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How to anonymously host the continued development of youtube-dl offshore

Original sources of this guide (might be more up to date in case you're viewing a mirror of it):
https://old.reddit.com/youtubedl/comments/jktx5b/how_to_anonymously_host_the_continued_development/
https://raddle.me/f/AntiCopyright/121477/how-to-anonymously-host-the-continued-development-of-youtube
In this guide I will go through how to anonymously host the continued development of youtube-dl offshore using companies that have a track record of being very resilient to DMCA takedowns. As a general disclaimer, youtube-dl is not illegal, no matter how much the RIAA wants it to be. Hosting it is not illegal, but the RIAA doesn't care about what's legal, so we'll have to act accordingly and not rely on companies that will bend over backwards for them. This post is basically my way of flipping the bird to the RIAA.
DMCA ignored hosting providers
RIAA report including DMCA ignored hosting providers
MPAA report including DMCA ignored hosting providers
United States Trade Representative report including DMCA ignored hosting providers
ESA report including DMCA ignored hosting providers
Europol report including DMCA ignored hosting providers
La Liga report including DMCA ignored hosting providers
Former bulletproof hosting reseller reviews offshore hosting providers
Former bulletproof hosting reseller on what the most warez friendly hosting providers are
(Novogara aka Ecatel recently got busted for tax evasion and are shady as hell in general, allowing anything to be hosted on their servers, so it's best to stay away from them.)
Take into account what data center the hosting provider uses. If they don't run their their own data center the company running the data center can shut down the server if the data center isn't DMCA ignored. That isn't to say that resellers can't be resilient, but it depends on how resilient the data center they use is.
This goes without saying, but keeping the hosting provider secret makes it a lot harder to take down.
Some countries like Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Korea force hosting providers to use government SSL certificates, meaning that they can MITM the connection.
CDNs and proxies to hide the real hosting provider
DDoS-Guard - Highly recommended. Based in Russia. Doesn't care about DMCA at all. DDoS-Guard is mentioned in the MPAA's Notorious Markets report and currently provides protection for Nyaa (the world's largest public torrent tracker for anime and manga) and Sci-Hub (the world's largest piracy website for academic papers which is under constant legal pressure from big US publishers). Has a free plan and accepts Bitcoin for paid plans. DDoS-Guard might be inaccessible outside of Europe for a few hours/month, meaning that sites using it would be unreachable outside of Europe during that time. This is probably peering related, but I'm not sure. Just tell site visitors to use ProtonVPN's free plan and connect to one of their VPN servers in the Netherlands if that happens.
While I recommend DDoS-Guard, I'll list some other alternatives in case something happens:
CloudFlare - Might be a honeypot, especially since I'm not sure how they'd be able to get away with this otherwise, but CloudFlare works for now. Just don't expect privacy from them. They're a US based company so they'll probably be reigned in eventually, but for now they're having their Wild West days. CloudFlare has a free plan. If CloudFlare is not configured properly when set up the real hosting provider will be leaked. More info about that here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
It's a myth that Cloudflare does not forward DMCA complaints, they forward everything. However, Cloudflare does not store any "sensitive data", which means forwarding "useless" information is similar like ignoring the DMCA request. A general advice is that whenever you use Cloudflare you should use a bulletproof backend server as well to avoid DMCA takedown request in the first place, so less or nothing gets forwarded (less "leakage risk").
Source: CHEF-KOCH / Warez / Bulletproof Hosting.md
OVPN's public IPv4 proxy (the Switzerland proxy) - Swedish company that provided a proxy for The Pirate Bay for a while, went to court because of it, and won. The two advantages with their Switzerland proxy in particular is that it's hosted by Interxion - the same Netherlands based company that is hosting Feral Hosting's DMCA ignored seedboxes - and that Switzerland is a pretty good jurisdiction. OVPN also scores well on That One Privacy Site. Accepts Bitcoin.
Before we go into registering a domain, I think it's worth considering if it's really worth keeping the name youtube-dl or if it could be spun off into a more accurate and less trademark infringing name like media-dl, for example. It downloads video and audio from a lot more sites than just YouTube, after all.
