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I've made millions on SEO traffic alone, let me know if you have any questions for me (14)

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All the profits were made drop shipping health/fitness/weight loss supplements.

I decided to create this thread here since 100% of my traffic was one way or another based on SEO alone.

I started learning and doing SEO with a really small budget (I had about $6000 in personal savings) in 2010 and it took me 2 years to reach a fair amount of success - it was a slow process because I was building almost everything by myself. I was making about $3000-6000/month from my craft in 2012 (basically driving my crappy website's traffic to crappy CPA offers - free macbook or a hot date anyone?). Everything started to go to the bright side when I googled the term "drop shipping" and started to look for high margin products.

Back in my best "killing it days" I used to have 4 properties ranking in the top ten for the most popular dietary supplements in the world. 1 usually was the original store, and the other 3 were different web properties (youtube, blogger, some slim website) that recommended my store in different angles.

Now it's hard for me to rank for the most competitive terms since I have a strong belief and some proof that there is frequent manual reviews going that dislikes my game on and the most competitive health/supplements and the SERP's are now controlled by webmd, drugs.com, wikipedia and other big & powerful brands. The easier terms are still easy though.

I am feeling down today and decided that sharing something (hopefully) valuable with the community could make me feel better about myself at least for a short period of time.

Let me know if you have some questions regarding my SEO and drop shipping strategies.

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As some one who works with manual reviewers on a nearly daily basis, I assure you that yes, there are manual reviewers that look at the top positions of search results, but they arent just in your niche. This is standard practice across the entirety of Google's strategy for combating spammers and algorithm manipulators.

I can also assure you that Google is not controlled by WebMd and major brands. Most of the clients I work with are Internet Retailer Top 500 clients. These are the top ecom's in the World. Several of them get manual penalties for backlinking and such. Then, I come in and clean up their backlink profile and show them what not to do in the future and everything is great for them after I get the penalty lifted (usually 6-9) months.

So, big brands get hit also, and it isnt one or two to make an example for Google., Most of them, you never hear about.

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I agree and I am not talking about some conspiracy and secret webmd deals with google - I don't believe they exist. Google is now preferring authority brand websites because they bring more quality to the search results and don't brainwash people as much as slim "review" type of websites do. It's their SERPS and they can do what's in the best interest for them and their investors.

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In all sustainable business relationships (and indeed even personal relationships), both sides need to benefit. The challenge with SEO is that Google really does not benefit if your page appears on top of the organic results, especially if these are thin pages versus authority brands. Even authority brands would be extremely foolish to make their business dependent on SEO traffic.

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This is so true. When I am looking for websites to buy on Flippa and other brokerages. If fore than 80% of the traffic comes from SEO, I will not even consider buying it no matter how strong or what the potential of the site might be.

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Hey I'm actually working a process on a review site with SEO on the side. Sucks about your sites getting penalized via manual review. Thanks for the thread!

What was it like starting out for you? There's a lot of information about SEO out there, and it's a whirl of mess whenever I try looking things up. Did you spend a lot of time reading around before deciding what to do? Did you connect with other SEO marketers and joined a mastermind? Or were you on your own?

What are you plans in this industry? Will you be making any other affiliate sites in other niches? Maybe trying paid traffic?

Also, I have an idea of how drop shipping works. Could you explain the process of how you got started? What sort of difficulties did you face when starting out with drop shipping?

How would you recommend a newbie to start entering SEO marketing, and what sort of expectations should they have about the money making/traffic growing/link building process?

Thanks!

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yup, apart from my main web properties, one of the best purchases I made was a dropped domain at snapnames with a ton of niche relevant forum traffic that the previous owner had kindly left behind. A simple niche site and funnel to an email auto responder is still going strong on autopilot today, 3 years later with zero seo.

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Thanks for great questions kyouhun.

How I started: I accidentally visited a large (probably the largest) blackhat SEO forum and started reading. I had a feeling it might be a right path for me since I was not interested in learning how to code or building some startup and growing it's user base - I also did not have enough money for that and was not interested in asking anyone to invest in it (I am not that kind of person). I really got obsessed by the idea of cracking the google algorithm and kept reading every single SEO thread for several weeks. When I started building wordpress websites and trying to rank for easy keywords. The first keyword I tried to rank for was "wedding planning books" (lol). I failed miserably at my first 5 or 6 attempts with different websites/keywords and ended up creating a lot of new threads asking for help. I kept learning and finally managed to reach some $100 days. The first $100 day was May 21th of 2011.

When I decided to go with drop shipping I knew I needed to create the perfect web-store so I spent a lot of time researching the ultimate layout/colors/copy and ended up with a well converting result. Later, I visited a website called alibaba.com and started contacting all the supplement manufacturers that fitted my description. All of them were only offering wholesale with 10.000 minimum orders but I did not care and emailed them all (I also lied about selling 20-30 units per day because I thought that they would laugh at the real numbers I had back when).

