SEM Tycoon

**Seafoam** · 12-19-2007, 11:03 AM

I've been lurking for a few weeks now, and my first post here is sort of a deep question, related to the mindset one needs to persue web-related monetization.

In the early 90's I graduated with a degree in MIS (not CS) and found work doing VB and SQL-Server stuff (programming, though not hardcore). When the web hit, I was doing ASP and ColdFusion, along with becoming pretty good at HTML/CSS & Photoshop. I wrote some content too.

The point is, I've been mainly a back-end "IT" guy. My view of all this is mostly from that of a Programmer/SysAdmin. However, after the hiccup of the bubble, there seems to be a lot of opportunity now for providing Content and making revenue from the Advertising and Affiliate Marketing that go with the Content.

I want to pursue this, but one thing I'm finding is that it's hard to acknowledge that my tech-geek "programming" skills are of secondary use. The real value is in Marketing ability... to identify niches, keywords, affiliate opportunities, SEO, and putting things together. Programming/Sys-admining is something that can just be "bought" just like a real estate deal-maker who hires electricians and plumbers.

I've had my head down so long into the code and server boxes, that's it's hard to make the mental shift that the "tech" side doesn't matter as much anymore as the marketing side does for this.

Anyone else going through or been through this?

**JohnWinner** · 12-19-2007, 02:20 PM

I think you are so right!
I have been in the SEO biz since 4 years now.
HTML, php, C#, VB, ASP.net, web services, automation, scraping, multi-threading, breaking captcha, neural networks, ocr, etc all that stuff has no secret for me. The hardest part is to make money out of those skills!

I have a hard time monetizing my traffic for a very good reason: I suck at marketing. (and yes my bad english doesn't help) The thruth is that I have absolutely no interest in marketing I would even say that I hate that!

But I think there are many ways to profit in the SEO biz. You just need to find the way your are the most confortable with. Some people make money out of only one big site, some people build thousands of ****ty sites and make money with the numbers, some people will prefer sub contractring everything and "play" the manager role. There are many possibilities.

Yes you can change your mindset and skills but only if you actually LIKE that stuff. If not then I think you will get bored and it won't work.

Personally I think I'm going to partner with someone who loves marketing, numbers, monetization strategies, tweaking, PPC, etc
If he can make web sesign as well it would be absolutely perfect!

**Seafoam** · 12-20-2007, 08:48 PM

some people will prefer sub contractring everything and "play" the manager role

Yep, and I think that's a key avenue to being profitable, the ability to delegate the things that you don't have the skills for. You can do very well as a manager/leader of others rather than doing the heavy lifting yourself.

I really like the marketing end... liking it is not a problem, and I can work very hard at it... it's just a little disappointing that all those years of being heads-down over code isn't what I should have been focused on, as I'm finding out the more I learn about all this.

**Stas** · 01-03-2008, 12:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seafoam

some people will prefer sub contractring everything and "play" the manager role

Yep, and I think that's a key avenue to being profitable, the ability to delegate the things that you don't have the skills for. You can do very well as a manager/leader of others rather than doing the heavy lifting yourself.

I really like the marketing end... liking it is not a problem, and I can work very hard at it... it's just a little disappointing that all those years of being heads-down over code isn't what I should have been focused on, as I'm finding out the more I learn about all this.

You know, it's funny how life is. Speaking for marketing guys (just this one) I can say that I am routinely amazed by what the technology can do in the hands of a gifted programmer.

I think that the key is an effective working relationship between all sides of the house. The technology is useless if it isn't marketed, true, but marketing something that doesn't work is even more useless.

I remember from the old days, the sales and manufacturing departments of a company I worked for were always at odds. I recall the President of the company called a meeting and basically said, "if we don't work together, none of us eat."

I guess my point is that you need great tech AND great marketing to succeed. They are both the most important and neither can survive without the other.

**ninjashoes** · 01-05-2008, 02:48 PM

imo programming can give you great tools to develope sites and lead to some great profits but its a seperate entity altogether than marketing

so I agree with you in essence

**r2rprofits** · 01-14-2008, 04:28 PM

great post thanks!

