I'm the OG Newbie

Hey everyone! I've just joined and I'm really looking forward to learning as much as possible. So the reason I call myself the OG Newbie is because I made my first $80 through affiliate marketing before most, if not everyone on this forum. This story might be a little long, but I think my story is quite interesting and would like to share it with everyone. So first of all I'm 39, but my story starts in 1997 when I was 16. For those of you younger than I am, you might not remember exactly what the internet was in 1997. Well it was pretty terrible, these are the days of the 28.8kbps dial up modems, the 28.8 was actually the bad ass one, I was cooler than the few other people in my school who even had the internet at home, they were running the 14.4, and there was even a 9.6 for the poor peasants. I was even walking around with a little notepad, and I would jot down any website address that I came across, because I thought the internet consisted of maybe a few hundred websites, and I was going to try to get the urls for all of them. Most of the internet was full of just text web pages on a grey background, a few had pictures, if you were willing to spend 5 minutes to load one picture. And there were no website builders, websites were made manually with html code. Just having 2 different text sizes on your page could make you stand out, and don't forget about the horizontal rule, which was just a line to separate sections of text. Once pictures started to become a little bit more common, porn quickly popped up everywhere. This was a time when most teenage boys had never seen a fully nude woman unless you or one of your friends found his dads nudey magazine collection. So now that porn has started showing up, every teenage boy is trying to find access to the internet, while trying to keep it a secret from our parents, they didn't know that there was porn online. All our parents knew is that there's this thing call the world wide web that all the kids seems to like. But it didn't take long before everyone knew, and with growing concerns of children accessing adult material, some sites were password protected, but the names of Simpsons characters would get you through quite a few of those, and then a few different sites started popping up, and they were trying to develop a method of age verification, one in particular took a unique approach at the time of using a credit card to verify age, and was trying to get all websites with adult material to install their software. The plan was that you would purchase one subscription and would have access to all of the porn online. The adult verification was called AdultCheck, and was operated by Cybernet Ventures Ltd. The business strategy at the time was brilliant, and Cybernet Ventures almost got a hold of the entire porn industry, and probably came pretty close to being the only legally recognized adult verification system, and would've been required on all porn sites. So as a teenage boy with raging hormones, AdultCheck was really starting to annoy me, it was growing quick and it was getting harder and harder to find sites that weren't using it. So I wasn't having any luck trying to get around it, but I noticed that there was a link that said something like "click here to add AdultCheck to your site" so I thought, certainly if you put AdultCheck on your site, that they would give you a free membership. So now I'm thinking, I need to figure out how to make a porn site, so I remember having to ride my bike to the public library to get an html coding book, since there wasn't really anywhere online to find that information, this is before Google, Yahoo, and even Alta Vista (there was also a spin-off adult search engine called Atilla Vista), our search engine was Webcrawler. Anyhow, I don't remember how I found this site, but I somehow I ended up on a web hosting service called WebSpawner which is still operating to this day, but obviously I'm not going to be able to pay for web hosting, and their free trial was just a template where you can make a personal profile, with your name, a brief description and 5 interests or something like that, you had to sign up if you wanted a blank template and wanted to be able to put pictures on your site. Well with my persistence, I found that there was a mistake in their page that let one of the text boxes accept html code, so I hunted around in the few remaining accessible porn sites, and managed to acquire about 30 pictures with very mild nudity. I signed up with AdultCheck, I put my name in, then it asked for my address, and at the time, nobody knew how secure the internet was, but everyone knew that there are risks involved with putting anything personal online, so putting my address in worried me for that reason, and also I thought if they want my address, they might want to mail me something, and if something comes in the mail with AdultCheck on it, my parents will see it and know what I've been up to. But I thought if they mail me something, it might be important, so I didn't just want to make up an address. I had been working at automotive shop for a few months, so I thought maybe I'll use their address just in case they do mail something. I didn't know the address, and without being able to search for that kind of information online, I just put in the name of the shop, the road it's on and the