Introductions Thread

[Ryuzaki]

Welcome aboard, @Thao. Glad to have you. We work hard to maintain the highest signal-to-noise ratio possible.

I've been working on my site for two years intermittently with intermittent growth.

I'm sure you see the connection. Intermittent work = intermittent growth when it comes to SEO. I've posted about it a lot, about keeping the conveyer belt churning even when we aren't getting results, because the results are so delayed. If we become forlorn and stop for a while, we'll have a period of no growth later.

I experience this a lot when new projects come along or production stops in order to make production more efficient, etc. It happens for sure, even if we know not to let it happen. Sounds like you have something solid on your hands though. Two years of age will be a big boon to you now that you're back to the grind.

My efforts lately have turned towards link building which I think is the missing piece (?) that can help me reach my timeline. But I'm not sure.

Could be the missing piece if you don't already have a baseline backlink profile. Too many people ignore links these days on the bad advice of some well-meaning gurus outh there and some that aren't being so honest about it.

There's times where you can publish tons of content and have steady growth and think everything is fine because of that growth, without realizing the growth could be 10-fold with some links. There's also times where you have a boatload of links and can stop doing that and just publish your heart out and see major gains. Figuring out if you're in one of those scenarios could quickly ramp up your revenue.

But the real thing is to figure out what level of competition you can dominate and use keywords at that level only until you level up. No point in beating your head against a brick wall now when you could use a pick axe later, or a bull dozer even.

 

[Thao]

Appreciate the warm welcome @Ryuzaki.

Could be the missing piece if you don't already have a baseline backlink profile. Too many people ignore links these days on the bad advice of some well-meaning gurus outh there and some that aren't being so honest about it.

There's times where you can publish tons of content and have steady growth and think everything is fine because of that growth, without realizing the growth could be 10-fold with some links. There's also times where you have a boatload of links and can stop doing that and just publish your heart out and see major gains. Figuring out if you're in one of those scenarios could quickly ramp up your revenue.

Early on, I attempted link building but found it to be a black hole of time consumption. I figured I was better off focusing on producing content instead. So I wasn't necessarily following the bad advice of those gurus but I was sure hoping they were right.

What would you consider a baseline link profile? I have maybe a handful of links that accumulated naturally to an info article but that's about it. The rest is random web crawler and image scraper junk that I assume everyone gets.

I'm hoping now that I have freed up time for myself to figure this link building thing out, I can get some of that 10-fold growth

 

[Ryuzaki]

@Thao, regarding a decent baseline backlink profile, I would recommend reading the Off-Page SEO day of the BuSo Crash Course here. I give out a lot of different ways to score some links, some more involved than others, some nofollow, some dofollow, etc.

The challenge these days is getting some of this stuff crawled and counted, but I like to create these mainly to increase the number of referring domains pointing in and to get me into the trenches and seeing sites and forums in my niche and becoming more familiar with the whole ecosystem. This is for passion projects I'll have my hands in and for new domains I registered myself. Otherwise I may not go through the trouble.

These links don't pack much of a punch at the start but over time they age and kind of act as an antibody system to keep you safe from algorithmic issues, because most of these sites will have decent trust and authority. They can also help send branding signals, which adds a much needed layer of trust to your project.

But the real needle movers are anything contextual with a link in the actual article. The effectiveness of these does vary based on your existing link profile though. The more the merrier as long as it's not spam.

 

[emerge]

Welcome to the board.

Are you really good at PPC? Finding targets and scaling? Ecomm?

Thank you!

I've been doing PPC since 2013, I'm alright at it, I'm scaling affiliate offers (lead gen mainly).

Welcome, @emerge, glad to have you around.

8 years is a long time, that puts you in the veteran category, especially with you having attained the status of "full-time for myself".

