Complete BHW Guide to Making Money on the Internet (Curation of Best Posts)

Complete BHW Guide to Making Money on the Internet (Curation of Best Posts)

In honor of my 100^th post on BHW and that I just became a Jr. VIP, I’ve decided to make a list of the most useful threads to Make Money I’ve read on BHW with a quick summary and divided by categories. It took quite a bit of time to collate everything and I certainly have missed some great posts (I’m sorry) but please point them out and I’ll add them.

If you can’t find anything that works for you, don’t even try flipping burgers at McDonalds, the Clown called and they won’t even consider you for his job…

Hope it helps!

For Newbies

If you’re just getting started, make sure to read the following threads:

How To Make Money Online - Getting Started
By coreygeer
Great place to start, it lays all the foundation for any techniques mentioned below.

BS Your Way to Internet Riches
By stumickel
All the basics concepts and information you need to get started.

Making Money Offline

Start a Web Design / SEO / PPC Agency

There are many ways to use the concepts that you’ve learned with Internet Marketing and apply them offline.

Banking Over $4,000/month - Sneaky 7 Step Offline Method
By boomboomer
Detailed strategy to sell offline SEO services to SMB.

How I built my offline SEO/Social Media empire earning $15,000 a month in three months!!!
by Taktical
Amazing Guide with strategy to start an SEO agency. Taktical even gave away some free templates to start your own company.

Niche site and Sell Advertisement to Local Professionals
By The Dark One
Smart strategy about creating niche site for professionals, make it rank and sell advertisement.

Sending Mail with Dices - The 7878 Method
By 7878
Smart way to send a snail mail to prospective clients in need of Online Reputation Management

Detailed strategy to launch an SEO business
By netmoney1
Very detailed strategy to launch an offline business and get your first few clients.

Other Offline Strategies

Use Hot Chicks to give flyers and send to CPA offer
By netmoney1
This one is quite funny and involves hiring models to handout flyers asking guys to fill out an offer.

Creating Niche Sites

You do some keyword research and create a site targeting specific interests. You attract traffic through SEO or other means and you either add advertisement or affiliate products.

$100 A Day In Adsense From 1 Blog - Have Done It Before Now Showing You How To Do It
by Bluematter
Amazing journey with great explanation on how to start an adsense site, make it rank and get good revenues out of it. (you need to reed through the whole thread)

The Niche Guide – Intro & Part 1 (Finding a Niche)
by Wealthy199
Introduction to creating Niche Site and How to find a good niche.

The Niche Guide – Part 2 (Understanding your target audience)
by Wealthy199
Explains how to understand your audience for niche sites

How I make 15K a month at AdSense
By doug
Old, Simple but effective method to create a niche site and monetize through Adsense.

Youtube

Many people chose to create youtube video instead of websites to generate traffic and then offer Pay-per-Install (PPI), Pay-per-Download (PPD), Cost-per-Action or other offers.

Cost-per-Action (CPA)

How to Create a Video to Promote a CPA offer

By Harro
Strategy using CPA and Youtube to make money. It was written in 2007 but the strategy still works.

KINLEE's journey to $10,000 a month with PPD/CPA
By Kinlee
Great journey with a ton of information on how to promote and create Youtube videos to promote your PPD and CPA offers.

Clickbank

My Slow, Deliberate Progression to $700/week with Youtube + Clickbank

By spiderblast
Amazing thread from spiderblast with a ton of information on how to rank Youtube Videos and make money from them with clickbank products.

Pay-per-Install (PPI)

Journey to 5000$/month with (mostly) PPI

By Irishsoul
Method using Youtube video uploads to generate traffic to PPI offers.

Social Media Techniques

Twitter

Amazon to Twitter. Automate your income. No investments needed

By gerbill
Easy technique to promote Amazon products on Twitter

Pinterest

[Journey] Pinterest + adsense

By Vekkata
Method using Pinterest traffic to send to blog and monetize through Adsense.

