 words on a site. It?s a different animal to get 20,000 relevant, exciting words. A detailed plan coming tomorrow, as well as hitting the bricks hard.

Click to expand...

^ I appreciate all the comments and kind words!

STATISTICS (8:00am EST)

30-Day Traffic: 942 (+53)
Yesterday's Traffic: 59 (+7)
Bounce Rate: 69.75% (+1.25%)
Twitter Followers: 1052 (-4)
Facebook Fans: 770 (+12)
Pinterest Followers: 2138 (+113)
External Backlinks: 57
Citation Flow: 15
Trust Flow: 9
Domain Authority: 1
Page Authority: 1
Spot in top 120 for keyword: #44

Total Spent: $899.66
Total Earned: $4.82
Total Revenue: -$894.84

STATISTICS (4:00am EST)

30-Day Traffic: 988 (+48)
Yesterday's Traffic: 50 (-9)
Bounce Rate: 70.14% (+0.39%)
Twitter Followers: 1060 (+8)
Facebook Fans: 774 (+4)
Pinterest Followers: 2209 (+71)
External Backlinks: 60 (+3)
Citation Flow: 16 (+1)
Trust Flow: 9
Domain Authority: 1
Page Authority: 1
Spot in top 120 for keyword: #53 (-9), back to #37 at 8:00am, back to #45 at 1:30pm

Total Spent: $1,080.90
Total Earned: $5.14
Total Revenue: -$1,075.76

NOTES

VA is hard in the paint already. He's in India, and there's like a 12 hour difference, so it's perfect. Getting work done while I sleep. Very comforting and very reassuring. I requested an email be sent with Twitter followings before and after, and Pinterest data as well, along with any impediments that may have occurred. Project Automation and Outsourcing is well under way. Got my receipt for Facebook advertising. $181.24. Fuck doing that any more. It's not worth the traffic and likes.

HANDS-ON

I went into the website and added five new categories: Comparisons, Product Reviews, Tutorials, General Articles, and an additional one. These aren't the exact names. I used some keyword stuff in there as well. If you aren't familiar with Wordpress category pages, the description section acts much like a general Wordpress post. Room for plenty of text, and an image or two if needed. I can also use Yoast to check SEO standing and edit the meta title and description if applicable. And it's definitely applicable.

I took the first of the five category pages and hand-wrote 300+ words in the description, utilizing a captioned and alt-tagged image, a specific keyword I had not used yet that was high-traffic, a nice ordered list, links to a relevant YouTube video and a relevant article on my site, and headings. Yoast put me 100% in the green regarding SEO. I was satisfied. I edited the meta title and meta description to fit unique text, and that was that for the first category page.

Then I found the two posts that directly related to that category and added them to it, removing it from whatever generic categories they were associated with. Luckily the URL's for my site posts are not [LINK]/[CATEGORY]/[POST], but instead just [LINK]/[POST]. Tomorrow I will notate the rest of the categories, then move on to tags.

I somehow found myself in this thread by pure luck, and the coincidence is actually astounding to me. I recently met this chick while doing a trial drug study (one of those deals where you whore yourself to the pharmaceutical companies for a small payoff to act as a guinea pig). She was explaining to me how you could make a blog site and work with drop shipping, all new terms to me. Since I was looking for a new hustle, everything she shared with me appealed to me a lot. I discovered this forum while searching for other unrelated topics concerning hacking (not that I'm a hacker) and social engineering.
Anyway, my life has been a complete pile of sh!t since a relationship that I invested myself in way too much went t!ts up. Since then I've tried to re-educate myself (full-time) while holding a full-time job simultaneously and that has just dumped me further into this swirling toilet bowl of depression that I can't seem to muster enough strength to swim out of. I want to find something that will push me to advance -- a new lease on life. This stuff could be just that.
I've read a good portion of this thread and I'm very interested in seeing the final results. So far it seems like a hell of a lot of work for nothing, but since I'm completely ignorant when it comes to this stuff, I'm hoping for a happy ending (don't worry, not the massage parlor type).

I was wondering if there are any major points that you've learned from your experience on this project so far, aside from that facebook advertising is a waste of time in your opinion?

Thanks for this in depth account of your project. (I won't call it a journey because that just sounds way too cheesy and as if I'm comparing it to a religious pilgrimage. hahaha)