Yeah, I try to have redundancies in-place, as well, as I'm pretty paranoid, myself.
I run into incompetence and corruption on a constant basis, and in some cases it pays to really dog after proper resolutions, but more and more I'm finding that it's better to just be aware of the risks 5yrs in advance, and be very shrewd about how we deal with them.
If something CAN go wrong, it will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment, right? (Murphey's Law?)
Oh yeah, definitely. Incompetence is rampant. Unfortunately there's no way to predict everything that can go wrong. But rest assured that it will, sooner or later
And Murphy's law. I live by that
Oh, man, if you don't use Object Storage, your mind is about to explode.
It's a type of elastic cloud storage, and some of the major providers have provisioned their object storage to have the ability to host static websites on a custom domain.
GCS, AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, and some other smaller providers all offer this feature.
The benefit is that, instead of traditional hosting that costs a few bucks or twenty bucks per month, or something, Object Storage costs you fractions of pennies per month, per site.
I get a bill from Azure for about $0.01 per month, I think. (minimum charge)
It's even less than that, when you connect it with Cloudflare as your CDN, which then caches your static pages, and once that happens, there is not data egress fee from your object storage, so you pay even less. (LoL)
Cloudflare's free plan is all you need, and allows you to use one page rule to redirect to https, which they also provide for free.
This is how you pay $12 for 100yrs of hosting. (hehehehehe)
If you don't have something like this setup, just shoot me a message, and I'd be happy to send my video on the process. (it's easy)
Okay, see, that is very interesting, and I've never heard of it. BHW really dropped the ball not telling me haha
I may shoot you a message about it at some point. Right now I'm trying to dig myself out of the mouth of an alligator, so once I'm done with that and out of the swamp, I may be in touch
Yeah, everyone talks about SEO like it's easy, but I've been doing it several years, now, and you are totally right, it's unpredictable.
I've seen better benefits from $5 posts than $100+ posts, and I've seen big posts fall flat.
I've seen pages with no unique content or links rank for no reason, and I've seen pages never rank that have awesome content and/or great link structures.
In my experience, it's a numbers game... you do an average of diverse SEO activities, and you'll always see the impressions climb upwards on your GSC dashboard.
I'd also say that the highest quality links certainly give a better ROI, but there are risks, there, as well.
It's all calculated risk, but yeah, from a business standpoint, it sounds like you've had more predictable traffic methods for your clients, and that's clearly a better business strategy.
That's pretty much the biggest reason I've had a hard time scaling SEO client work, because most clients won't stay committed.
It has taken me this long to realize that the best way to sell SEO is to not actually sell SEO, but rather small retainers for content marketing and blogging.
From that angle, you can build the content base of the client, and your retain the retainer pretty much indefinitely, because even at $50/mo, you can see progress with their sites, as long as there is content being pushed-out, and with more authority they will eventually be much easier to rank whatever you want.
I realized this just this past month, so I'm getting ready to pivot my offerings in a pretty big way.
Tiny but scalable content marketing, and whopping link packages. (nothing inbetween... LoL)
My main "job" is selling social media services. And one of the things I like best about it is that it's quantifiable. It's tangible.
You buy 500 likes for your Facebook page, and your page has 10 likes now, and when the work is completed your page has 530 likes. It's there, it's right there, you can see it, taste it, smell it, you got what you paid for. There's no buts, ifs or maybes.
And it works, for the most part. Of course, you can get deeper into that and find issues with speed of delivery and likers quality and stick-rate, but for the most part it's very easy to measure and everybody is happy-ish. I like that
If I was selling SEO-services, I could never sell magic. You know, buy my offer and we'll do XYZ and you'll rank. And then they buy and don't rank, and you have to deal with the bullshit. I'd much prefer to sell measurable things, like, 1,000 backlinks, or an article, or anything that you buy, and you get, and we're done. I don't guarantee anything other than... exactly what you paid me for
You can still push content with static, it's just a little extra work to format it, and you could always have someone do all that for you, technically.
For a CMS dash, with login capability, I'd use Tumblr! LoL
The Wordpress company owns Tumblr, you know... pretty interesting.
They deploy like static sites, but then the backend allows you to manage posts, and they are supported by many of the syndication tools out-there.
There's also Medium, but it costs money to host a custom domain.
Tumblr is completely free hosting, and it costs nothing to connect your custom domain.
It also doesn't have restrictions in terms of account creation, like other social media platforms.
No way man. If Tumblr bans me, it's done. If my hosting bans me, I can host elsewhere in 5 minutes. It's just, I just can't do it. Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Mickey Mouse
Yes, for the lack of plugins, you are pushing the cost and difficulty at the platform level, and shifting it to other dependencies, if they are needed.
Many sites don't need anything extra.
There are plenty of tools to push from RSS, which makes Tumblr easy, and some of them might be able to push from sitemap, which would still make static viable for some types of automation.