Reposting Popular Pin to Generate Traffic
By Joshweaver9
Very simple and basic method to save and repost the most popular pins on Pinterest to generate traffic and send to your adsense site.

Reposting Popular Recipe Pins
By Raffy
Another good pinterest threads with details on how to repin popular recipe images.

Facebook

Promote CPA offers to your Facebook Fan Page

By Onlineentrepreneur
Hire someone to add fans to your Facebook page and promote CPA offers to your fans.

Other Techniques to Make Money Online

Selling Backlinks

Make Money Selling Unlimited Backlinks
By exodusms
Good strategy to sell backlinks to clients

Adult Sites and e-Whoring
Men are dogs. Let’s make the most out of it! There are plenty of ways to trick men into subscribing to sites such as Adult Friend Finder and to get a commission out of it such as pretending to be a girl and to want to chat on AFF or to add affiliate links in free ebooks.

Create Adult and Sex ebooks with Affiliate Links
By The Lazy Pig
He explains how to create ebooks and add your affiliate links to adult sites.

Trick Guys in Completing CPA offers
By exodusms
Strategy using myspace that you can adapt to Facebook that consists of tricking guys in completing affiliate or CPA offers.

Create Sex Site and Promote with Social Media
By reinstecker
Detailed instructions on how to create Adult Niche Site and to promote it with Social Media

Commenting on Videos with Affiliate Offer
By Pakelika10
He comments on adult videos and sends people to his Affiliate Link

Plenty of Fish (POF) e-Whoring
By stallion45d
eWhoring: Faking to be a girl and have guys sign up for offers.

Media Buying
As wasted mentions, Media Buying can be anything from buying banner space on a website, contextual ads, a sponsored tweet, or a blog post. Then you redirect the traffic to your own Landing Page.

The Secrets to Media Buying - Getting Started – Part I
By wasted
Good guide explaining the basics of Media Buying and promoting an offer.

The Secrets to Media Buying - How IT makes Millions of Dollars – Part II
By wasted
Focus on the Offer and Re-Marketing.

Classified Ads and Auction Sites
There are many ways to use the classified ads sites to promote affiliate products or CPA offers.

Offer Amazon Products through Classified Ads – Part I

By 2011nfl
Using classified ads to get some Amazon sales

Amazon + Youtube + Adsense + Email Marketing + Classifieds = Money – Part II
By 2011nfl
Method using Youtube to generate traffic and sending it to Amazon or Adsense

Buy and Resell products on eBay
By Smitty
Explains how to make money with Ebay products by purchasing and reselling products

Cryptocurrencies
Buying cryptocurrencies at a low price and reselling them.

How I made 40 bitcoins in 2 months trading IPO coins

By Patel
Explanation of how to buy new cryptocurrencies in their initial stage.

Selling Articles

Use Voice Recognition to Write and Sell Articles

By Shaqsquash
He uses a voice recognition software to “write articles” and sell them. The website mentioned in this article isn’t working anymore but you can replace it with Textbroker, iWriter, etc.

SEO-Jacking

Commenting with Google Alert to Promote your site

By Meathead1234
He explains how to use Google Alerts to be the first to comment on a topic and send traffic to your website.

Mailing List

Making Money With Email Lists - My 40k/Month Strategy
By Nuklearedm
How to create a large mailing list through ads and promoting CB products to your list.

eCommerce

Selling Products on Amazon
By isaiahz
How to leverage the Amazon marketplace by selling products and using dropshipping to send them.

Resell Fiverr Gigs

How to Resell Fiverr Gigs for profits
By Leith
Take the most useful Fiverr gigs and resell them for a profit.

That's it for now. As I mentioned, if you think I forgot anything, please don't hesitate to write it down in this thread and I'll try to edit this post to include it.

Finally, I'd like to thank all the guys that took the time to write their methods and their journeys in the above-mentioned threads. There's a lot of amazing information contained in them and it certainly helped me along the way!     