Resilient TLDs (there are more options than just these)
.is - As of a few years ago ISNIC had only ever suspended one domain and it was connected to ISIS.
When we asked whether ISNIC would follow Greenland’s lead and move for a proactive suspension, we got a clear answer.
“The short answer is no. Such an action would require a formal order from an Icelandic court. ISNIC is not responsible for a registrant’s usage of their domains,” ISNIC’s Marius Olafsson told TorrentFreak.
“This policy applies equally to any .is domain,” Olafsson says, adding that it’s the domain owner’s responsibility to abide by the law, not theirs.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-finds-safe-haven-in-iceland-switches-to-is-domain-130425/
“Domains can hardly be considered illegal any more than a street address. A street address is not illegal even if there is illegal activity in one apartment at the address,” ISNIC says.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/torrent-domain-suspensions-damage-credibility-registrar-says-140617/
.ru / .su - Good for anything that doesn't affect Russia or go against Russian interests.
.to - Used by a lot of torrent and other filesharing websites. I have never seen one get suspended. .to is managed by a US company though, so it being "bulletproof" could change.
.cr is a resilient TLD according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance's (IIAP) report:
thepiratebay.cr domain is still online despite actions against it from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica. Other notorious infringing sites are following the trend of using .cr domains as a safe haven (e.g., kickasstorrents.cr). Costa Rica’s failure to deal effectively with its obligations regarding online infringement, more than eight years after they came into force under DR-CAFTA, is a serious concern.
In case you want cheaper options that are available on Njalla, .ws and .ch are said to be pretty good.
.ec is also looking pretty solid as Library Genesis (the world's largest book piracy website, which is under constant legal pressure from big US publishers) have been using it for some time without getting suspended.
Vulnerable TLDs
.com, .net, .cc, .tv, and .name are operated by VeriSign, a Washington DC based company that is controlled by the US government.
.org, .info, .asia, .aero, .ag, .bz, .gi, .hgn, .in, .lc, .me, .mobi, .mn, .sc and .vc are operated by Afilias, a company that blocked one of WikiLeaks' domains.
.site, .website, .tech, .online, .uno, .fun, .space, .store, and .press are operated by Radix, a company that has an anti-piracy partnership with the MPAA.
All TLDs operated by Donuts, a company that has an anti-piracy partnership with the MPAA.
Resilient domain registrars/resellers
Recommended:
Njalla - As anonymous as you can get when buying a domain. Njalla is a Nevis registered company that buys the more common domains from Canada based Tucows, which is pretty abuse friendly and some TLDs like .is they buy from the registry directly. They then lease it to you while legally speaking they own the domain. This means that you don't have to give them any personal information to register it and they take Monero. Njalla is mentioned in the RIAA and MPAA's Norotious Markets reports. Njalla has a Tor Hidden Service, PGP key, and has support for registration via XMPP with OTR. Njalla is run by one of the Pirate Bay founders and they kept the Pirate Bay sense of humor alive when dealing with DMCA.
Other:
NiceVPS - As anonymous as you can get when buying a domain. NiceVPS is a domain reseller based in the Dominican Republic that buys the domain from easyDNS and then leases it to you, meaning that you don't have to provide any personal information since they own the domain on paper. Accepts Monero. Has a Tor Hidden Service, PGP key, and warrant canary. I've seen NiceVPS recommended on some websites, but I'm not sure how solid it is. Doesn't seem to offer all of the TLDs that Njalla, Openprovider, and easyDNS offer, including a lot of the more resilient ones.
Openprovider aka Hosting Concepts B.V. - Netherlands based registrar that is one of the most abused registrars by rogue pharma sites. Doesn't suspend domains without a WIPO decision or court order. Has a full section dedicated to it in the United States Trade Representative's 2019 report and a brief mention in the 2020 report.
easyDNS - Canada based registrar that has a big focus on due process. The current registrar of The Pirate Bay's .org domain, which it defended against the RIAA. Wouldn't suspend a domain for a video downloader like youtube-dl unless ordered by ICANN, CIRA, or a court according to their takedown policy. Accepts Bitcoin.