**onlineincome** · 02-01-2008, 11:33 PM

It's all abt doing what you love & working towards your goals. Take a day out alone & plan things out the way you want to see yourself in 5, 10 yrs later & work towards it. If you can't enjoy what you're doing be it managerial or technical tasks, it's really hard to believe you'll make it for long & succeed in years to come ultimately.

**Seafoam** · 02-10-2008, 02:22 PM

Wow, I'm surprised this thread is still somewhat breathing.. thanks guys.

I'm curious... I'd like to ask some of the most high-profile earners in this forum... guys like handsome rob, andrew wee, jonathan volk, and too many others to mention...

Do you guys have web programming skills? I mean, can you sit down with a text editor and at least crank out some client-side CSS or Javascript? Or better yet, something server-side like PHP, ASP/JSP, or even SQL for a database?

(I don't mean this as any kind of insult, I'm just curious what level of web-related programming skills some of the top earners have... or not, if it's really neccessary)

**Extramoneymaker** · 02-12-2008, 12:04 PM

Actually having IT background is a very very big advantage. First you already don't mind facing the monitor all day long. The first criteria to make money online is you have to enjoy staring at your computer. Second advantage is that IT people such as programmer are very analytical and that is huge advantage. online you need to do a lot of research and testing. and with that analytical mindset you wouldn't easily feel bored. About marketing just consider it as your way of providing good values to potential customer instead of selling something to them.

**PVReymond** · 02-28-2008, 10:22 AM

Seafoam, if you have all those skills, then get someone that teaches you IM, how the system works, etc.

But remember that this is a business and you have to treat it as such. All the tings you need offline you have to incorporate online.

Thanks,
PV Reymond

**Kaabi** · 02-28-2008, 11:21 PM

I'm all about SEO, and I've noticed that with marketing you can make more than with programming, because programmers are so much in abundance the market is almost saturated for them.

**Seafoam** · 03-09-2008, 03:02 PM

To just give this a nudge, I was poking around the blogs of 2 guys, John Chow and Tyler Cruz (find their links on Google) and these 2 seem to exemplify the original thought here.

They both seem to have almost no programming skills to speak of (and they admit it) yet instead spend a lot of $$$ hiring freelance programmers to code their sites, while they spend their time (instead of programming) putting together all the monetization, marketing, and wheeling-dealing.

Any other bloggers/website owners that fit that description? (or at least any thoughts on the 2 guys I've mentioned?)

**Seafoam** · 09-11-2008, 08:36 AM

Maybe I can give this a bump 6 months later, especially now that its on a new forum?

Speaking for myself, my focus is almost entirely on Marketing now, it took a while, but I don't think about programming, or Adobe design skills as much as I used to. It's all now marketing/affiliates/seo, etc.

It's amazing the amount of online programming resources that are out there like Elance an Odesk.

Anyone else out there who fits the description of successfully subbing-out the programming/design work so you can focus on marketing?

**witnesstheday** · 06:58 PM

no way. programming your own stuff is the strongest backbone any online advertiser/monetizer can have. calling this a geek mindset is just blind, shallow, stupid, so many bad things.

most of my money comes from doing jack. that much is true. and spending jack. and essentially being jack. no wait that's pushing the jack analogy. but my point is that i make, for example, from just one of 2 working money machines (with a third one being refitted to work, after doing brilliantly and then getting shafted by some dimwits who think like you, called google) i get 400 dollars a month for doing ZERO work. in fact that particular object has ZERO programming behind it also. it involves a business, and their site, and i work for them directly, a family business, and google's adwords. i buy ads, the business milks it, i get my cut. so that has no programming, no techie skills, etc at all at all at all. yet i would never be as aware of all the key skills required, not marketing ones at all but keyword-related ones, if i wasn't such a dabbler in perl, the ultimate language for people with verbal diahorrea. and on top of that i have 2 more money machines in the making, one of which is 100% driven by my own programming excellence. it's actually, i exaggerate not, a nugget-size version of the google-style search system

google's search system broke ground and superceded lycos, altavista, even the masterful webcrawler, by being able to match words within pages, exhaustively

my search system, built in 1999, when google was young and i'd not heard of it, is a midget way of doing what google does. it's less powerful, but if you only want to index a few 1000 or 10s of 1000s of pages, it's a far far far far far far better way than google's way, on every level, from programming to usage.