Making Money Online: It All Starts With YOU. (Not Methods. Not Google. YOU.)

Making Money Online: It All Starts With YOU. (Not Methods. Not Google. YOU.)

Making Money Online: It All Starts With YOU. (Not Methods. Not Google. YOU.)

I have been on this forum for a while now and there is one thing that never fails.. at least a couple times every day someone posts a thread asking how to make money. Some want to make $5 per day, some have higher goals at $10 per day (that was sarcasm for those wondering) and then some want to know how to make $5,000 within 30 days to pay for some important medical procedure..

I’m not knocking small goals like $5 or $10 per day. Everyone has to start somewhere but I wanted to start a thread that talks about what it takes to actually reach your goals.

It doesn’t matter if you want to make $5 per day to fuel your video game obsession or if you want to make $10,000 per month to support your family.. it all starts with YOU.

So many threads ask for methods, for secrets, for the easy way out. Unless you have the activation key for the PayPal monkey generator you will find that there aren’t any magic secrets to fill your bank account with money.

I want this post to become a place where every noob can get a serious dose of reality. This same info will work for a kid in high school that wants extra money for video games and going out with friends on the weekends or for a man in his 30’s that wants to start earning money online and has a family to support.


DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT EASY.

Seriously. You have to know from the start that making money online is hard in the beginning. You need a steady source of income to stay above water and to invest in your online ventures.

So, for anyone that has $0 in their bank and has bills coming up due I want to give you this real advise: GO GET A REAL JOB. Seriously, you will have so much trouble if you don’t have a little nest egg to work with and have your bills covered. The majority of people fail because they jump in at the wrong time.

Making money online isn’t something you try to make it in when times are bad. You are setting up yourself for failure. Trust me.. get a job with a steady paycheck and devote your time away from work to making money online.

So many people associate online money with easy money. That is so far from the truth. It’s hard. Very fucking hard!

If you are serious about making money online follow these guide lines. It’s just my opinion and nothing is set in stone here.. but I feel like I have been around long enough and have had enough success online to be able to give my 2 cents at least. My goal is for some noobs to see this and see what it really takes.

So many “make money online” blogs make it seem easy. Why? Because they want the noobs to sign up for their hosting affiliate offers and WP theme affiliate offers.. and buy all of their MMO affiliate products. It’s such a cock fest.. all these self proclaimed gurus telling noobs they can make millions online with just a hosting account (that pays them a nice commission)..

Fuck those gurus (that are really broke muppits) and their false claims. This is the reality of making money online..


You Need Money to Make Money

The gurus will tell you that you can start making money virtually over night if you just get some traffic to your website and start ringing in affiliate sales. It’s that easy, right? WRONG. Again.. they are just trying to sell you their product or get you to sign up for hosting through them. (Sadly even the most “elite” <more sarcasm> gurus come to BHW to spit their BS just to get hosting affiliate signups).

The CPA and affiliate marketing space is crowded. There are so many people trying to make money. 80% of them don’t stand a chance. Who makes all the money? Those that have money to spend and invest. They are the ones that have the coin to invest in proper SEO and control the top of the PPC results. They are also spending crazy money on Facebook ads and every other traffic source that produces results. They have money to test the shit out of ads, banners, and traffic sources.

So many people will post a thread stating they have $50 to invest in PPC. Stop.. save your money. That $50 will buy you dinner for a few nights.

Understanding that you need money to make money is the first step.


You Can’t Spread Yourself Too Thin

We see it all the time on the forum.. people are trying to build an authority site and monetize it with AdSense one minute then the next day they are asking about building a clickbank review website and then a few days later they want to build Instagram accounts. Enthusiasm is great and wanting to venture into many different areas is a nice goal.. but it isn’t practical. And if you spread yourself too thin you are going to fail.

In the beginning you need to pick one thing to focus on and spend all your time learning everything you can about it.. whether it’s building a blog and monetizing it with CPA offers and AdSense, or running CPA offers using paid traffic sources.