I bet you have some the same thoughts a lot of us do: I've been doing this since the very late 90's and once a year I always think "damn, if I hadn't spammed some of those early sites and kept them around I'd be a billionaire by now." Then I snap back to reality because the earliest ones were Geocities and Angelfire sites anyways. A couple years later I got into the real deal of site building. I still have some of the domains but they've been out of the index for long enough that they might as well be brand new. Oh well!

I hope you'll stick around and keep posting with us. I look forward to siphoning off your vast wealth of knowledge and sharing back with you all the same!

I've been in the online space for a while, yes I wish I had started some stuff earlier, I think we all have our regrets. I didn't get into SEO properly until around 2016 and really got the hang of it in 2018, but still learning!

Thanks for the warm welcome.

What specifically do you do in terms of social media marketing?

I run a site that has a bunch of amazon associate content which I market via Twitter/Pinterest etc.

 

[Trump]

G'day people,

My name is Trump (no, my first name is not Donald) and I work with SEO.

I've been in this business for around 5 years now.

Just wanted to pop in and say hello. There is not much to say about me, and honestly, I don't think anyone cares. I'm just your regular Joe, trying to get rich.

So to make it a little bit more interesting, I thought I'd start off with a question:

Is domain relevance a:

A) Myth
B) Real thing
C) Misunderstanding

It's popular to talk about relevance now days. I see it recommended all the time "only build relevant links". Sure, I think relevant links are better than non-relevant links - but that doesn't mean non-regular are bad, or can be better than a low value relevant link.

My question is not about relevant links, though.

I'm talking about relevant domains in the SERP. For example, when Googling "best xxxx" - the SERP is populated with strong, general websites. It's only when breaking it down to longer terms like "best xxx for fat people with 200 in their pocket", that I get "relevant" sites that are in that niche. If even then.

Another example is that I started a general experiment site one year ago, with 50 articles on it. These articles were in widely different niches. All my competition are niche sites.

Yet, I manage to rank above these sites - even though we have similar link strength and article quality. Their "relevancy" doesn't seem to play a big part at all. They have whole sites dedicated to, for example, fishing, my site have 5 articles about fishing, some about flowers and some about weight lifting. I still rank higher than them.

Another interesting aspect is that their niche sites also have loads of informative and relevant articles that links to their money articles. I have none, only money pages. But I'm still above them.

What do you think? Is domain relevancy overrated?

Two quick examples:

"Best fishing rod"
1. Menshealth
2. Amazon
3. Nytimes
4. Businessinsider
5. nymag
6. fishingbooker
7. outdoorgearlab
8. calloutdoors
9. outdoorempire

"Best horseshoes"
1. kicksack
2. Amazon
3. Horseshoesonline
4. Cicagotribune
5. bestreviews
6. thewiredshopper
7. pingpongbros (lol)
8. thebackyardsite
9. cabinlife


I also have a niche site (pretty wide, think "Flowers") and my competition are general review sites. We all have similar link strength and quality of articles. Sometimes I beat them, sometimes they beat me.

Since we are so similar, I'd think I would beat them since my site is only about flowers with supporting info articles - while they also write about paintball, car stereos, fishing and boxing gear. "Domain category relevance" doesn't seem to mean much in search.

 

[secretagentdad]

This isn’t a totally direct answer because I think you need a bit of a perspective change. Organic Sem isn’t this straight forward and the answers change from time to time depending on what google feels like cracking down on.

Google, historically, has been a page based algorithm.

Everything works. If you’re saturating for your tier, topic specialization appears to work better.

Very few webmasters ever push their organic footprint to their domains maximum potential. It requires an enormous amount of content that passes the various indexing tests. Topicality impacts aren’t very discernible until after you’re at saturation.

If you write better topical section headlines and you can beat niche sites easily if you have a couple of URLs to send signals from and aren’t living up to your domains potential. We’re not in a post page rank era but it’s not the only mode inaction anymore.
My default assumption based on what you’re saying would be you could be picking up harder keywords anywhere by just writing more so I don’t think you’re making fair comparisons.