it is highly profitable. in 2002 to 2004 it earned over $1 for every use of the site. ie 600 users a month, 600+ dollars per month.

even today, in 2009, i see no competition for it and am rebuilding it.

far too many people call the HARD and valuable skills called PROGRAMMING by the inexcusably rude term "geek mindset".

the money i make on the 200 quid a month machine is growing up to anything between 800 and 1800 quid a month. my main purpose of this dosh is to feed traffic to the money machine that's built on my own programming. and also i have an arbitrage system in progress which may also work (google-to-google didn't work, google didn't want to play my game any more, they decided to be greedy and keep all the profits for themselves, the fascist monopolistic ****es that they are, so i am now running google-to-affiliatenetwork arbitrage instead, after weeks and weeks of rigorous training - training that a non-programmer would eventually get the hang of but would never do as naturally as us "geeks")

geeks of the world! we rock. keep the money. put it in the bank. don't let the cool cats sell you a bunch of ****e. we are more valuable. we should be rich.

i just saw a wondrous image in my mind. here i am sitting here, wearing a nice suit and a splendid t-shirt, looking pretty marvellous and i feel tired and will go to bed, and all the nongeeks i know and recently spoke to will soon be sleeping also. and this long haired, raggedy youngster, some alter ego of mine, hovers in the reflection in the window next to me, my reflection, this nasty rough yoot (what is a yoot, mr gambini?) saying "go on, my son, stay awake another 3 hours, indulge yourself, have a snack, have a cuppa, have a nice smoke, and add 500 more keywords to that **** machine - an instant 100 pounds per month extra, on the current algorithm." - he's wearing raggedy clothes, i should emphasize, and he's got a fag in his mouth... and that much remains true on both sides of the reflection.

ALGORITHMS in the end separate us, the "geeks", from them the "cool people" who are actually anything but cool

ask vic reeves. cool is jimmy dean lolling about in a field on driving a tractor down the M4, cool is not a lambourghini or one of those really well dressed young ladies who spend every penny anyone they touch has - the antimidas touch it's called.

it's 10.40pm on sunday in london, i'm listening to some talented bloke singing about all going down to dixieland and fightin in the name of antislavery, and maybe i won't change out of my suit or anything and be that geek again, but i sure as hell won't stop being the geek inside. i think i may just get on and do those 500 keywords. at about 7am the punters start to awaken, usagewise, and if i were to do that, then tomorrow being the busiest day of the week, i'd milk it. the geek mindset is the one that tells me - DO IT, do it now. listen to the tumbleweeds song, eat drink be merry, watch a bit of rab c nesbitt, do what ya gotta do (in younger days it wasn't as clean as watching online video, well it often did include online video, snicker snicker) but finish those keywords. dull synonyms. tonnes of money for a bunch of dull synonyms. richard whiteleys dream come true (may he rest peacefully... de de de de dededede)

does anyone have one of those "i watched carol vorderman and didn't wank" t-shirts? no? maybe they don't exist.

that's me. and geeks. good luck. hope no one censors my vorderman gag. just in case, i shall print this thread as a pdf and hope i don't trash it later. good comedy is hard to find.

**witnesstheday** · 09-14-2008, 07:05 PM

re-reading the thread-starter's (probably) views i see that he/she/it is not a cool person but a geek, accidentally straying from the true path of hardcore geekness. yeah sure, the non"geek" stuff pays the bills, but what's more important in your home, your job (which pays the bills) or your wife (whom you love) who spends the money? the geek in you is your soul. look after it.

**Seafoam** · 01:06 PM

Witnesstheday, thanks for the post! That's the kind of in-yer-face thought provoking I like to see.

It's amazing that I made that original post waaaay back in last Dec, and yet it was only just this past summer that I really forced myself to pull my head out of trying to figure out yet another javscript/php trick and spend that time instead learning the in-and-outs of all that goes into Affiliate marketing (Adwords, landing pages, affiliates, etc). It's actually been productive getting to that goal by putting the programming aside.

And of course, things snowball - the more I read about Affiliate marketing, the more I see that the programmers and Adobe designers are very much "hired guns" to the marketers "above" them. I hate to admit that, but it increasingly looks true.