Find one thing that you are interested in and stick to it. Don’t bounce around between several different things. You have to dedicate all of your time and focus on one project at a time, especially in the beginning.

Look at the best IMers in the game.. they are experts in one area usually. That is how they become so successful. They aren’t all over the place trying to do it all. They master one thing and continue to evolve with it.


You Can’t Expect Instant Results

This one kills me and it’s amazing how many people expect to make money overnight or even in their first month. I blame a lot of the guru crap that is online. They want their sheep followers to think that they can make $100K a year and drive an exotic car if they just buy their $47 eBook.

If you spend some time to get to know some of the experienced members on BHW you will know that they failed more times than they succeeded. Some didn’t start to make money for several months.. but they knew if they kept learning and kept moving forward they would eventually find success.

This also goes back to the first point I made about needing money to make money. In the beginning your regular job is in place to pay your bills and support your family while you learn IM. If you don’t have that safety net the stress will cause you to panic and make bad choices. When you have that job and you know your bills are covered you can learn and suck in info at your own pace. Of course everyone wants to make money online ASAP but that’s not how it works. You need to learn, read and figure it out at your own pace. With your bills covered you don’t NEED instant results.. allowing you to figure it out at a pace that is comfortable and will allow you to actually figure it out.

You Can’t Give Up Easy

I bet if you took 5 minutes you could find a thread within the last week where someone is complaining that a particular method doesn’t work. How many times have you heard…

“PPC sucks.. it doesn’t work!”
“SEO is dead.. it doesn’t work!”
“Affiliate marketing is dead.. it doesn’t work!”
“Email marketing is dead.. it doesn’t work!”

You get the picture..

Why do these people say that something doesn’t work? Because they don’t give it enough time. They expect instant results and quit before they figure it out. If IM was easy wouldn’t everyone be working from home or working from some exotic location while models fan them down and feed them grapes?

You should be thankful it isn’t easy. Who would pour you a beer at your local pub or come mow your lawn and take care of your yard? Working online and making a living online is very hard. Did I mention this yet?

Just like a professional athlete trains nonstop.. someone with goals of making money online needs to read, study, test.. nonstop. If you want it bad enough you have to put your head down and DO THE WORK.

Go into this knowing that you aren’t going to quit. You will eventually figure it out if you just promise yourself that you will NEVER give up.


You Can’t Put All of Your Eggs in One Basket

Once you do pick something to pursue you need to make sure you diversify as much as possible because IM is always changing and shit happens.

Let’s pretend you decide to start a blog about personal finance and you have selected the following ways to monetize your website:

• AdSense – ad blocks throughout the site
• ClickBank offers - offers mixed in your blog posts and will send offers to your email list
• CPA offers - offers mixed in your blog posts and will send offers to your email list

So, you want to push as much traffic to your blog as possible with the goal of them clicking on ads, clicking on your affiliate links in the content or joining your email list through some kind of offer.

You need to find as many traffic sources as possible.. that way you aren’t screwed when one dries up or just disappears..

So, a few traffic sources you would want to look into:

• SEO
• PPC
• Facebook Ads
• Guest Blogging
• Media Buys

This way if a Google update kills your traffic overnight you can just increase your other traffic sources… just turn the dial and adjust. If you put all your eggs in one basket and spent all of your time and money on SEO you would be at $0 the minute that update killed your SEO.

You Need to be Minimalistic Starting Out (and maybe give up some luxuries)

Don’t be like CEOSam and all the other fake IMers that are worried about materialistic crap. The people that get their first taste of money and go out and buy a watch or some other stupid material possession are doomed for failure. You have to stay grounded and remain focused.

This industry can do a 180 instantly and if you lose your focus you will fall on your arse fast. I’ll use myself as an example.. I could have any crazy car I wanted. Not bragging.. just making a point. Instead of spending a ton of money I bought something that I had wanted since I was very young.. an a4.. it’s a nice car but it's no Maserati or Veyron.. but that doesn’t matter to me.

