Your Opinion: Making Move from Web Development to Web Marketing

Build apps marketers, SEOs, and Bloggers will use.

Look at Thrive, StudioPress, and other premium theme and plugin providers.

I'd be willing to pay for an app that would build a spreadsheet based off certain search queries, geared towards my outreach campaigns. Then pull in metrics from another party, like aHrefs or Moz so I can get a quick glance at their value.

Maybe with a bit of actual rank tracking, like a web based app -- none of that needing 50 proxies crap.

Then, if it happened to have some keyword research tools in it, I may be willing to pay even more.

If it's all web based and I can use it from any machine, or maybe even a smartphone, you'd get even more of my money.

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To answer your questions, I started life as a hacker / programmer in my early teens, and evolved into a marketer in my early 20's. I could program in 16 languages as a teen, so I had a bit of technical know-how.

The beginning was incredibly easy, because I understood how it all worked together -- from my background in computers. I started out building niche blogs and spamming Google.

The next year sucked balls. I had the biggest ideas, with the capabilities of pulling them off, so I ended up staying stagnant for a long time. I couldn't figure out which project to focus on the most.

The next year I partnered with a guy and built out a massive portfolio of sites. We banked but it was all spam and got nuked a few years later. He financed it, I kept total control of building the business.

Now, I still don't outsource much except for graphic design. I prefer to do it myself just so I know how it's done, and keep control over my business.

It took me 6 months to see my first $1,000 check from AdSense back in the day. Mainly because of the payment threshold and having to wait another month to be paid.

Now, I can setup a site and see a check within a few weeks if I'm working a local market. Affiliate stuff still has payment thresholds and payout holds, so it's a waiting game but it's a lot more profitable for recluse nerd like myself.

I wouldn't do anything differently. Well, I'd learn more web languages like PHP, CSS, and maybe Ruby or something so I could build out some leet apps and sell 10's of thousands of copies to other marketers for a monthly premium.

I think it's a lot easier to get information overload as a nerd, because of how we're designed -- to soak up as much information as possible in the shortest amount of time. If you're aware of it and don't overthink it too much, you'll be OK.

There's too much risk in being original when it comes to marketing to marketers lol

The best way, in my opinion, to find the need is to start building out your own sites and finding your own problems.

If you face them, other marketers and SEOs are having the same issues.

Prime example, check out Long Tail Pro and Market Samurai.

They're both tried to do it right, but both ended up failing big. They're both laggy as hell and expensive, and desktop based.

I guarantee Market Samurai has sold 10's of thousands of copies, and the creator, Spencer Haws, has been raking it in with Long Tail Pro for years.

In IM, it doesn't really matter if there's another solution. Make yours a little bit better, then spend more time getting influential people to get behind you and it will take off. If you can't do that, you'll have issues with the noise in the industry, like you've already seen.

Right now, I'd like a complete tool for managing a niche blogging business -- launching and managing HTML sites via FTP, managing outreach and link building campaigns, keyword research, income and rank tracking.

Exactly. I am recovering "There is already something like this out there" syndrome patient.

Just recently i started shifting my perspective from "well, there is so much competition" to "well if everyone is doing it then there must be good money in it"

It's amazing how traditional business model doesn't fully apply to internet business model. In fact some shit is just opposite.

Hi TrueStory

In my opinion, the IM market needs more people to bring back some integrity into it. I think overall it has gone downhill over the last year or so. So many trying to be like others and bombarding people with so many upsells it turns them off. I ran into this today with a new offer that barely let me get out until they were offering their latest and greatest for a discount down to 1.00

If you jump into IM marketplace, dear god please do not hammer your customers is my first advice. If you are able find a solution to any of the problems you have encountered, put it together with some quality and call it your own. Then if it is a good product that can stand on its own merits, you should never have to twist anyones arm to buy it and 1 or 2 upsells done in a respectable manner is ok, but any more will reflect badly on you in my opinion.

Good luck to you!
Jim

see i like ho you refer to it as wem marketing vers Im ..

every business today have to us web marketing to some point ...but as a developer ..your competing agains the developers in lesser cost of living countries ..

the old brick and morter business models ..where based of low margin businesses..where the profit where average of 2 - 3 percent..so to make 100k a year the business owner had to do millions of doller in business ..and a lot of that profit came from selling knock offs and stuff cheepr than normal..once the mom and pops had to shift to more computerized software inventory tracking..and debit credit card systems..they had to shift to legit channels to get all their goods..which put most oiut of business..though this was blamed on wal mart ..

today if you get into any business ..online or off..you don't want to compete on price .. if there is plenty of competion..there are probably many eople willing to pay top dollar ..and build a business around that.. it takes less time and effort to sell 1000 dollars worth of stuff yto 100 people than 100 dollars worth of stuff to 1000 people ..

how much do you want to make how many people can you sever and how much would you need to charge each to make that ..

and do you have the skills to do it ..

always remember water ..in the US pretty much everyone has access to unlimited amounts of water..that is the safest drinking water in the world..and bottled water is one of the most profitable parts of the business for coke an pepsi co..while soft ddrink sales are declining .

the larger the market willing to pay money online the better..because that means there are more people willing to pay premium prices

That's true, there is always someone willing to pay premium price, hopefully for premium services.

I was born and grew up in Ukraine with the post-soviet mentality of price determination based on the cost of goods and overhead. At first, it was very difficult to adjust myself to capitalist style of business in US when I moved here over decade ago.

For countries with lesser cost of living, developer charges what I call "minimum-livable-rate" ..basically if he can work 40-50 hours per week charging $15 dollars and be comfortable, that's what he's going to charge. While American Developer tends to charge what the industry standard dictates (average $35-60/hour).