There are a few resellers of bulletproof Russian and Chinese registrars that accept cryptocurrency, but because those are pretty much only used by cyber criminals they would not be a good look for this project. And there's also the risk that they'll just be gone one day without a word and no way to transfer domain and not much recourse. Because of those reasons I'm omitting them from this list. I think the above mentioned registrars and resellers will be good enough, the project is legal after all.
Worth considering:
In order to anonymously directly register a domain at any of the other mentioned services than Njalla and NiceVPS you'd have to fake the WHOIS information, which violates ICANN's rules and registrars usually suspend domains because of that. I could especially imagine easyDNS doing this. Not sure how the other registrars would react to that, but ICANN does have the power to withdraw their accreditation - meaning that the registrars would lose the ability to issue domains - if they don't follow ICANN's rules. In the cases of Njalla and NiceVPS they aren't a registrar, they just fill in their own details and buy the domain for you from a registry/registrar when you register a domain using them.
If you use Njalla or NiceVPS you're handing over control of the domain to somebody else and have to take their word for it that you'll always have access to the domain. It's easier to trust Njalla than NiceVPS in this case since it's known who owns Njalla and they have more of a track record than NiceVPS, which is fairly unknown.
TLS/SSL
Let's Encrypt - Free, uses open source software, backed by EFF, Mozilla, and others. Easy to set up and easy to maintain with an auto-renewal script.
If you're using CloudFlare, you'll have to use their phony SSL certificate.
Keeping your server secure and other technical advice
Check your server, and how reliable it is in terms of security and privacy, online services like https://centminmod.com can test your server and it's configuration to ensure nothing is "leaking".
Check if someone can see your hidden backend server IP via https://dnsdumpster.com. In general you should block every IP connection to your backend server, only allow your own connection, VPN's or reverse proxies. You quickly can check if someone has an "open" backend IP service via services like https://censys.io.
Source: CHEF-KOCH / Warez / Bulletproof Hosting.md
If you use CloudFlare, also check that your backend isn't leaking using CrimeFlare.
If you have set up email with your domain, use SMPT and a custom mail server so it doesn't leak your origin server IP. Email is the easiest way to leak origin server IP addresses.
Use SSH instead of VNC. With VNC the login information is sent unencrypted via plaintext, meaning that a rogue exit node in the Tor network and any server the login information is sent over on the clearnet could record your login information if they wanted to.
Use a password generator for all accounts and have it set to the max number of characters. Don't put the login information into a proprietary password manager or an online password manager. Make sure to back up the login information to multiple hard drives/SSDs/USBs/etc.
Try and make the site portable so that all software and all configurations can be saved to an ISO that can be spun up at any hosting provider at a moment's notice in case the site has to move at some point.
If you get a VPS, make sure it's KVM. KVM is much more secure than OpenVZ since OpenVZ doesn't have much separation between different customers on the same server. OpenVZ is also easy to oversell. Xen is also secure, but has worse performance than KVM.
Use nginx, it has a lot better performance than Apache.
Use MariaDB. It's a more up to date fork of MySQL developed by MySQL's original developer after he sold MySQL to Oracle. Contains bug fixes that sometimes have not gotten into MySQL yet. It is of course fully compatible with MySQL databases.
Basic security hardening (I'd probably use OSSEC + Shorewall instead of fail2ban and ufw, but I'm not an expert at this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
nginx configuration for improved security (and performance): GitHub Gist | blog post (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are both Google Public DNS resolvers, so if you enable OCSP stapling, use a more privacy friendly DNS resolver, like Njalla's public DNS, one of the DNS resolvers mentioned on PrivacyTools, one of the DNS resolvers in DNS66's settings, or an OpenNIC server that doesn't keep logs. Digitalcourage e.V. and Chaos Computer Club are pretty trustworthy organizations, so their DNS servers from DNS66's settings along with Njalla's DNS resolver are probably solid, at least. Few OpenNIC servers seem to last very long, judging by that most of them were added in 2019 and 2020. If you use CloudFlare for the site, just use CloudFlare's 1.1.1.1 DNS, they'll get site traffic data regardless, so just use them for that DNS resolver as well instead of sending out data to another party.