Don’t set out to impress anyone. It isn’t going to make you any more money. Know what you SHOULD spend your money on? A great computer, laptop, smartphone and online tools and software.. things that will help you improve your online marketing.

You need to also look at what you spend money on and look for ways to cut spending.. this allows you to use that money to help your IM career. If you eat out a few times every week (I was seriously guilty of this) cut back and cook your meals at home. More ads.. a new blog design.. more links.. etc.


You Need to Save Money

This goes back to the previous point. When you start to make money and you see it roll in DO NOT spend it. Put some away for a rainy day. If your goal is to be self employed then you need to think about the big picture.

There are no health benefits.. retirement funds.. etc. You are 100% responsible for your future. When you do start making money I suggest you hire a proper accountant and work with a financial adviser and planner.

When you are 75 years old you will be glad you put some money away instead of buying that sports car or spending your money chasing girls.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have fun.. you should have plenty of fun.. just don’t live beyond your means.. and focus on saving money.

I bet if we started a thread on BHW asking people to post about experiences they had making a shit load of money and then having nothing there would be plenty of people coming forward to tell their story.

When you first taste the money it is like a drug.. have fun, but just be smart about it. Tuck some dough away and pretend you don’t even have it. Invest it properly.


You Need to Treat IM Like a Real Business

This is where a lot of mistakes are made. People think they can work when they want and be successful. IM is a real business.

What would happen if you just showed up to a regular job when you wanted? You would be fired.

What would happen if you just left after a couple hours of working? You would get fired.

Yes, part of IM is the ability to work from anywhere in the world and not work as many hours. It is up to you to determine how much you work and when you work. Some deals will require more work. Heck, I know people with successful online businesses that might work 2 hours a day.. but they worked plenty of 20 hour days when they first started!

Just don’t cut yourself short.. and be professional. Respond to emails quickly. Address any issues right away. Just like a real business.. because IM is a real business!


That's the end of my rant.. I hope I don't scare any of you newbies.. I seriously hope this helps some people figure this out properly. Any questions, feedback or points to contribute/add fire away. As always I hope you enjoyed the read. Until next time.. Ciao for now!

Confessions of a Google Spammer

Before I became an inbound marketer, I once made $50,000 a month spamming Google. I worked a maximum of 10 hours a week. And I am telling you from the bottom of my heart: never, never ever follow in my footsteps.

This blog post will tell you exactly why...

My Mindset in 2009

I never wanted to spam the Internet. Google made me do it.

This is what I told myself back then.

If spamming is so wrong, I wondered, how come it always works so well? Most black hat SEOs think this way. They rationalize spamming Google's index in so many ways:

• We're helping Google improve their algorithm!
• Content is king?!? LOL! Links are the only content you need. Google's lying to people. They deserve to get spammed.
• If we don't do spam, our competitors will--and then they'll beat us. We have to spam.
• We're helping our customers--the little guy--win the battle against a big, bad, evil empire that wants to enslave them to paying PPC costs!
  

 

Black hat SEOs: masters of ethical rationalization

But there I was, responsible for Google adding 45,000,000 new words of spam to its index every day. I had built a spam machine; the thing was brilliant enough to give my clients huge SEO ranking boosts (this was before KontentMachine and all the other spam-producing software out there now).

Some examples of my “work”:

 Some samples of my automated article creation "work" c. 2009

Spamming was very profitable back in 2012

Sales of our SEO SaaS subscriptions peaked at around $150,000 a month in subscriptions. Profit margins were about 70-80%. All profits were shared 50/50 between my partner and I. We had two sales threads—one on WarriorForum and another on WickedFire.

Here's what a few hours of sales looked like back then:

 

An average couple hours of income at my company during the high times. These would all magically appear after I returned from a swim, playing with my son at the park, or from playing pickup basketball with the local islanders.

PayPal had no idea how I was suddenly making so much money. They were so confused about my business model that they froze $25,000 in my account. They expected massive refund and chargeback requests.