Good to see some thought being put into a first post. I think you kinda missed the boat, but I think my response also did so what evs.

Welcome to the internets best public club.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Hello, @Trump. Glad you joined and are posting with us.

Relevancy is a very real thing and has been for nearly a decade, without doing the math. I agree with you that you shouldn't ONLY build relevant links while avoiding others. In fact, you can't avoid others since you can't control what other people do online. Non-relevant links still pass page rank but aren't going to be the same needle movers a relevant link will be.

Your example is interesting and illustrates how many various factors there are in the algorithm and how you can win despite missing some signals. But for sure, one thing that's still weighed very heavily is link authority and branding because it's an easy way to fight spam. That's why you see giant general sites winning on short tail, high volume keywords where Google's possibility of being embarrassed the most is at risk.

You did mention your case where your general site beats niche sites despite similar backlink profiles. There's also on-page SEO, technical SEO, page speed, and a myriad of other things that can account for the difference.

The thing with niche sites ranking for long tails is a great thing. That's where the money is at. That's where the very clear user intent is and often you don't need to fight giants because they're fighting over short tails because they can't justify the wages spent to chase a 200 volume keyword.

@secretagentdad is right about Google largely being a page-level algorithm. That's where most "relevance" starts and stops. But we know for fact that there's domain-level niche classifications. Those domain-level signals aren't strong enough to dominate the game and probably never will be, but I also know there's a clear point where a switch gets flipped where suddenly you have "topical authority" for a niche topic and can pretty much clean house, only mitigated by the rate at which you can publish. I think that's assigned at the domain-level but it's not acquired at the domain-level, if that makes sense.

 

[Kelowna]

Don't let my profile pic fool ya, I'm out in BC.

Just found out about this place after reading a post by CCarter on WF, looks very promising. Been at this SEO game full time since the late 1990's, not quite retired yet as I tend to spend too much.

I do like very much that the new spammers get filtered out with the 3 like feature, great idea.

Also I am always in the market for good backlinks and not afraid of link farm stuff, every link has a purpose, so drop me a note to help me navigate to the best sellers on here.

 

[secretagentdad]

We don't need no more Canadians round these parts.
Yall are such a bunch of @Potatoe s

 

[Kelowna]

We don't need no more Canadians round these parts.

But you need our electricity to keep your puters running

 

[returntrip]

Another BC resident right here. We're invading.

@Kelowna I remember your nick from WickedFire!

 

[Kelowna]

Ya it's a little dry now-a-days around old WF

 

[Golan]

yo man. good to see you here!

it was you who never responded to any email sent from gmail, right?

 

[Kelowna]

Yes, I don't trust the Gorg, always spying, always watching

 

[John Thomas]

Hello, my name is John Thomas and I do SEO Full time.

My journey started about 8 years ago, with websites related to Amazon affiliate products. After I shifted to more complicated niches such as health and local SEO.

With the pandemic, I started helping others out on their journey. Please write me for SEO-related questions. I am glad to help

 

[Ryuzaki]

@John Thomas, welcome aboard. Has the game changed for you since Google started the YMYL stuff heavily targeting the Health vertical?

 

[baddyswing]

Hi everyone,

I am excited to find this place and nice to meet all of you. Been lurking for a while and notice that people here are extremely helpful.

I consider myself new to online marketing and building websites as assets. My only experience was buying Perry Marshall's Google Adwords book and spending $300 to get some clients doing Excel spreadsheet dev freelance work for small businesses as a side gig. That was a few years back.

My day job is in the mining industry doing simulation modelling and data analysis. My day-to-day work bounces between coding in Java, Excel VBA, and analysing outputs from simulation models using R and then putting together PowerPoint slides to communicate outcomes to project stakeholders. Whenever I have a tiny bit of spare time at work, I would try to learn new tech by building tools for project I get assigned to, like data-driven animations using javascript.