nginx tuning for best performance
nginx SSL/TLS hardening including HTTP Strict Transport Security
Top 25 Nginx Web Server Best Security Practices
Let's Encrypt auto-renewal script
If you need FTP server software, Pure-FTPd is the most secure option. Use SFTP instead of FTPS for better security and less of a headache.
Disable password access for administration, require login using a SSH key, and limit the number of login attempts.
Change default ports, like SSH. If anyone tries to access the default SSH port, have the firewall block them for a few hours.
Disable root login.
More security tips for SSH are available here. Don't implement port knocking though.
Disable nginx logging once everything is set up to protect user privacy and improve performance.
Keep the software up to date to decrease the risk of your serveVPS being hacked.
Don't use analytics. If you have to, self-host Matomo (formerly known as Piwik). It's open source.
Keep up to date backups of the site on multiple hard drives/SSDs/etc.
Anonymous payments
Bitcoin is fully traceable nowadays and tumbling/mixing your Bitcoin won't make any difference.
Tumblers are useless
Against my better judgement, I’m going with this click bait heading, but the premise is correct. Due to the software running real time analysis on the ledger, simply avoiding taint and breaking up coins is now entirely ineffective, as it matches the full bitcoin amount to be received over a period of time, as the software is built around a neural net of sorts (talking out of school here, I’m not a programmer) it appears to self-correct in real time as a more "likely" or "accurate" owner conclusion is reached.
Source: Blockchain Analysis and Anti-Money Laundering (X-post from /DarknetmarketsOz)
Meanwhile Monero was the only cryptocurrency that that the US government couldn't track when they took down one of one of the biggest darknet drug markets and seized the site operator's cryptocurrencies. This is because Monero is the only major cryptocurrency properly designed to be private.
Update:
There has apparently been some recent developments when it comes to tracing Monero. You can read more about it in my comment on Reddit or Raddle. I wouldn't worry too much about it at this stage though.
Use I2P or Tor when transacting with cryptocurrency. I2P has some privacy benefits in its design over Tor:
Unidirectional tunnels instead of bidirectional circuits, doubling the number of nodes a peer has to compromise to get the same information. Protection against detecting client activity, even when an attacker is participating in the tunnel, as tunnels are used for more than simply passing end to end messages (e.g. netDb, tunnel management, tunnel testing) Tunnels in I2P are short lived, decreasing the number of samples that an attacker can use to mount an active attack with, unlike circuits in Tor, which are typically long lived. I2P APIs are designed specifically for anonymity and security, while SOCKS is designed for functionality.
However, I2P doesn't have as much funding and reseach or as big of a developer community behind it. I2P's userbase is also a lot smaller than Tor's. A full comparison about that can be found here. Monero chose I2P over Tor.
More information about Monero + I2P/Tor is available here.
Either get cryptocurrency donations or use a peer-to-peer exchange that doesn't enforce KYC (Know Your Customer) to buy Monero or Bitcoin. Unlike centralized exchanges, private sellers on decentralized exchanges won't automatically submit all their data to the government. Even if you get all of the cryptocurrency via donations and it therefore has no connection to your real identity at all you should still anonymize it via Monero so that it can't be traced from the donation wallet to the hosting provider which you want to keep hidden.
Some private sellers on peer-to-peer exchanges won't require IDs, while some might require it. If nothing is mentioned, it's worth asking the seller before you send them any money. A few even accept cash meetups and cash by mail (watch out for being scammed or mugged though). If you do go to a crypto for cash meetup, make sure it's in a public place with lots of people in case something goes wrong. LocalCoinSwap, LocalCryptos, and LocalMonero even has sellers that accept gift cards (which you could buy with cash in a physical store). However, most gift cards are only redeemable in the country they were bought in, making this an option that won't work outside of the countries the sellers are based in. The one exception to this that I know of are Steam Wallet gift cards, which work internationally.