But our refund/chargeback rate was less than 1%. 
Because our SEO service worked.

Most of our users were ranking high for big affiliate keywords. I even got my electrician buddy’s website in New Jersey to rank in first place for the keyword "electrician" just for fun. I could literally rank first page for any keyword I wanted to with about 5 minutes of effort.

And my life became very easy as a result. I had two apartments on an island in China with 180-degree panorama views of Sanya Bay--one for myself, and one for my son's mom.

I barely worked. 
Our entire business was outsourced to 7 VAs in the Philippines and one transgender customer support rep in Nevada who was saving up her salary to complete her hormone therapy.

My schedule looked like this:

• 7:00am: Wake up, do some stretching and play with my two-year-old son while my chef prepared breakfast.
  
• 8:00am: Eat breakfast and watch an NBA game (the Clippers, if they had a game) while eating breakfast. The nanny watched my son.
  
• 9:30am: Check in with my partner and employees, Facebook, and chat with my two journalist friends in Beijing.
  
• 11:00am: BS on Skype with some SEO spammer buddies for a bit.
  
• 12:30pm: Ride my scooter to the gym.
  
• 1:00pm: Run 10km, lift weights.
  
• 3:00pm: Go for a swim in the ocean or the neighborhood pool.
  
• 3:30pm: Play with my son and his friends.
  
• 5:00pm: Play basketball at the court with maintenance workers and tourists staying in my neighborhood.
  
• 7:00pm: Shower, then dinner, prepared by my chef.
  
• 8:00pm: Put my son to bed.
  
• 9:00pm: Check in on Skype, BS online, read books.
  
• 11:00pm: Sleep.
  

Lonely SEO Spammer Millionaires

The above schedule is what a spammer’s four-hour workweek looks like. And it's the life of a lot of black hats that are still balling today. It's a comfortable but often dull and somewhat empty life.

The most exciting (and nerve-wracking) times are when the loophole you're exploiting gets closed, and your life flips upside down while you scramble to adjust.

During the boring times, my other spammer buddies and I would BS on Skype about our lives. One guy made $100k a week for a time selling garcinia cambogia pills after Dr. Oz fraudulently proclaimed them to be a magic weight loss supplement.

One woman focused on morally shady but technically legal niches like bath salts, salvia, and access to guides on how to cheat on your spouse. Yet another guy (also in China, like me) was working with prison wardens who forced their inmates to mine World of Warcraft gold for sale online.

All three bought links from me.
They spent their earnings like spoiled little kids. 

They bought luxury cars and $5,000 bottles of champagne to spray their spammer buddies at conventions. They ate ADHD medication like candy, trying to stay awake and focused to work as long as possible. They traded NLP secrets to work on their powers of female seduction. When that didn't pan out there was always the old staples of prostitutes and cocaine. Many practiced intensive bodybuilding, and took steroids, HGH, and weird supplements like deer antler sprays to hack their muscle growth.

With all that money and privilege at stake, the brotherhood of spammers is merciless and ultra secretive. If you fail to attribute a useful tip to the person you found it out from, expect to be shunned. Expose an SEO loophole that made your buddy money, and you’re excommunicated. Betray the ‘family’, and you’ll get kicked out of the Skype group forever. It’s like the Sopranos except instead of wise guys, your family is made up of awkward tech nerds who have cashed in and want to live out all their fantasies.

Google Made Us Do It

I hadn't originally wanted to go down this path. Ironically, I had applied to work for Google's webspam team in 2010. I knew all the tricks and hacks in the book, and I thought they could benefit from my help.

When they didn't reply to my application, I promised myself I would make them pay.
And I had them paying for a few years…

Until one day, Matt Cutts sent out this historic tweet:

 

The tweet that shook the SEO world

ALN (Authority Link Network) was the platform we used to boost ranking for all of our users' websites. Our service was actually called "ALN service"— a fact that helped increase awareness of the network and ironically hastened its demise.

