This post will be useful to some internet marketer somewhere
Hey WF, I'm new here but have been doing SEO, web dev, and IM for the past 3 years or so and wanted to not only share some things that have worked for me but also get a sense of what worked for some of the others here.
I'm not looking for domains or niches as that stuff is held pretty tightly and kept secret by those dominating IM. Just some stories, general ideas, or something else related to your success or failures.
To start off; web dev and SEO for other small to medium sized businesses is what pays the majority of the bills but finding clients is no easy task as I'm sure some in here can attest to. This brings in about 2/3 of my income.
The other 1/3 is my own projects that I own and operate. This is what I would like to become my full income and is slowly growing. Obviously I would like it to grow faster and bouncing ideas off other smart people can only help.
I started marketing ebooks via PPC or even SEO for some long tail terms related to problems that I myself was experiencing. That way I felt I could really relate to the potential buyer and offer a much stronger sales pitch and testimonials than someone unrelated to the product. This proved mildly successful selling about 150 books, the problem was the margins were tiny, at least through PPC. I could barely recoup the investment in PPC and it was tough to scale up as the traffic to the terms wasn't growing. Came to the conclusion that the dude who's product I was marketing was making the cash not really me. So if you want to make money with books, you better write them and then find some of your own affs.
So because I was sick of spending tons of money through PPC, I dove full force into SEO. All I can say is it's addicting to see your website move up in the rankings for keywords that you actually wanted to rank for. However it's definitely a numbers game, don't even think about ranking for top keywords, it's tough and the guys at the top know what they're doing and will squash you. So for me, success came in longer tail keywords that converted well but had little traffic so the only way to scale up was to own many, many domains and rank each one for the long tail terms. Some sites would do well others would suck and there was really no way for me to know which ones would do well and which ones wouldn't, I just had to try them all. My products were never ebooks because I started feeling like the general public wasn't buying into the whole "read this and all your problems will go away" type of thinking anymore. Maybe I'm wrong about that though. So I would push rebills, ebay products, amazon stuff, other products I liked and had affiliate programs. I still do this today and am having mild success with it. Building backlinks is tough and takes time as well as writing the content for the blogs or review sites.
Then I started to get into local offline SEO stuff. I didn't even realize other people were doing it, but since have seen that GoGetta and some others here seem to have a very good grasp of the process. I would also vouch for this. The market is huge and that's why it still works well. Ranking for those keywords (ex. doctor cityville CA) is much easier and the number of searches are still pretty big. The point here is most local business owners don't know jack about SEO which is good and bad. It means it's easy to outrank them but it's hard to sell them on the idea. For those that don't know what local offline SEO is, it's when an SEO type like me, builds a site, generally a squeeze page, and ranks it for a term like "doctor cityville CA" and then rents the site to local doctors in cityville CA. The toughest part is finding the renter, ranking the site is easy even with the new google places. I think it's a tough sell because it's still a concept sell and these local biz owners don't know **** about SEO. With a good pitch though, they'll rent.
Sorry about the long post, but I wanted to offer some of my experience by showing some failures and some successes hoping that it would be of use to somebody somewhere.
I would love to read some other stories and gain some knowledge from other WF members. Also if anyone has any more in depth questions let me know.
I'm not looking for domains or niches as that stuff is held pretty tightly and kept secret by those dominating IM. Just some stories, general ideas, or something else related to your success or failures.
To start off; web dev and SEO for other small to medium sized businesses is what pays the majority of the bills but finding clients is no easy task as I'm sure some in here can attest to. This brings in about 2/3 of my income.
The other 1/3 is my own projects that I own and operate. This is what I would like to become my full income and is slowly growing. Obviously I would like it to grow faster and bouncing ideas off other smart people can only help.
I started marketing ebooks via PPC or even SEO for some long tail terms related to problems that I myself was experiencing. That way I felt I could really relate to the potential buyer and offer a much stronger sales pitch and testimonials than someone unrelated to the product. This proved mildly successful selling about 150 books, the problem was the margins were tiny, at least through PPC. I could barely recoup the investment in PPC and it was tough to scale up as the traffic to the terms wasn't growing. Came to the conclusion that the dude who's product I was marketing was making the cash not really me. So if you want to make money with books, you better write them and then find some of your own affs.
So because I was sick of spending tons of money through PPC, I dove full force into SEO. All I can say is it's addicting to see your website move up in the rankings for keywords that you actually wanted to rank for. However it's definitely a numbers game, don't even think about ranking for top keywords, it's tough and the guys at the top know what they're doing and will squash you. So for me, success came in longer tail keywords that converted well but had little traffic so the only way to scale up was to own many, many domains and rank each one for the long tail terms. Some sites would do well others would suck and there was really no way for me to know which ones would do well and which ones wouldn't, I just had to try them all. My products were never ebooks because I started feeling like the general public wasn't buying into the whole "read this and all your problems will go away" type of thinking anymore. Maybe I'm wrong about that though. So I would push rebills, ebay products, amazon stuff, other products I liked and had affiliate programs. I still do this today and am having mild success with it. Building backlinks is tough and takes time as well as writing the content for the blogs or review sites.
Then I started to get into local offline SEO stuff. I didn't even realize other people were doing it, but since have seen that GoGetta and some others here seem to have a very good grasp of the process. I would also vouch for this. The market is huge and that's why it still works well. Ranking for those keywords (ex. doctor cityville CA) is much easier and the number of searches are still pretty big. The point here is most local business owners don't know jack about SEO which is good and bad. It means it's easy to outrank them but it's hard to sell them on the idea. For those that don't know what local offline SEO is, it's when an SEO type like me, builds a site, generally a squeeze page, and ranks it for a term like "doctor cityville CA" and then rents the site to local doctors in cityville CA. The toughest part is finding the renter, ranking the site is easy even with the new google places. I think it's a tough sell because it's still a concept sell and these local biz owners don't know **** about SEO. With a good pitch though, they'll rent.
Sorry about the long post, but I wanted to offer some of my experience by showing some failures and some successes hoping that it would be of use to somebody somewhere.
I would love to read some other stories and gain some knowledge from other WF members. Also if anyone has any more in depth questions let me know.