For a while now I been trying to figure out how to best use my skills to build an online based business. I think I probably got overwhelmed by the all possible options - freelancing on Fiverr, upwork, build a Youtube channel, start a website blogging, etc. And then I end up stuck in analysis paralysis mode.

Look forward to getting know you guys, learning and contributing.

 

[stackcash]

Welcome!

Make sure to check out the free Digital Strategy Crash Course. That'll keep ya busy for awhile!

 

[Ryuzaki]

I have a buddy in big data who's been telling me about R. He's in hospitals. Not at all surprised to hear it's in the mining sector now.

What I would think is that you could either keep it as complicated as you are, with big data modeling, simulating, and analyzing, but you're not likely to find someone seeking that from a freelancer, though it'd be big money. They'd want a full-time employee.

And what I'm trying to communicate is that I wouldn't expect there to be any in-between in terms of complexity. Everything else is pretty dead simple from your stand point and expecting it not to be is going to get you in trouble. It's a problem I encountered. When I realized how simple this game is, things exploded fast.

So if you plan on starting a website, what I'm saying is don't mentally project and overlay complexity over it. It's dead simple.

Good luck, please join us in conversation. We're happy to help.

 

[Ceefax]

Hey man, good to see a fellow dev on the forum! Did you study CS?

It's a crowded space out there, is there a niche or sub-niche that you want to focus on (e.g. talk mainly about how to write themes/plugins for Shopify)?

Thanks, yeah traditional CS'er. For the site, I do have a sub-niche I'm focusing on, but would prefer not to mention it on here just now.

I've also seen a lot of money being made in enterprise plugins, if you go on the Atlassian marketplace for stuff like Confluence/JIRA, you'll see a lot of low-quality plugins with thousands of installations, each bringing the original dev 10-25$ a month (quickly racks up to 20-30k$ a month).

Great. This is something I have thought about, but never really investigated properly. Jira is used absolutely everywhere and since it's B2B, $25 a month is peanuts to the customer. Same thing applies to GitHub's Marketplace too. I might go take a look, now that you've mentioned this. My difficulty is usually in idea generation. So I guess that one possibility is to just look at the plugins with bad reviews, and create something better.

 

[atikrr]

Hello everyone,

I found that, lot of talent and hard working people contributing to this community by sharing their experience and helping others to grow. I am very happy to be part of this community !

About Me
My name is Atik ,I'm a passionate SEO expert from Bangladesh with over five years of experience in the agency environment. I helped thousands of companies in diverse industries to boost their website google ranking by performing full SEO. I have created more than 100 thousands diversified manual backlinks to building their healthy backlink profile for their website.

I am trying to build a digital marketing agency and now trying to connect with others. Now I"m try to build connection thorough fiverr and up work freelancing marketplace, although I did not get any client yet but hoping to get client soon.

Thank You!

 

[baddyswing]

Welcome!

Make sure to check out the free Digital Strategy Crash Course. That'll keep ya busy for awhile!

Thanks @stackcash! Yup started going through and lovin' it so far. So well structured!

I have a buddy in big data who's been telling me about R. He's in hospitals. Not at all surprised to hear it's in the mining sector now.

What I would think is that you could either keep it as complicated as you are, with big data modeling, simulating, and analyzing, but you're not likely to find someone seeking that from a freelancer, though it'd be big money. They'd want a full-time employee.

Yup you're totally right that what I do is a pretty tough sale for a freelancer. Even the big boys top tier management consultancy firms find it hard to sell such a service to their clients because such projects take 2 months (or more) of development before there are any tangible results to look at. But then their eye watering price point could be a factor. And from my past experience, more and more companies needing such simulation modelling are in-housing this capability.

And what I'm trying to communicate is that I wouldn't expect there to be any in-between in terms of complexity. Everything else is pretty dead simple from your stand point and expecting it not to be is going to get you in trouble. It's a problem I encountered. When I realized how simple this game is, things exploded fast.