There was a time when our service was one of the hottest things going on WarriorForum. We had found SEO spammer nirvana, and everyone wanted a piece.

Dozens of guys using our service quit their day jobs to open up SEO businesses that relied almost exclusively on our service. Our biggest client, an SEO company that offered reputation management services for celebrities in Mexico, was paying us $25,000 a month and probably charging its clients up to 50 to 100 times more than that. I only realized how hard they were balling when they showed up on the Inc. 500 list in 2012.

But now there was this tweet from Matt Cutts, warning to take the network we relied on out of commission.When our clients asked about the tweet, I pretended I wasn't the least bit concerned about it. Publicly, I scoffed.How could they find a network of 25,000 blogs? If they took it out, we'd just build a new one. 

No big deal..

Privately, I was very concerned. I knew it was easy for Google to find every site in the network. Because all they had to do was buy a few links to one website, wait for those links to show up, then have every website receiving links from that blog manually reviewed. That review would uncover other spam blogs linking to those sites, which would then uncover more cheaters, and so forth.

In fact, from one spam site you can, and Google did, locate and destroy the entire ALN network. To us, it felt like we were the freedom fighters of Zion in the Matrix. The Google guys were like the agents, sending out Sentinels to take us out. Google, of course, saw it the other way around. We were hacking their algorithm and mucking up their search results for fun and profit.

 

How Google + SEO is like the Matrix

Publicly, I proclaimed that we were the good guys and Google was the evil empire. But in my heart I knew we were the bad guys.

Google provides clean search results for free, which truly benefits society. What does spamming the Internet provide for society? It helps two people: the spammer and his customer. Everyone else suffers.

And I knew it was shady. Part of me always dreamed of running a more legitimate business model. But it was just like Michael Corleone telling his wife Kaye that his business would be 100% straight in 5 years—there was just too much incentive to keep on spamming.

 

The psychology of spamming for money--
Spammers always think they’ll “go legit someday soon”

I was a hardened, unapologetic spammer. To the real marketing world, I was an outcast. And that became all too clear when I went to Distilled's LinkLove event in London in April 2012.

Seeing the writing on the wall: the death of link building

My Dutch partner and I had found out about LinkLove from one of our favorite customers. Our customer was scheduled to speak there, so we bought all-inclusive tickets to the event and made plans to meet up there.

Right after we got our tickets, our customer dropped out of the speaker role without explanation. (This was right around the time ALN was getting deindexed, so maybe he was doing damage control with his clients whose rankings were dropping like flies.)

My partner and I went anyway, feeling like confident marketing experts with our massive PayPal bankroll. Those few days in London, however, opened my eyes to how the fledgling world of inbound marketing saw black hats.

We had dinner with all the VIPs the night before the event. Rand Fishkin and Mike King were there. Many other heavy hitters in online marketing were also there.

They were all talking about inbound marketing, quality content, engagement, and a bunch of stuff I didn't understand or considered "BS."

None of them seemed very interested in what we were doing.

“F#$%! Link Building”

Their beef with us was even clearer when Rand took the stage to kick off LinkLove 2012. My ego had already taken a hit after the lukewarm response at the dinner, but I never expected the onslaught that Rand would unleash.

He took the stage with a big smile, introduced himself and then proceeded with this presentation called “F#$%! Link Building”.

My heart sank.

I went from slightly butt-hurt to outright angry and defiant. He was insulting our entire industry. I imagine that this is the feeling Michael Corleone, from Godfather II, felt when Senator Geary called him out in the meeting about the casino rights he wanted.

 How Rand Fishkin sees link builders

I swore I wouldn't let Google make us stop hustlin'. But Rand was right. Within 2 months, our entire network of 5,000+ blogs—for which we paid more than $80,000—was deindexed, dead, simply kaput. Our $100k/mo business was ruined.

However, I remained arrogant and defiant. I still believed that making money online would be easy. I thought I could just make some minor adjustments to our strategy and keep on banging out new successful products.

