New to Blackhat

Hi all,

Glad to find this forum, and hope to learn a lot.

My background -- about 8 years in Whitehat SEO for some of the big media corporations (also concurrently worked in online advertising ops for about the past 10 years, both in trafficking and advertising product packaging). About 4 years ago, I was between jobs and got into blogwriting, but was re-hired into corporate hell before I could fully get into blackhat.

Now I'm at a crossroads in my career, and want to get serious about Blackhat. I consider myself a jack of all trades - I can write, used to know some ASP (but really want to get into PHP and other languages), and am very eager to learn.

If you had one piece of advice to give a noob like me with 12+ years of corporate web experience on the whitehat side of things, what would it be? What's the one thing I should do right now to not make a lot of stupid mistakes, or to get on the right path?

All replies are appreciated, as I can see that time is money, and that a lot of folks here have VERY valuable time.

Sincerely,

Valleyviking

Wow, so friendly here... Did I do something wrong? I don't mean to whine, but everyone else got a nice little welcome, and I'm the loser with 0 replies. Sorry if I offended anyone...

Hi there and welcome to BHW.
You said you know how to write. You can open a BST thread for content writing and sell your services.

Thanks, appreciate the feedback. I was actually interested in the programming/hosting/generating traffic part of the business -- you know, the big money. My experience is that writing really doesn't make any money -- at the company I work for, we get the writing for free (we laid off our entire editorial department, case in point). Given my career level and current earnings, I'm looking for scalable solutions to generate new income -- writing is just too much nickel and diming, not really worth what I already make per hour in the corporate job (which isn't writing).

I guess I'll just poke around and see what I can learn here, and eventually upgrade my membership as I get further along.

As a noob, anything I should focus on first off (hosting, programming languages, etc.) and anything I should avoid?

Since you are into programming, creating products is always the classic way to go. Find a need, create the tool, bank.

There 's no straight answer to your questions, everything depends on each person 's skill, preferences and dedication. What works for person A does not mean will work for person B. This is why this forum is great. There are a lot of methods, search and pick the ones that suit you.

Makes sense -- I've also read here that Google site search is my friend, so it sounds like I have some reading to do and that might be the best way to answer my questions. I was also going to start up my own professional blog anyways (for the whitehat/corporate side of my life), so it looks like that's a good place to start learning the ropes.

Just from this morning, looks like GoDaddy hosting might be problematic long-term, so maybe I'll do HostGator instead (seems to have mostly favorable feedback here).

Once again, time is money, so I do appreciate the responses from both of you, and hope that I may know enough in the future to contribute back here. Thanks again, and hope to stay in touch as I learn, as well as have some advice and tools to contribute back to the community.

Cheers,

Valleyviking