So if you plan on starting a website, what I'm saying is don't mentally project and overlay complexity over it. It's dead simple.

Good luck, please join us in conversation. We're happy to help.

@Ryuzaki, you read me like a book! By nature I overcomplicate things. Think. Read. Think. Read. Read. More thinking... Zero action.. No results...

So do you mean that because of the complexities I regularly deal with already in my day job, those learnings will enable me to relatively easily overcome a lot of the learning curve in starting an online business whether that be starting a website or something else?

 

[Ryuzaki]

So do you mean that because of the complexities I regularly deal with already in my day job, those learnings will enable me to relatively easily overcome a lot of the learning curve in starting an online business whether that be starting a website or something else?

Yes, I mean that, and I also mean that you should be careful to NOT expect the things you're encountering to be that complex. You'll start inventing puzzles to solve that aren't there, etc. That level of complexity isn't a part of this game (unless you're coding something really sophisticated).

Even though it feels like a tech business, it usually boils down to marketing and reaching a high scale of production (content publishing, social media marketing, PPC campaigns, etc), none of which is complex.

Shedding the expectation of complexity, and then realizing it's simple, and then working to make your work flow as minimal and free of friction as possible... these are the things that matter if you want to move fast, which you do.

Trying to be first to market or best in the market ends up meaning you never make it to the market, when at the end of the day what matters is saturating the market.

-----

Good luck with everything @atikrr. I think you're going to have to find a way to provide value and build authority in the eyes of the people you're marketing to on Upwork and Fiverr. Having your own website with a blog that looks professional and offers actual, helpful information would be a good start. You have to go above and beyond what others do if you want to be selected. And if you can prove you provide results, that's the most important thing in a B2B environment.

 

[Ceefax]

And then I end up stuck in analysis paralysis mode.

Analysis paralysis, I know that feeling very well! Always wondering which is the "best" option to take.

My own solution, FWIW, is that since you will need to plant some sort of seed somewhere, which will take time to grow, you might as well just plant something right now - anything - while you're motivated but still deciding... Then, if you still take more months to really get going, then at least your first seed has already been planted.

But welcome anyway! Good luck with getting started.

 

[baddyswing]

Yes, I mean that, and I also mean that you should be careful to NOT expect the things you're encountering to be that complex. You'll start inventing puzzles to solve that aren't there, etc. That level of complexity isn't a part of this game (unless you're coding something really sophisticated).

Even though it feels like a tech business, it usually boils down to marketing and reaching a high scale of production (content publishing, social media marketing, PPC campaigns, etc), none of which is complex.

Shedding the expectation of complexity, and then realizing it's simple, and then working to make your work flow as minimal and free of friction as possible... these are the things that matter if you want to move fast, which you do.

Ahh yup... so I'm thinking my steps will be something like,

1. start off hands on executing all aspects (content publishing etc) myself to learn and understand the process
2. identify repetitive elements and anything that can be boiled down into a procedure document
3. systemize and scale with automation and outsourcing

Thanks for the clarification Ryuzaki!

Trying to be first to market or best in the market ends up meaning you never make it to the market, when at the end of the day what matters is saturating the market.

When you mention "saturating the market", reminds me of GaryVee's content model that CCarter spoke about in CCarter Weekly #3. Is that what you mean by "saturating"?

Analysis paralysis, I know that feeling very well! Always wondering which is the "best" option to take.

My own solution, FWIW, is that since you will need to plant some sort of seed somewhere, which will take time to grow, you might as well just plant something right now - anything - while you're motivated but still deciding... Then, if you still take more months to really get going, then at least your first seed has already been planted.

But welcome anyway! Good luck with getting started.

That's an awesome idea! And even if it doesn't turn out well or if I finally decide to pursue something else, I still come away with a bunch of skills I can use for my next venture. Thanks Ceefax!