If your method of paying for cryptocurrency involves going somewhere to buy it/a gift card/a prepaid card/a burner phone, consider leaving your phone at home since it's essentially a tracking beacon. If it's a cryptocurrency for cash meetup you might want to have it with you in case something goes wrong though.
From what I've read there are some centralized exchanges that don't require KYC, but at least some of them freeze funds if they think it seems suspicious (which I would imagine a Tor IP would fall under) and they refuse to release the funds until they have been provided with an ID.
If you decide to buy cryptocurrency using a normal payment method, a wire transfer would be the option that involves the least amount of companies getting the transaction info, though I don't think you'd have much recourse with getting your money back if you got scammed and paid via wire transfer.
Bitcoin ATMs may require ID and usually have surveillance cameras around them, but this may vary depending on where you live.
If you bought Bitcoin, use XMR.to to exchange it to Monero. If the service provider only accepts Bitcoin and not Monero, exchange the Monero back to Bitcoin so that the Bitcoin has been anonymized. Don't pay in Bitcoin without exchanging it to Monero and back first.
Prepaid cards usually require SMS verification and are sometimes limited to purchases within the country they were sold in, so be sure to read up on whatever card you're considering using. Vanilla Visa gift cards used to be the go to for VPN buyers back in the day since they only required putting a zip code into a website, but things change, so read up about activation requirements and international purchases for the card in your country before buying anything and if you get information from an unofficial source, try and make sure that it's at least somewhat recent. If SMS activation is required there are two options. One option is buying a push-button burner phone and a prepaid SIM card at a physical store using cash, activate it at a major public place and then once the prepaid card is activated shut off the phone and take out the SIM card and the battery. Another option is buying access to a dedicated number in the same country that you bought the card in at an online SMS inbox site using cryptocurrency (the free SMS inboxes that have shared phone number might be used up already). The catch 22 there is that you wouldn't have any cryptocurrency yet at this stage, so it's not really an option unless you figure something out that I wasn't able to think of. If the prepaid card can't do international purchases you could withdraw the money into an anonymously created PayPal account (requires SMS verification). Expect the prepaid card and PayPal account to almost certainly get frozen if you try to pay with it over Tor. The risk is lower when paying via a VPN IP, but it's still a notable risk, especially if it's a VPN server with lots of users and you can never verify that the VPN provider isn't logging you. An anonymously paid for self-hosted VPN on a dedicated IP address in the same country that you bought the prepaid card would be less likely to cause the card to get frozen. A residential proxy/proxy would be the least likely to get the card frozen. Just don't connect to that residential or self-hosted VPN/proxy directly using your real IP address since your ISP would see that and since you would be the only user of that self-hosted VPN it would be directly identifying. You could use the prepaid card on public WiFi, but that will give out your general location and will give the WiFi network your IP address. It will also give the WiFi network your MAC address, so be sure to set the MAC address to be random (just search something like "[operating system] random mac address on wifi" on DuckDuckGo). Then there's the issue that most browsers other than Tor Browser, SecBrowser, and Bromite are bad combating browser fingerprinting. Sure you could also customize Firefox with arkenfox user.js (formerly known as ghacks-user.js) and a bunch of add-ons to combat all the different kinds of tracking, but you'll just make your browser more unique the more you modify it.