city, nothing else. So I uploaded the pictures and the script for AdultCheck through that text box. And there it was, my first website! Now I thought once AdultCheck saw that I had installed it on my site, they would give me a membership. Well they didn't. My quest to unlock more naked ladies than I could imagine seemed to have come to a dead end. But I figured that I had made a website, that was pretty cool, nobody knew how to do it, so I could show my friends and brag at what I made. A few weeks later my boss hands me an envelope with a confused look on his face and says "there's something from Cybernet Ventures that's addressed to you." I'm thinking "what the F is Cybernet Ventures?" I open it up and pulled out a cheque for just over $80, that was a good chunk of cash for a 16 year old in the 90s. It turns out just one person joined through my link, but purchased the full meal deal gold package which was around $350 if I remember correctly. So I was pretty excited, I didn't realize there was money involved with this, I was just trying to see some naked ladies. But not too long after than, I received an email from someone complimenting my website, and complimenting the women in the pictures, and asked if I happened know where those pictures came from. Well that doesn't sound good, so I immediately deleted everything. Which was disappointing, I had thought I was onto something, but I think I almost got myself in trouble, so I thought maybe I won't focus so much on making money online, and I'll just focus on this automotive thing, computers and cars were always my passions, so I was enjoying it. The next 23 years of my life, I dedicated to becoming the best mechanic I can be. I tried to build my knowledge in every area of automotives, from independent shops, to dealerships, 4X4 shops, high performance both high end new cars, as well as classic muscle car performance. I've exceeded all of my goals that I had for myself. A few times over the years, I've come back to affiliate marketing, and decided that I'm going to figure this out once and for all, and I actually found a tiny bit of success a few years ago with TeeSpring, which I soon realized wasn't going to work, with the amount of hours I had spent on Adobe Illustrator, and on Facebook, running ads, and joining all sorts of groups and trying to promote my designs, a $20 profit just wasn't going to cut it. Well since the start of Covid, it's been the first time I haven't been working in 23 years, nobodies cars need work when they aren't driving them. Over the past four months, it's been the first time I've really been able to sit back and look at my life, and decide what I'm doing with my future. Automotives has gotten a bit old, I've done everything I wanted to do, and leaning over engines for hours and shimmying around underneath cars is already getting to be harder than it used to be. With my time off, the thought of going back to automotives for another 25 years just to make ends meet with maybe a few hundred bucks a month for spending cash, is not very appealing. So a few days ago I decided that I'm figuring out how to make a living online if it's the last thing I do. I started watching YouTube videos about affiliate marketing looking for any clues, hmmm the comments section is awfully positive, suspiciously positive, what's going on? I started reading absolutely everything on every page anywhere I went, privacy polices, terms of service, maybe I'll find some clues in the places where nobody goes. I was looking at an offer on Clickbank, reading the terms of service and I came across a particular topic that made a lightbulb go off. There seemed to be a lack of concrete information on Google surrounding it, but I did end up on a page that mentioned black hat and white hat marketing. My next search was black hat, and that's how I finally ended up here, and I'm pretty excited about it. One interesting thing I found yesterday when I decided to search about Cybernet Ventures just to see if I could find out anything about the company that gave me my first check, and the real interesting thing is that Cybernet Ventures ended up being sued by multiple websites for having copyrighted material on the websites that AdultCheck protects. And after that, the copyright owners went after the websites using the material. I'm not sure how much my little page of 30 pictures contributed to that, but it does make me very curious about who emailed me. So here is my situation, my employment insurance runs out at the end of the month, and I've got a couple hundred bucks to play with, and I really don't want to go back to twisting wrenches, if this looks positive by the end of the month, I can probably borrow enough money to cover my mortgage for one more month, but by the end of September, I need to be making 5K a month. I've already have webhosting and a couple domains, so can anyone tell me if I can turn my $200 into 5K a month in less than 2 months? Or am I completely crazy? I know my way around a computer, and I'm very motivated and have nothing but time right now, if anyone could give me any pointer on how I might be able to pull this off, or just give me a pointer in the right direction I would be so grateful. Anyhow if you made it through my whole story, thanks, and I really look forward to working with everyone.

I'm bit lazy, btw welcome to blackhatworld.