Bob's Story...
This is Bob ("hi Bob...").
Bob is 42 years old and has been online since 2002. He has 3 kids - 2 daughters and a son, a wife Kathy, and a black lab named Mickey. Kathy is mainly a stay at home mom but does work 2 days a week as a dental hygienist. He and his family live outside of South Bend, Indiana. Other than the house and a summer place, they have no debt.
Bob needs to lose 25 pounds but he goes to the gym regularly. He loves walking the dog, playing with the kids (14, 12, and 9), coaching baseball, watching the NFL and college football, and reading.
Bob is politically very conservative, goes to church on Sundays, and donates $15,000 a year to his alma-mater, Kathy's, and various charities.
Bob's making about $150,000 a year marketing online - mainly through adsense and affiliate marketing. There was that one year he did $1,002,000 take home back when Adsense first launched, and a few other years when he topped $250k but the past few years has been slower by design. Bob's tired of the pace and effort and is starting to lay back. The business has been pulling in about $440,000 and Bob's taking home $150k, paying outsourcers to run most things, and investing the rest for retirement.
Bob is smart. And technical.
Before getting into internet marketing Bob built software for financial trading companies. Then the internet boom hit big time and Bob decided to be a day trader himself. Back then, Bob loved the edginess of the trading business - the risk, the long hours, the rewards, the lifestyle.
When the bubble burst Bob went looking for something to do. One night surfing the web he came across an ad for the AdMinder tracking software. The sales page intrigued him and that ad started Bob on a path learning about online marketing, and especially affiliate marketing.
Bob had no desire to open up an ecommerce store but the affiliate model kinda appealed to him. He taught himself HTML, CSS, SSI, and even a little PHP. He built some websites - small minisites the kind Jim Edwards and Yanik Silver and everyone was telling people to build back then.
But Bob's big breakthrough came when he learned about this thing called a "doorway page" and then applications like Traffic Equalizer, Directory Generator, and other "builders."
That's when Bob realized that he was a builder.
That's when Bob realized he would become rich by being an online marketer.
He still remembers the day he kissed his wife and said he was starting a new project. Yes, he'd still do consulting to bring to pay the bills (affiliate mini sites were only making him $4900 a month and they needed about $10,000 to maintain the lifestyle they wanted)...
But this new internet marketing project was going to be "big".
Bob became a mass builder. He bought dedicated servers, learned about hosting, page generators, RSS feeds, and all the stuff that was the rage back then during the early Adsense booms. For 10 to 12 hours a day Bob built sites.
Sites about every possible topic you could think of - asbestos cancer, DUI lawyers in GA, acne removal, you name it. Bob didn't really put up any content - that's what all his scripts did. Scripts he bought, modified, and some he even wrote himself.
Income flowed in. Getting to $10,000 a month was easy. Then $50,000 and when he cracked $100,000 for 3 months in a row Bob knew that there was really no stopping him from dominating anything in the search engines.
By then Bob had 10s of thousands of websites and 10s of thousands of other domains. He'd learned "black hat" seo and was hiring link builders and programmers to try new scripts and techniques. Every day Bob was locked in holy mortal combat with Google. But as long as he could build more sites than Google could trash... everything was ok.
Bob didn't just do Adsense. He made plenty with Amazon feeds and the old Stephen Pierce Smartpages approach. He got into cloaking and "Google Cash" PPC pretty heavily for a while. But it was all centered around building.
The first few light Google purges didn't impact him much. He kept on building and adjusting to what Google and the other engines were doing.
The big one in 2004 wiped him out though. He lost 77% of his income within a 1 week period. "Income" is a bad word -- it was pure cash flow.
Bob was knocked down but not out. He rebuilt a smaller but more profitable portfolio of sites using things like Metawebs. He had a team of Chinese workers in the back room of a restaurant cranking out sites 24/7 for him and doing link builder and templates to try and cover his tracks.
Over the years the scripts have changed but the ideas haven't much. Bob is still a builder and he finds it funny that originally he wanted to make $0.01 a day from 300,000 sites and now he's much happier with a few hundred sites doing a few thousand a day in sales.
The business today is more affiliate sales than adsense. Depends on the niche really.
So Bob's been through it all and there isn't anything the latest WSO or product launch can teach him about blogs, RSS, autoblogging, page building, adsense, and the like. 'Been there, done that, and has all the scars.
Lessons from Bob
- if you're a builder you should be technical (PHP, Wordpress, HTML, CSS, domains, hosting, etc.)
- you have to put in your time
- you can be non-technical but you need deep pockets to buy the expertise
- methods shift all the time for builders. Adapt or die.