An introduction to the members on this site with some questions.

7 replies
Thank you in advance for reading and taking time to respond. My name is Josh. I have been lurking on this forum on and off for every bit of a year, but given some recent downturns in my current field of employment... I need to break free and establish another method for making my living. I work in a collapsing blue collar industry (automotive collision)in which I am seeing about a 5% collapse in pay every year. I have a a beautiful 18 month old daughter (which serves as my motivation to fully apply myself to internet marketing.. the freedom to be there for all of her plays at school, play days... etc etc...) Also, a gorgeous soon to be Fiance'. We live in smalltown, USA on about 45k a year (mortgage, car payment, bills, food.) We have done so successfully for over a year now, and I have set this as my 2 year goal... To make 40k online.

I was a nerd throughout my childhood years. I loved computers and computer games. on AIM, I had at least 4 online girlfriends at all times. (none in real life... downside of being a nerd from 6-17 years old) I gave in to popualirty and abandoned my nerdness for polo shirts, hair gel, and a Job that I was making 40k a year at 20 years old. What does 40k a year get you when your 20 and live at home with your parents? A lot of bling, a lot of beer, and a lot of "what was her name?" mornings...

Anyway fast forward to now, at age 26... Still making the same amount... and no longer viewing drinking and late night partying as fun. To be honest, I don't even care about social status anymore lol. I am ready to expand my life and get back to my nerd roots.

What I want from IM is freedom. I don't care about riches... I just want to reach a point in life where I make enough money to live without the ball and chains of a 9-5 (in my case 6-6) job. It's not the amount of hours logged that I care about, It's that I am mainly working to stuff "the mans" pockets. I want the effort I put in my job to go to my family and I.

I have already purchased a domain and hosting. I am in my second week of learning the Joomla 3.2 platform. WOW, what an information overload. Nonetheless, I have invested in a great book that is aiding me in trying to swallow all this information. My goal with Joomla is to become proficient in Joomla CMS and be able to produce authority blogs and sites as opposed to Niches. Niche sites seem like short term money makers where investing 3 months into an authority site will allow me to market multiple products and allow a higher ranking in SEO.

My niche is one that I am a little unsure of... In fact, I think i may of made my own niche. All keyword searchs I use on google reveal articles in huge mainstream fitness sites or WIKI links. My 3-6 month goal is to launch an authority site in this Niche and take over the engines.

Whew... Sorry for making such a long post. My questions are as follows...

1. Wealthy Affiliates seems like a great place to learn from, what are your experiences with them?
2. Are there any reconmendations for my chosen CMS system? Such as mentors? helpful links? Templates I should consider?
3. Is my CMS system a bad choice? is so why? and what other options should I consider?
4. How do or did you cope with the initial information overload? I am scatterbrained by nature and with all the new information I have been processing for the past 3 weeks... I have trouble sleeping at night lol.

Thank you for your thoughts and I look forward to a day where I can offer helpful answers to the next newbie.
#introduction #members #questions #site
  • Profile picture of the author welovetheshow
    I can only answer you last question listed, but I can also give you some advice.

    4. Avoid information overload. Absorb information slowly and you'll retain more of it. Trying to learn to much to fast will cause you to forget most of it. Limit how much information you take in on a daily basis. Take things one step at a time.

    A few red flags went up while I read your post. A really big mistake a lot of people make is trying to compete with the Wiki/Big name links. You're probably not going to win against them SEO wise. They have much larger advertising budgets and teams of people working around the clock to keep them where they are. Google also ranks the wiki links higher automatically. The reason people go after niche sites as opposed to building up a big authority one is because competing with them is near impossible.

    You invented your own niche? Careful. It might seem that way because your niche is too broad or there isn't a market for it.

    Good luck to you!
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    • Profile picture of the author Jason Freeman
      1. Wealthy Affiliate is pretty good as far as teaching the basics. There are some reviews in here if you do a search.

      2. My understanding and I may be wrong is that Joomla is more for corporate, university, government type sites. I know there are a lot of people using it for regular websites. Wordpress is used the most by people because it is easy to use and there is so much that has been made for it such as plugins and themes.

      3. See 2

      4. The hardest part is learning how to focus on one thing. The best option is to spend a good month or two and read everything you can. After that, find out what you want to do. Once you decide on a money making method focus like you have already left your job and your family is depending on you to eat. Don't let anything else make you lose focus. Trust me this is important because you can easily get caught going after shiny objects for years.
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  • Heya Josh,

    Welcome to the forum!! You have an interesting story that I think I can relate to. My main goal when I started to build from scratch our now 9-year old ICT outsourcing company after I was gunned down in 2003 and permanently went totally blind was to provide a better life for my wife and then 4-month old daughter. Anyway, here are some suggestions that I think could help you in your venture:

    Start out with a small test project. Instead of investing 3 months of your time and some of your money in an authority site that covers a lot of niches and sub niches, start with the following things:

    • A niche target market comprised of people with problems and needs that they can neither solve nor satisfy on their own, especially if you can help them solve and satisfy those problems and needs. You said you're in the automotive industry. Your username here is HondaMan0487. How about creating quick and easy guides for people who want their Honda cars to look cool and to run like new?;

    • An affiliate product that's helpful for solving the problems and needs of your target buyers;

    • A mailing list subscription offer like a short, easy to understand ebook that can show your expertise in your niche and help you gain the trust of your target buyers, in terms of recommending your affiliate product to them;

    • A blog that can introduce you to your target viewers as a friendly expert in your niche;

    • A facebook page that you can use to implement a test Facebook PPC (Pay Per Click) / PPM (Pay Per Impression) campaign that targets a custom audience comprised of members of Facebook groups that are directly and laterally related to your niche, in order to reach your target viewers and introduce your blog to them; and

    • A list of niche-related Web forums with large active membership bases where you can hang out and spend time helping other members with their problems and needs that are relevant to your niche, in order for other members and lurkers of those Web forums to check out your blog or your Facebook page via your sig links or profile pages.