I funneled more than $100,000 into various new link schemes, each one more "white hat"-seeming than the next.

Nothing worked for long. Google’s deindexing, plus Panda and Penguin, were just too much of a challenge for us. I would put in 3 months of work, get 4 months of sales, and either almost break even or have a huge deficit.

I felt discouraged and depressed. I tried to buy myself some fancy clothes and toys to feel better about myself. I immersed myself in a shallow relationship with a model who would end up being Miss Universe China 2014. I took weekly hiking trips with my friends in the hills of Beijing on psychadelic mushrooms.

I was an empty shell of a human being, lost with no sense of purpose or what to do with my future. With anxiety levels at an all-time high, I could only sleep 2-3 hours a night. Most people I met at that time felt uneasy around me.

And I wasn't the only one having trouble adapting to the post-deindexing world. The Google-hating spammers reached their official low-point when SEOnitro (another public blog network) tried to start a class action lawsuit against Google for intentionally doing harm to many “competing businesses."

Seriously guys? That's like spray painting your business's phone number on someone else's building, then trying to sue them when they paint over it.

Giving Up, Embracing Inbound and Getting a Job

After 18 months of banging my head against a wall, I started thinking about that LinkLove conference again. What if I started over? What could I have built with that $100,000 I had wasted chasing loopholes in Google's algorithm? How much awesome content could I have gotten? How many email subscribers could I have gained?

Maybe there was something to that inbound marketing thing Rand and Mike had talked about so passionately after all.

Maybe it was the way for me to really go legit.

So, I moved back to Beijing and put out the word to my friends. I was ready for a marketing job. I got a few offers, but none struck me like the one from Ptengine. They were a small startup making what I would later call "the Swiss army knife of conversion optimization tools."

They had been successful in Japan, but now they wanted to enter the English-speaking market. They wanted to double their number of users over the next 2 months to show the VC firm looking to invest in them that they were able to achieve rapid growth.

They wanted me to help them with the powers of SEO. I told Ptengine that SEO wouldn't work. Google's new rankings sandbox wouldn’t allow it to work. I wanted to go with the safe route.

They were confused.

"What about PBNs?", they asked. "We're working with a very well known SEO blogger in the UK who has tens of thousands of email subscribers. He’s building PBNs for us". I looked at the properties this SEO “god” had built. (Actually, it turned out he just outsourced the SEO work to a company in London.)

It was like opening a time capsule from 2012. Expired domains, duplicate content scraped from Archive.org, he didn’t even block backlink checking spiders. His reasoning: “blocking spiders would look like a footprint to Google."

I felt a pang of sympathy for Ptengine. They had already dumped $4,000 into this operation. The whole thing was shocking to me. Even the SEO gurus who talked about inbound marketing were still trying to get by with loopholes.

My Stubborn Support for Inbound Marketing

I was undeterred by the SEO guru. 
I went on with my newfound ideals instead.

By using a variety of outreach methods, including permission emails, sponsored posts, social media, and a very successful deal on StackSocial, we hit the VC's goals. They bought in with very aggressive growth goals for 2015.

And I intend to keep going this route. We just started working with Joanna Wiebe at SnapCopy.co (whom Shanelle Mullin of Onboardly said might be "the best SaaS copywriter in North America") and Talia Wolf atConversioner.com to optimize our entire funnel.

We're also getting plenty of adopters and influencers to get us case studies that we will promote to targeted segments that need Ptengine. In fact, all content will take all targeted audiences to various inbound funnels that are only meant to give them value.

Hear all that talk about content?

In short, after 5 years of considering white hats and inbound marketers to be snobs, I'm finally drinking the Kool-Aid.

You win, Google.

Content is king.

---

Jeff Deutsch, Ptengine's VP of Marketing, wrote this blog post for two reasons. 1) To warn against the anxiety-inducing treadmill of using black hat SEO to get traffic, and 2) To express why he finally gave in and accepted the necessity to use inbound marketing.

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