Wow! Everybody so damn vicious here today. This is probably a huge mistake with the mood everyone seems to be in today but here goes.
Hold my Beer and Watch this...LOL
I'm learning how to do this SEO thing, this is the second website that I made all by my lonesome.
Site #1
The first one literally sucks ass and I'm going to have to redo it. zero traffic, zero sales, yadda, yadda, yadda. I built that site following directions from a mentor that walked me through how to build the site step-by-step. I paid dearly both literally and figuratively for that experience. That mentor had me set up a site purely for landing pages and email capture. I figured out pretty quick I hate that style of email marketing. Not only that, I suck at landing pages. Nuff said there.
Then I pad to have a couple of affiliate sites built for me. Nice looking sites and fast, get some traffic, no conversions, no sales. Things are going to have to be overhauled in some sort of fashion and soon. Good money spent there too with so far $0 return.
Then I decided to get to the brass tacks of the matter and figure out how this website/affiliate site/SEO monster works and how to do it myself so that I can actually start to win, have decent sites and make some money because up to that point it was all a big **FLUSH DOWN THE TOILET**.
Site #2
Hired a coach that makes affiliate sites for a living for about the last 15 years. He started like most of the longtimer here when sites had to be written in HTML. Ranked sites for clients, built his own, etc, etc, still builds sites tot his day. Spent a little $$ to learn from him but I have to say, far less than I had spent so far on training/sites.
I started building it from scratch, brand spanking new domain registered, I seriously mean scratch. I wrote articles, and wrote articles, and wrote articles all from scratch, no copying anybody else's stuff, no spinning anything, hammering it all out at my desk on my laptop every day for a month. I followed the video he had made for me every day, stopped them, rewound, watch again. Keep doing, doing, doing.
Then he taught me how to do the interlinking, then the outbound links, etc, etc, etc. I still watch the videos as I'm going through and adding content.
I started getting indexed in a couple of days after posting. I actually started getting feedback from Google search console about 2 weeks in. Bing reported faster and ranked me higher. Things jump around a good bit but are on the upswing. I got a couple of sales into my affiliate account about 2 weeks in. I get sales of something or other every few days. Point is, I'm finally seeing some movement, some traction. Is it big money yet? Hell no, but I'm working on it. Things I have read over and over again in these forums is finally starting to make sense on how to do things, how SEO works. I'm starting to understand a lot more than I ever thought I would. I'm ranking on the first page of Google and Bing and it blows my mind because I think to myself when I look where I'm at that there is no way I'd outrank so and so website for anything, but there it is.
So, I don't know shit about SEO compared to any of these longtimers here that is gods honest truth.
I have figured out though, that it is so freaking easy to spend money and get what amounts to zero real help with SEO [and it could be anything in this world really if you think about it] when you don't already know the process yourself and what expectation and requirement to have of others.
I'm getting my hands dirty and yes, it's taking time. I'm not the fastest learner, I didn't grow up with computers or video games lol. The curve is probably a lot shorter and less steep for computer literate people.
So there ya have it. Yes, you can spend a fortune, trying to dig a gold mine that never pans out. You can even be thrifty and make bank. It can go either way or anywhere in between - just like any other business.
Good lord, this sounds like a journey thread.