JOURNEY: Newbie High on Coding/SEO skills, Low on Experience with IM

Hi and thanks for BHW, I have been lurking on and off for years.

I'm a web developer and making a decent living building and managing sites for clients. But I'm tired of this being 100% of my effort. Seems to me building sites and onsite SEO is a barrier for most IMs, so I should have a head start in this respect, right?

I want to go with the KISS principle and learn through experience, I have zero expectations of making big $ anytime soon. Neither do I want to waste $/time making too many mistakes.

TL;DR - Tell me where I'm going to make mistakes - be blunt. I'm in this for the long haul

1. Strategy ( And a self assessment of my strengths and where I suck )
2. Tactics ( What I've done, what's next )
3. Gaps ( What I need to try / learn from )
4. Resources ( what I think I need to do, and spend $$ on )

Strategy is to start with 3 affiliate projects - all with the same model. Niche Website, Quality Original Content, Free Guide, Build List, Promote Product to List.

Here's my Self Assessment ( marks out of 10 )

10/10 - Hosting/Building Sites/On Page SEO/Google Analytics

8/10. - Writing. I can write original copy and edit/repurpose. Not so great at sales copy, but I'm researching this

5/10 - Keyword Research - I understand it but haven't used a serious tool like Ahref

3/10 - Traffic Generation ( FB Ads/ YouTube / - every other method I've read on BHW!)


3/10 - Milking a mail list ( understand the concept, never done it ) Plan to use Aweber/GetResponse

0/10 - Personally don't use social media at all, and have 0 understanding of FB

Where I need to invest. ( I think )

Ahref - $97/m - Essential to find KW and optimise my niche site
Aweber/Get Response - $50/m - Do lists and content properly

Do you agree?

Should I spend $ on anything else?
What would that be ?
I guess I have $500 to spend on tools and ads initially.

Tactics

Here are my 2 starter ideas, before I detail them the following apply to all:

Done

Domains, Hosting, Google/Bing Verification, Design, Capture Pages, Content, Onsite SEO

To Do: - And I would love to hear if I'm going wrong here

Getting traffic ! ( yes big subject )
In line with the KISS principle, I plan to just use FB ads. Even if I waste $



Niche 1 - Around a breaking news health item that might stick around ( e.g. 5G health risks ) [Its not that]

Site content around whistle blower/ 'what they won't tell you' type content, mixed with SEO. New posts every 2 days. Sign up for free insider guide

To Do:
Find good affiliate products ( get healthy quickly by spending $, rather than doing any work on yourslef LOL )
KW research, FB Ads ( and others you recommend )

Plan: See if I can get rank quickly for long tail KWS,


Niche 2 - Established market, high competition - ( How to control your drinking )

Done/doing:

Site with plenty of content ready to go. Daily posts and free secret content for subscribers.

Authority. I'm a recovering alkie ( 4 years sober ) so I know what I'm talking about

Affiliate products chosen

To Do:

Research long tail KWs and optimise content for them. SEO is the goal here
FB ads / mail list in short term to test response.


Niche 3 - (maybe ) - microniche adult erotica + crakrevenue.

All of the above apply.



OK - reading that lot back I feel like a complete noob and almost feel like deleting this whole post.

But fuck that self-loathing shit, you don't learn if you don't try


In summary.

I have a lot going for me in terms of web dev/coding/design/UX/analytics experience

I can register a domain, host it and throw up a landing page in no time, so can fail fast

I have ZERO experience in gaining initial traffic, getting and retaining sign-ups and selling to those list.

I'm brand new to affiliate marketing, but want to stick to just this for now.


I PROMISE to update this journey.

Can you help me? I don't need encouragement, but I DO need to know where my assumptions are wrong.


Put it another way, If you had the strengths/weaknesses described above, What would you do ?


Thank you all so much in advance!

Delila

Wow, I just saw I posted 3 times in 2016.

That was a heck of a long to procrastinate, even for me !

If you're in it for the long haul, then i recommend finding a good daily routine for your day to day living in order to keep yourself motivated. dont be afraid to change your routine either. having a good daily routine will get you into a working mode. you're more likely to succeed.

if you tend to procrastinate making breakfast. then try not to, and just make your self good damn breakfast. its that sort of thing that will help motivate your day. dont change your path, and stick to your guns.

one of the most challenging steps is finding customers. for your chosen path, try searching kijiji or cragslist for wanted ads. try finding a good search engine, that only searches classifieds. there are many people on there who need web design, and you're likely to succeed. good luck!

Thank you.

I'm OK for web development work. Plenty of that coming in and it is an established business.

My thread post relates to getting started in IM, given my skills and acknowledged weaknesses

@https://www.blackhatworld.com/members/delilajane.959513/ Sorry maybe its not the place to ask but i`m interested what tools, templates you use for web development and any suggestions, tutorials, courses for actual web development not learning HTML, CSS Javascript?

create a portfolio first

ACMillions said:

create a portfolio first

Click to expand...

My OP was about my journey towards affiliate marketing. I already AM a web developer and have built 100s of sites on all platforms. I don't need help with that

I'm hoping someone will READ the post and then help me.

I added a fair bit of detail.

Thank you

Hi. There's a lot of text, but let's put things into a system:
- website audit: do you know how to check technical errors, missing tags, and low CTR pages?
- on-page optimization: are you discovering the keywords with highest potential, optimizing the copy and setting all meta tags for a page?
- off-page optimization: what's your strategy for getting links to these websites?

You need to know the following things for your affiliate websites to succeed:
- how to rank the website;
- how to optimize the affiliate content (and please mention that these are promotional links);
- how to use the long form content and build an audience.

I hope this helps to get started.

NexusC said:

Hi. There's a lot of text, but let's put things into a system:
- website audit: do you know how to check technical errors, missing tags, and low CTR pages?
- on-page optimization: are you discovering the keywords with highest potential, optimizing the copy and setting all meta tags for a page?
- off-page optimization: what's your strategy for getting links to these websites?

You need to know the following things for your affiliate websites to succeed:
- how to rank the website;
- how to optimize the affiliate content (and please mention that these are promotional links);
- how to use the long form content and build an audience.

I hope this helps to get started.

Click to expand...

Thank you NexusC

Yes this is a great help.

I'm very good at the on page stuff including, semantic HTML, accessibility, schema markup, page load speed etc

I need to work on my keyword research skills - Plan right now is to bite the bullet and invest in AHref.

Thanks for the reminder re explicitly mentioning promotional links - I guess that builds trust too