Anonymous Internet browsing
Use Tor when doing anything in connection with the site, including when using PuTTY and FileZilla. Verify the integrity of the Tor Browser installer using PGP before running it so that you know that it hasn't been tampered with. Use a bridge if you don't want your ISP/government to see that you're using Tor. Running Tor over a VPN may seem like a good idea, but even if the VPN provider really doesn't keep logs (which is impossible to verify) using Tor over VPN can make you easier to track since that makes the VPN service a permanent entry node [1][2][3][4] and there's also VPN fingerprinting. If Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is a concern you can use Pluggable Transports [1][2] to disguise the Tor traffic. Keep Tor Browser up to date. Never run Tor Browser in full screen. That makes you more easily trackable as websites can detect the real resolution of your screen. Don't install any add-ons or plugins, that makes you a lot easier to track. If you have logged in and then logged out of a site it can link you to other accounts you have on the same site using session cookies if you login to those accounts without hitting the "New Identity" button to relaunch Tor Browser with a clean slate. Block JavaScript when the website doesn't require it, that's the closest thing you'll come to an ad blocker. Use the Hidden Service version of sites when available, that way your Internet traffic never goes onto the clearnet and it also adds three more proxies between you and the site's server for a total of six proxies.
Since you shouldn't use an ad blocker with Tor Browser it's important that you keep your operating system up to date to minimize the risk of getting infected in case you come across some malicious JavaScript via for example malvertising when you have JavaScript activated.
If you use Windows and don't want to switch to Linux (even though you can set up dual boot or just boot it from a USB without even having to install it on your computer), use a non-admin user account and have an admin account that you only use to authorize trusted software to run, that will mitigate 94% of critical Windows vulnerabilities. You can use a tool like W10Privacy to decrease the amount of tracking in Windows 10, just be sure that the tool you use is updated to match the latest version of Windows 10 or you might brick your OS.
Email
Use an end-to-end encrypted no logs email provider located outside of Five Eyes, Germany, Enemies of the Internet, and countries under surveillance - preferably ProtonMail - when signing up for all of those services. Use a different email address for anything not related to the administration of the website. ProtonMail has a Tor Hidden Service, but signing up for ProtonMail is only possible on the clearnet address, so you'd have to go into Tor Browser's privacy settings and change "Prioritize .onion sites when known" from "Always" to "Ask every time" when you register the ProtonMail account. Change it back to "always" once the registration is complete. And yes, it is possible to sign up for ProtonMail via Tor. It's not easy finding an exit node that hasn't gotten blocked yet, and you will most likely need a secondary anonymous email account on another email provider to send a verification code to, but it is possible. Don't try using a disposable email service, ProtonMail blocks pretty much all of them so you'll just waste time and will probably get your account frozen. Once you have made an account, go into Settings > Security and then wipe and disable the authentication logs. Once that's done - before you sign up for anything - log out and wait a while then log back in, just to see if their anti-fraud system decides to freeze your account or not.
If you go for a email provider other than ProtonMail, keep in mind that it has to be there for the long haul in order to be usable. If it suddenly shuts down without notice, you're pretty much shit out of luck. So try and go for one that has been around for a while and seems like it will continue to stick around.
Comparison of alternatives:
https://privacytools.io/providers/email/
https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/email-comparison/#3
https://www.prxbx.com/email/
Other
Use a new username that you haven't used before.
Use end-to-end encryption for all private communications. ProtonMail has built-in end-to-end encryption between ProtonMail accounts. If you want to encrypt email with PGP when communicating with non-ProtonMail users follow this guide. That will allow you to import it into ProtonMail. Just remember that the subject line will not be encrypted by PGP. PGP/MIME gives out less metadata than PGP inline and is just better in general, so use PGP/MIME. For file transfers you can also use OnionShare if the receipient also uses Tor Browser or put the file(s) into a password protected .7z file using 7-Zip with the "Encrypt file names" option enabled + a password generator set to the max number of characters that you then upload to Disroot Upload. Be aware that the lufi software that Disroot Upload runs on keeps the filename visible after the file has been deleted. If you need an end-to-end encrypted pastebin, self-host PrivateBin or use Disroot's PrivateBin. Disroot uses a privacy respecting hosting provider and claim that they don't keep logs for services that don't require an account, such as Disroot Upload and Disroot's PrivateBin.
Use DuckDuckGo instead of Google. At least when doing work related to the site. It has a Tor Hidden Service that you can easily find by searching "duckduckgo onion" or "duckduckgo hidden service" on DuckDuckGo.