Ironically, the two types of clients I tend to get:
1) Budget isn't an issue, they got VC, it's non-profit, it's large corp, it's for their client - basically they don't mind paying regular rate
2) Please Fix this "jugaad'ed" website. It usually means they went out, hired someone for $10/hr and got broken shit in return. Those clients are the most difficult and can be insanely frustrating to work with. They are waaay over budget, clearly past deadline, and they end up premium because someone before me ****ed up. I am not even going to get started on the state of the code I inherit with such projects.

Occasionally, I get client with realistic expectations.

My friend and I did an experiment, we both posted identical job requests on upwork as clients. Except mine said that candidate will be working with a skilled developer and code will be reviewed by a professional eye. "ha ha ha", mine got half of the applicants and mostly Eastern Europe. Kind of tells you about the quality you tend to get on these sites.


But I got offtopic: I decided to start with few product based niche affiliate sites. I bought one WSO it sounds fairly reasonable and easy to execute and i can probably make few hundred bucks so I can get started on my own blog.

Here is my plan and if you can tell me if this is a bad idea:

• Continue doing some side web dev projects
• Start a main blog about Internet Marketing and branding for mostly brick-and-mortar businesses. Most of the content will be written by me. This is actually the shit I was passionate about when I was doing web dev and occasionally marketing.
• Start handful of niche blogs on saturated niches. I am going to hire writers from WritersAccess (amazing place to get North American writers - It's not even about command of the language. I've seen content written by non-american. Unless you live in NA you cannot easily relate to your customers who are in NA. It's simple stuff like cultural references and jokes or phrases)
• Build lists and build more.

Anyone has any good advice on building list? Should I start segmenting it right away? By which category? Here is what I am afraid of: I have a list of thousands of email addresses and they are in just one list. That sounds pretty retarded to me, am right? no?

Since you are a developer, and a good one you say, it must be not that hard for you to make that income. It is true that you must have a backup source of income for the first 6-12 months until your business takes off.

Since you already are a developer and a technical person, you will spare thousands of dollars on developing tools, creating and designing the website.

I am also a IM-developer and I can tell you that blogs might not be the best option for us. The competition is big because anyone can install wordpress, get a free template and start blogging. On the other side, there are not so many that can develop tools and websites, They have to pay thousand of dollars for this.

Try to build some tools or to automate a service. You have the skills. Worried about competition ? Well, entering in a very competitive niche like Health and Fitness, where every big company is interested and ready to pay millions for the best apps might not be such a good idea, but if you find some topic that you like and you can build an app that solves problems, ignore the competition. You can do something better, you are a great developer, right ?

More good news for you. Since you are a developer, you don't need advertising money either. Use your own skills, build related tools and give them for free. Build a chrome extension, a wordpress plugin, an android/iphone app, a facebook app related to your main tool and have a links somewhere. There is no advertising like giving things for free.

Awesome suggestions folks!

TrueStory, have you listened to James Altucher's podcast? Look up a book called Become an Idea Machine (his wife wrote it). You need to generate many ideas about potential products and some of them will turn out to be good ones.

I have created between 80-100 WordPress plugins so far. What it works is to publish a free plugin on WordPress org and then build extensions for it.
To get ideas you will need to keep reading sites like freelance, elance, WP.org forums, LinkedIn, Reddit to see what people are looking for. Actually, I've been checking WooCommerce's ideas section to get ideas for extensions.

Good luck

Wow. I didn't realize there's a room for good software. I always felt that there was a plugin for everything.

I've wrote WP extensions before, typically for custom needs, so I'm familiar with that.

I actually started using some of plugins for WP like SumoMe and Landing Pages and some other "visual editors"..... the most frustrating experience ever. Clunky. Bulky. Slow.

One of most downloaded plugins are caching plugins. I'm starting to see why.

While WP is great it's a monster of code. They do a great job keeping it lean but some hooks... just make me cringe. Last I cringed like this was developing extensions for Magento lol


Anyone wants to throw some issues you have hard time finding solution for?

The issue with Wordpress plugins is that everyone expect them to be free. To workaround this issue, you may thing of something that requires something from your web server that needs an API key to be used. You will also have a basic/free version that does not require the connection. You can charge a monthly fee for API access, or you can give it for free but request a name and email address. Then you can send other related offers, either your own premium products or other products where you earn affiliate fees.

Or, you can think of a service that can be built without wordpress. Giving users a JS code that they can enter in their website and get all the functionality they want. This can be used on any website and they come to your website to tweak the settings, where you get their email address and you can sell them something else.

Don't expect to make money from your first plugin or first site. Look it as a learning process and a way to find what people really need. Try few ideas and see if they get any traction. Think of the business as a whole venture, not only as a single plugin. Build a main plugin, then few small related ones for promotion, brand them well, have your own website, build other tools, and you will have a real business. Think 2-3 steps ahead: "If I build this plugin and I have success with it, then I can build this other plugin or service, promote it trough the first one and make some sales". Don't forget about getting emails or any other way to stay in touch with your customers.

Pick something you like. Don't settle in the webmasters-IM area, try new markets too. For example, if you are into website speed/response time, build some tools to help webmasters to find out how long their site takes to load, how to improve the speed, maybe automated tools to minify scripts. Maybe you won't make a lot of money on these, but you can promote fast hosting companies, where they pay good commissions.

If you are into security, then try to build encryption tools and plugins, encrypted hosting, there are a lot of stuff to be created.

The base rule to validate an idea is: If you need it then probably someone else is needing it too and there is a market for it. It is very easy to build something when you are the one in need, because you know exactly what it should achieve.

I get the most satisfaction when I build an app that I am using every day. And every time I use it I say to me: "wow, I built a nice and useful app, good job"