They have SOME benefits, because whenever I do posts to hashtags, I get some likes and new follows, but truthfully I'm not sure that it's a big enough benefit to spend as much time as I've spent trying to automate it all.
I recently started using DLVR.IT, and have been loving it, but the costs to scale with it are high... at least for projects that are brand new, and not bringing-in any residuals, yet.
Once something starts bringing-in several bucks per month, then it evens-out, I guess.
In my experience, though, if you really wanna do well at building a following on a social media platform, you have to be directly active on that platform, for the most part.
YouTube is SEO oriented, so that would be an exception, but for everything else, you have to be in the mix doing comments and increasing engagements, so it's not as passively beneficial.
So, when I think about it, there are a lot of things that aren't even necessary.
I have some unique analytics things I use, but they are lighter weight than Google Analytics, so it works well with the Static method.
I also use Switchy, which allows for custom domain shortened links.
Mailing list tools have to be independent anyways.
Forms can utilize free routing services, or you can pay for a service, or just use a cheap form tool, and since the nicer features require a paid tool, anyways, this isn't a big deal.
For some sites, I don't even use a form, and I'll just put an email alias improperly formatted, so it doesn't get scraped easily.
For payments, you can use a form with payments, or something like Chargedesk, or any number of independent cart systems. (better this way, anyways)
For all the extra stuff in your external kit, most of them can be applied to a large (or at-least scalable) number of sites, as well.
So, unless you spend a lot of money on really fancy Wordpress hosting, or multi-site madness, you aren't gonna get the better top-down view (per dollar) of your infrastructure and assets with WP.
Social media, I pretty much have pages for all of my websites, and I have fake-ish likes and followers on all of them, just to appear "popular". And I autopost to them, either by using wordpress plugins or sites like dlvr.it and others. You know for me it's not even about being really popular on the social media sites, it's more about pushing content and having a presence and getting the low-hanging fruit.
Because I tried going the social media route and do it legit, and around the same time a friend of mine just went full spam. This was years ago, and we both were doing SMM (Social media marketing) type selling. Well eventually SMM got a bad rep and my websites got banned on many of the social media sites, and many of my social media pages and accounts got banned. My friend on the other hand, he didn't care, he was spamming with bots and all that kinda stuff.
So in the end I was left with nothing, trying to be "legit" and build a "brand". Fucking idiot haha. My friend made more money than me that's for sure.
Of course, my friend is gone now, and I'm still banking. But that's just because I'm resourceful and I keep finding ways to keep going, and I'm also crazy and I won't go away lol
And one thing is for sure. The website that gave me the least headache in terms of owning and operating it was a simple HTML site. The only PHP the site has is just a bit of code to allow me to edit certain things from a central config.php file. Like, the site has 300 pages, and each of them has a footer with this shit - Copyrights 2014-2021
Now 2022 comes in, and I gotta change it to 2014-2022. Years ago I'd do shit like that manually on each page. No matter how fast you go, it's total droid work and a total waste of time.
Of course then I discovered Notepad++ and the mass-edit feature, so I could download the site and edit everything in 3 clicks.
But then I understood how the php on the site was used for other things, and I edited each page to make that footer date changeable from that central config file. And now, every January of a new year I go to the config file and change that to update the year, and I move on with my life.
Ah, the things we do
From several tabs, you can see everything you are doing across your assets, and you can do so for a fraction of a fraction of the cost, by comparison.
You do have to make some adjustments with this approach, but if you are shrewd, you can dramatically drop your costs per site, and your maintenance per site, among other things.
It allows you to shift your focus to content and money making activities, and that's how it should be.
You can keep Wordpress sites simple, also, and deal with fewer problems than normal, but it's still enough problems to make it a hassle.
Sites don't go down for any reason in a static infrastructure, unless your CDN fails for some reason, which is very unlikely.
Even if your object storage has issues, if the content is cached, you are still LIVE. (LoL)
View attachment 202737
Just moneymaking activities, as it should be, definitely
Yeah hahahaha right? Even if your cached page is being shown and it's a static page, I mean, fuck me, people can even buy from your cached page like if you have a paypal or payeer or any sort of buy button on your site. The cached page will still take a person clicking the buy button to the next page of the payment processor and allow them to pay. And even if you have a return URL they'll be brought back to it.
Of course, if they have to submit something on the return URL page in order to send you the info you need to complete their order, they won't be able to do it. But that doesn't matter because you'll receive an email about having received a payment, and you'll probably be aware your site is swimming with the fishes for the moment, and then you can contact the customers and get things cooking.
Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. Unlike stupid fucking sites where people have to login and bla bla bla yada yada yada meh
Great fucking photo
View attachment 202738
ignoring it for the time being until im bothered to go test it out/after my host confirms everything is somewhat good to go haha
I just finished cleaning up one of my wordpress sites and bringing it up to date. Removing plugins, replacing plugins, updating plugins, dealing with spam and other comments, running wordfence scans, the whole thing.
And now the last thing I have to do is update wordpress, and I am looking at the exact same thing as the photo you shared.
FUCK!