As a newbie you should start with the easiest keywords possible. If you start playing with medium or hard keywords like most of the newbies do you will lose your drive and belief in your possible success. You should also have a budget, I'd say at least 10.000. Back in 2010 or 2012 it was possible to use scrapebox or a similar harvesting software and build 90% of the links by yourself (web 2.0 properties, high page rank blog comments), buy some xrumer blasts and you were ranking for easy/medium keywords within weeks. Now it's different. Your best bet would be build your own blog network (keep in mind that you need a lot of knowledge for building a strong network that won't get deindexed), guest post and to throw some lower quality backlinks into the mix. You should create backlinks constantly and consistently and strengthen them with tier 2 links (public blog networks work great for that). If you want to rank you should go with black hat strategies, keep the white hat crap for the folks that are writing books and blog posts about seo and bank in those ways. Those who can't perform teach - this is very true when it comes to SEO. It would be great if you could have some other not SEO related projects going on the side since it's really unpredictable and it's not smart to have all of your eggs in one basket.

My future plans are: SEO, learning more about paid traffic and finishing my SAAS project I have been working on for the past few months.

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Sick response.

I'm actually applying an SEO course my friend got for me on my money site. I'm definitely a tad lost on the keywords part: wondering if I targeted the right ones. How do you find yourself picking the right money-making keywords to laser focus on? Do you run paid traffic first to see what happens? Or does SEO really shouldn't care about what "converts" and just pick and run with any keywords to build traffic?

I'd like to also get a sense of how much it would take to compete on keywords. How many PBNs do you recommend someone to start out with to really see movement in high competition keywords and low competition keywords? Is there a way to spy on backlinks and then simply set up PBNs until you match and exceed? Or is there something more to it?

What are tier links + guest posts?

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It is always wise to check the keywords with PPC and run with the golden nuggets. Otherwise, there are plenty of "buy keywords" like "buy [product name[ or "where to buy [product name[", best [product name] - you can't go wrong with one of those, if the user is searching for reviews you can also create a separate review website and rank it for those review keywords.

When it comes to the competition I always check what are the top websites ranking for my target keywords at the moment. There are multiple tools for checking the strength (backlinks, indexed pages, age, etc.) If I see a mediocre website ranking in the top 10 that means it can be done. If I only see amazon, webmd, some .gov sites it usually means there won't be any space for me and I keep on looking for better keywords/products.

A lot of websites allow guest posts. This is how it works: you contact the webmaster, offer them a high quality post on some interesting topic suitable for their niche, you write the article (or outsource this terrible part) and later send them the article with your backlink inside of it. This is kind of an unspoken agreement that guest posts are written for one or two backlinks.

You will also need to learn how to harvest the blogs in your niche that allow guest posts. Most websites have footprints, for example if you want to post on some .edu forums and get backlinks from them a good footprint would be: site:.edu "intext: powered by phpbb"

A small list of footprints for guest posting:

Note: when looking for GP opportunities always enter your niche into the footprint. E.g inurl:addguest.htm "smartphones", later go broader with "phones" or "technology". I think you get the idea.

For your PBN start with 15-20 properties and easy keywords. Note, that you will need some other type of links to make it look natural. You can guest post (I hate this task) so it's always a good choice to look for some freelancer that could arrange everything and hassle for you. You can also trade your PBN posts with someone who also owns a network in a similar niche. I am also using some small public blog networks that allow a limited amount of users and does not send any reports, it's risky and you must know who is responsible for running and creating the network. It's really easy to get burned for using a public network that everyone else is using. Google keeps an eye on those marketplaces, acts as a user and later de-index the network.

Tier2 links (not recommended for your own PBN) can empower your tier1 links (the one's that point to your money URL directly). It works like a pyramid - you make your tier1 links stronger by creating tier 2 links that are pointing to them. You can use public blog networks and other spammy links for that. According to the latest research it still works wonders.

One more important thing: act natural, drip the links, don't build them all at once. Always think: what if some google employee decides to manually review my backlink portfolio and my on-site SEO efforts?

Hope that helps!

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Hmmm, what about the searching users? They benefit from relevant search results. If G loses those, they lose search ads, no?

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I have a question.

I got some basics in SEO but never ranked a property yet, although I did use to build some backlinks and link wheels as a freelancer a few years back.

Right now I need to rank some Affiliate sites for Amazon Associates with fairly low comp keywords.

Can use some guide to follow and learn SEO from, and rank my first site. Any ideas?

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hi, wondering if you have any recommendations for SEO providers. I've started helping my wife with an ecommerce site, and we do quite well off facebook advertising. But i wanted to get our SEO up to par

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I am sorry for the delay guys, I have been travelling for the past two months...my STM subscription even got terminated because of my omission...

cyberninja, unfortunately I can not recommend you anything since I haven't been following the novice SEO material for a long time. If the keywords have a low competition you should just go ahead and build a website full of unique content, update it regularly and build quality backlinks to it at a regular rhythm...if the competition is not that high the site should start moving within 2-3 weeks.

black hand, your best bet is to run two google searches using these keywords "seo company" and "seo services" every single SEO company with at least some balls is trying to rank for those and if they are on top they sure know what they are doing. You might even get a "results of your money back" deal if you are lucky (those were available in the past, not sure if they are available now).

Patience and good luck!

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