nop90.net

I am a new comer to the SEO/SEM scene. Currently I live in PH.

Last year, June 2006, my contract as a programmer in Canada had been lost. I had no income, no idea how I could get more income. Better educated programmers then me are a dime a dozen in these parts.

My options at the time where pretty bleak, the only option that seemed viable was to go back to Canada work and send money back to support my family in PH. Unable to speak tagalog, there are not too many jobs available here.

Not knowing what to do, I decided to do an evaluation of my life. Instead of looking at what resources I lacked I made a list of what I had.

• a good internet conection
• a laptop
• ability to program in various computer languages from assembler,C,C++,python,perl,lisp,scheme etc.
• a good ability to reverse engineer things.
• good at playing simulation games like railroad tycoon,civilization,masters of orion. I always seemed to be able to find a “hole” in the game that allowed me to win.

Those type of skills probably will not get me hired by a fortune 500 company. Also despite having a good technical knowledge of computer,programming,internet etc.. Despite this I was clueless when it came to the nuts and bolts of how ecommerce worked. How people make money on the net etc. (Anyway I am getting ahead of myself).

Anyway I came to the idea that somehow I have to make money online. But how, that is the million dollar question. I have no design skills, I hate webprogramming etc. How can I make money online with the skills that I have available. My on my internet travels i stumbled across a site called syndk8 (August 2006). They did this thing called blackhat seo. I decided to look into this. In a nutshell I found out that using my programming abilities I could get sites to rank in various search engines. Even more baffling products which you advertise on these sites people would actually buy. You could become something called an affliate, just for sending people to another site you could get money :).

I think initially the fellows at syndk8 must have been baffled with me. My knowledge of computers was good, but yet I would ask stupid questions like :

• what is an affiliate ?
• ok i get this epassporte thingie, and the affiliate sticks money in it. And then i just do to an atm and i get money from it ?
• ok let me get this straight. I send horney people to adult friend finder, these people will pay money to meet other horney people. (Still really confused about this).
• ok people actually buy things online ? (i think i must have asked this a million times).

Initially I started promoting adult friend finder using social networks. This was something I could implement right away using my programming skills. So I make bots that would sell stuff on social networks, to my surprise people actually started to signup.

I never forget the day my epassporte card arrived in the mail. Me and the wife went to an atm. I stuck the card in. In our minds was the thought, will it actually work. Nervously I typed in my PIN. Then I even more scared I typed in withdraw. The ATM seemed to hesitate, the few seconds seemed like an eternity. Then the machine began to spit out money :). Until that point in time my internet earning did not seem real. I think the bank guard must have thought we where lunatics. Me and my wife where jumping up and down screaming “It works,I works”

Around March 2007 I decided to try my hand at actual blackhat seo. Bompa (he is a legend in syndk8 and other places ) approached me and and asked if I would like to work with him on a series of MFA (made for adsense sites). With Bompa’s guidance I soon learned BH (blackhat) seo. At this point in time MFA was not as profitable as 2 years ago. But what I learned from Bompa , was worth far more then the money we earned.

One of my hero’s has always been the inventor Edison. Like me he did not have much formal education. He also have good attitude, but he is legendary for is perserverance and experiments. When it come to studing google i decided that i will be like edison . I created a site generator, but it I was able to easily modify it, so every site I create would be sightly different. Every day for over a period of 2 months I generate 5-10 sites a day. I then take notes, and see which sites perform better then this. Using the properties of the better performing sites, I would improve my generator. From this darwinistic approach I was able to see which what google likes/dislikes :).

The rest as they say is history, but those early days where the most fun as I learn how google works.