My SEO Journey
I first started down the path of SEO back in the mid 2000’s after reading Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Work Week. There was one gentleman in the book who made a website selling sound effect cds on his website created on yahoo. He was making something like 10,0000/month pressing a few buttons every day. This made it seem so easy. I immediately looked into making a website on yahoo and quickly found out that it’s harder than in looks.
I couldn’t figure out how to do anything, but the idea stuck that there are people out there making money from a website that they built. This appealed to me because I wanted an escape from the anxiety of money and the freedom of being confined to having to go to work.
Paid Ads
In 2008, my friend downloaded an ebook called “Google Payload”. The idea of the book was to make money using Google’s Adsense system by sending cheap traffic to your site via paid ads. You had to make a website and plaster adsense all over the place. Then you send cheap traffic from various sources to the site in the hopes that they click on your ads. If you get more per click on what you spent to get them there, you make money. When I first read it, it sounded extremely scammy, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt and tried it.
We wound up losing about 50 bucks trying everything out, but it gave me some experience in setting up a preliminary website, what goes into making the site live, and how to start using Google Adsense and Adwords. This experience also opened me up to the idea that people are making a ton of money using Google Adwords. I read many case studies of people spending thousands of dollars every month on ads.
First website from scratch
In 2011 I moved in with a gentleman from my hometown who was into internet marketing and showed me a lot about SEO. When I was first living with him he convinced me to make a website for a podcast that we’d do together. Even though the podcast was horribly bad, the experience showed me how to set up a wordpress site, install a theme, and install analytics.
After setting up this site I looked into various ways of making a niche site after reading about them online. I remember buying a course called Keyword Academy that taught how to make small niche sites. This opened me up to the idea of keyword research and writing content that answered the questions that people were searching for. It also gave me some experience using some SEO software like long tail pro.
From here I developed a few sites where I got some success. I made the site Striving for Freedom in 2013 and was able to rank a page for “30 days of discipline review”. This was an ebook review that resulted in a few hundred in affiliate sales. I also was able to rank a page for “phenibut review” which talked about my experience with using the anti anxiety drug phenibut. This resulted in a few hundred in affiliate sales as well.
I developed a site about home brewing mead called Viking Smash Brewing. Here I experimented with ranking on Pinterest and using a mixture of recipe posts with tutorial posts combined with youtube vids in order to rank for certain terms. While this has been successful, the commercial viability of such a small niche may not have been the best choice. However the potential is sky high in terms of being the authority.
Further Development
In the summer of 2017 I decided to expand my education in digital marketing. I went through analytics and adwords certification and went through Isaac Rudanski’s Google Ads course. I then took that information and started different campaigns sending traffic to my websites and learned a ton in the process. I’ve taken various SEO courses and immediately used that knowledge to run site audits on local businesses that I know.