    Set your target results and a runtime as well as a budget for that project. It's more cost-efficient to change and retain niches or grow and expand to laterally relevant niches and sub niches once relevant fundamentals are nicely squared away, i.e. It's more logically sound to try and multiply a $1,000/month net income by multiplying your resource investments in the things that you've already tested to work in earning $1,000/month net income from, than targeting a $1,000/month net income at a point where you have not tested anything on your own to even earn $100/month net income from...

    That's essentially what my wife and I did to build from scratch, grow and expand our company from a group of four work at home moms and dads, my wife and I included, to a 9-year old ICT outsourcing company here in Manila that's been catering to long term contracts with software corporations, tech companies, tech startups and tech affiliates in North America, the EU, Australia, Asia and Middle Eastern territories since 2005...

    Also, in my opinion, it'd be best to not solely rely on SEO for traffic. The time and money that you'd most likely end up using to test out what works in terms of giving you positive SERP (Search Engine Ranking Placement) benefits could be far more costly than implementing paid advertising campaigns, especially since Google may at any point in time decide to change anything that they're presently doing to rank pages. Plus:

    Promoting your site / blog, brand name and product/s through paid advertising arrangements in the right online (or even offline) places can also give you positive SERPs as by-products of your paid promotions, since you'll be able to reach your target viewers, and those people could talk about your whathaveyous and drop backlinks for your pages in the online (and offline) places where they hang out with like-minded people who may also be included in your target viewer groups. However:

    Set your advertising budget wisely. This goes without saying, but just as a friendly reminder: For almost any investment, only spend the amount of money that won't put you in a total state of poverty.

    Hope this helps...
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    • Deep Learning & Machine Vision Engineer: ARIA Research (Sydney, AU)
    • Founder: Grayscale (Manila, PH) & SEO Campaign Manager: Kiteworks, Inc. (SF, US)
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  • Profile picture of the author HondaMan0487
    Wow, thank you all for your replies. I have decided that Joomla may be too much for me to bite off at once and have turned my site over to Wordpress. I have already purchased my domain name from GoDaddy, so I may as well run with it. Hey, if it fails, thats one less failure I have to have before I reach the point of success (Brian Tracy, amazing success speaker.) I can use this as sort of a test run, learn the basics, take it as far as it goes... Ya never know lol. My niche that I targeted is a specific body part. No its not abs or anything perverted... When i google some keywords, a lot of generic posts from all sorts of different websites come up. I was aiming to create a site/blog dedicated to the health and wellness of said body part... Marx Vergel Melencio, you have a inspirational quality about you. Thank you for sharing your story.

    I may not know much about IM, but I do know a decent amount about the automotive industry... If any of you guys have any car related questions I could help you with, please don't hesitate to ask. It's the least I can do for your help in this new adventure.
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  • Profile picture of the author duvik
    Joomla is good for any content generation site but Wordpress is a lot more userfriendly. Welcome to the wild world of IM and also to the parent club. Enthusiasm is great but as the others said, dont be blind tto the realities... there are no quick and easy solutions in this game. You will have to work at it.
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    This is my website, there are many like it but this one is mine... Targeted Leaders If you are interested in making money with Pay Per Call or need lead generation check it out. draws his sword and points it to the URL and then shouts in a Spartan Warriorish manner...This Is Marketing!!!

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    • Profile picture of the author HondaMan0487
      Thanks for the words Duvik. My mindset is like this: I have worked 10-12 hours a day 5 days a week since the age of 16. ( school from 7-3 than Wal-mart from 4:30-10:30, until i graduated and got a trade. ) ... All this work and effort I have put in life, is ultimately to make someone who is already rich, richer... I am sick of working for someone and piling money in their pocket while I take a fraction of it and try to make myself believe I am ok with that outcome. Working 10-12 hours a day for ME... where 100% of the money is in MY pocket, the guy who needs it.... is a dream come true. Like i said earlier, its not the riches I'm after... It's freeing myself of working for someone who could already buy 100 Ferraris.
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  • Profile picture of the author duvik
    Well said my man. I think you will do well with that mindset. Im currently embarking on a venture that is turning out to be pretty profitable so far... I won't believe it until the first real check is in my account though. So far I am quite happy with the results though. If it works out and the check actually arrives and clears maybe we can work something out.

    I'm by no means a millionaire... not even close... I currently have about 30 bucks to my name but as of right now and having started a little less than 2 weeks ago I have 1200 in an affiliate account... I've invested about... well, so far less than $100 bucks but I also have saved a lot of money by not needing to hire any graphic or web designers. I just have a cheap webhosting account from Godaddy.com and a few domain names and some skills I snatched from my former boss. There is definitely money to be made out here.

    It's just hard as hell to make any without investing some... there is an old saying along those lines methinks.

    Anyway, I might have an auto question for ya... actually I do... I have an '03 Mustang with what I think is a blown headgasjet only the water isnt getting into the oil... it is the exact opposite. Oil is getting into my water... we have been running it like this for over 4 months now...

    Have ya ever come across that scenario? Usually a blown head has the water mussing up the oil but this is really odd IMO and apart from needing to top off the oil every week or two (about a half to a full quart) it runs fine. I also drain out the water every week to prevent too much oil buildup in it.

    Anyway... if ya have any advice on that let me know.
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    This is my website, there are many like it but this one is mine... Targeted Leaders If you are interested in making money with Pay Per Call or need lead generation check it out. draws his sword and points it to the URL and then shouts in a Spartan Warriorish manner...This Is Marketing!!!

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