How'd you get started?

[Sherlock]

This is not a first thread. I already wrote the response (I started a gambling forum just out of curiosity and after many years I put the first banner on it).

As I am lazy to start new threads and as a part of my erratic way to online seclusion I do not want to; I would like to know how you imagine your end in affiliate marketing. Because the state now is like having dead mother in a wardrobe and cashing the hefty pension, which feels like being loser. Yes, it is the passive income that everyone is dreaming about, but I wonder whether I should simply give up the free money and do only things that go somewhere.

[mooncereal]

Yep, I do think that $1500 / month is an overkill for backlinks, especially for a new site.
With new sites (especially in saturated and very competitive niches like igaming), I'd probably want to be reactive rather than proactive - meaning pushing up KWs where you are already seeing a positive trend upwards.

I'd say, once you build a solid foundation of content ("solid" may vary depending on your intent and plans), let it sit for a month or so and see what G thinks of it. You will definitely start seeing some pages outperform others - you can double down on those as there you are likely to get best returns on your BL investment.

Talking about exact amounts, if we're talking about a one-man operation and a singe website, $600 - $800 per month is more than enough to build out a solid backlink profile.
The main reason being (in my opinion) is you buy links that "work" and you probably want to make sure that what you are doing "works" before continuing.

So the ideal scenario might look like this:
- You have content on your website and you see which pages / KWs get more impressions / clicks than others
- You identify which of those pages are likely to bring you $$ (where you can get FTDs or which might drive people to reach out to you to buy BLs from you)
- Once you know the KWs and pages - you do competitor and backlink strategy research where you identify places where you might want to get BLs from. These should be somewhat (or completely) niche and GEO relevant.
- You identify a topic for a guest post publication. The goal here is to create a post which will get clicks. If you publish a guest post with a backlink to your website (on a different website) and that page never gets any organic traffic - there's very little use from such BLs. So you'd want to craft a post that is relevant to your target KW and that covers a subject / KWs that people are searching for and that will likely get clicks (a good number of impressions at the very least).
- Then you let that sit and you try to analyze the impact. This is the tricky part because it is very easy to confuse correlation with causation. But really, anything about G, its algos and methods of working with them is, in essence, tribal knowledge.

That's one possible formula for a good backlinks. If you have that as the objective - you won't really need to spend more than $600 - $800 per month on BLs unless your website gets really big.

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the heads-up before I started putting a lot of $$ into links. Also - I think I saw you on the FreeSlots podcast on Youtube.

[Oliver Cooper]

Welcome to the forum! It's great to hear about your journey. I came to this niche from journalism. I had experience with SEO, and I've always been into gambling. It's a great combination of skills and interests

[eenzoo]

This is not a first thread. I already wrote the response (I started a gambling forum just out of curiosity and after many years I put the first banner on it).

As I am lazy to start new threads and as a part of my erratic way to online seclusion I do not want to; I would like to know how you imagine your end in affiliate marketing. Because the state now is like having dead mother in a wardrobe and cashing the hefty pension, which feels like being loser. Yes, it is the passive income that everyone is dreaming about, but I wonder whether I should simply give up the free money and do only things that go somewhere.

Hmm ... not pretty much sure. As we moved to Tuscany and decided to own some real estate (actually i was always more the tenent guy, but girls ... kids). Good anyway. House and land paid fully cash (yes, iGaming commission) and invested in olive trees. Looking to reach a (retail) net within next 3 yrs of €100k ... its hard farmers work, still backed from iGaming commission. Actually i would love to invest much more in food production. Micro greens, herbs, fresh water fish farming (RAS Systems), but our little mounty and abonded location, make the "fresh to door" distribution not easy.

Some small consulting gigs over the year would be welcomed too. 20 yrs experience and 7figure income out of adult, casino, fx affiliate marketing still kicking

and you?