Rely on open source software and privacy respecting services when it comes to processing and storing data related to the site. PrivacyTools.io, awesome-privacy, AlternativeTo, and GitHub makes it easy to find privacy respecting alternatives.
Keep software on your devices up to date to decrease the risk of it being compromised by an exploit.
And yeah, I probably went pretty deep on some of the less relevant sections, but I thought it was best to include everything.
submitted by Fuck_the_RIAA to youtubedl [link] [comments]

[25/M] Directionless in an IT career, how do I grow from this witch?

I'm going to cry my heart out, so you've been warned.
Long story, short.
​
Long story, long.
Chapter 0: The beginning.
I was great at computers from when I was young. I was no Chintu developing applications and having investors wrestle to reach me, but I did some basic static HTML pages, could figure my way out in fixing computer and internet issues, etc. This got me the prestigious stature of "geek" and "gizmo" in a household where being able to surf the internet was akin to cavemen discovering fire. Then on, I decided I wanted to study computer science despite being from a school (rather, board) that did not even have Computers as a subject in 8th, 9th and 10th.
Come 11th, I wanted to take up Computer Science and take it up, I did. The first chapter (and I kid you not) was about introduction to computer science, where we had to rut what a peripheral device is and what a non-peripheral device is. The class was basically a teacher highlighting contents of the textbook that would fetch us marks. I nope'd out. Being the cream student, I had an option to switch to Electronics because the demand for electronics was so low that they had only 1 section with 63 people and were really looking to make that an even number. After a few trial classes, I realized electronics is fun too and I ditched my long term love to study electronics.
I guess somewhere, there was always a zeal to want to learn computers but I did not know the sources. I knew I could "learn C/C++" but what would I do with that was something I never knew. I consulted a couple of teachers in my college regarding this but what they'd suggest is for me to learn it to get good marks, improve my score and get into a good engineering college. 🙄 Their assumption was that the real CS happens in engineering college and 12th does not matter.
I stuck to electronics, scored fairly decent marks and in engineering, I opted for CS.
Chapter 1: University. (Can skip)
For some reason, I thought of University as a magic box where a dumb person goes in and comes out as a "coder, rider, provider". But alas, life is no TikTok and I realized it on day 1 when in my Science and Humanities department, I was the only one who did not know a line of code. There were kids who'd be inducted into Mechanical, Electronics, Civil departments and 99% of them knew how to write some code and I was caught off guard, by this. I thought I could wing it and yet again focused only on scoring marks. This is what I was thought whole my life and it did not help that the Director drew a correlation that every kid who scores a 8+ GPA lands up a job that pays them at least 12lpa.
Focusing on marks, studying what "looked" important and with a goal to maintain a 8+ GPA, I strictly adhered to rules that would help me achieve my goals. 3 years of this, you could ask me to write an API and I would first see if this was "in syllabus" or not. In the 3rd year, we had something called Practice School. This was a term that we borrowed from some IIT / NIT, but proudly wore it on our chests like it was some discovery we secretively made. Practice School is a fancy term for unpaid internship where you could either work for a company, or work under a professor to do some research work for some minor credit. For some weird reason, I was asked about what activity I did apart from academics in every interview that I attended. Did they really expect me to do anything apart from study and score marks? 😲 \s. So, obviously, I got a great internship in a very good company called the company of friends, located in the Boys hostel.
With an industry internship that went flying while jamming to "Hum Toh Udd Gaye, by Ritviz", I was left with no choice but to get a research internship. Thanks to my face, communication and luck I could convince one professor that it was me who discovered gravity and that I have some secretive potentially mind-blowing scientific research going on that would shock Stephen Hawking. I was a Research Assistant to a professor with initials MDD (which co-incidentally also stands for Major Depressive Disorder).
Chapter 2: Research Assistant. (Can skip)
Being a research assistant, my job was to build apps to capture data, propagate these apps to a set of users and generate datasets. Not bragging, but I could learn the technology he wanted and build apps very quickly. It was not production quality as this was the first "project" I was working on, but it was there. It could house about 100-150 users who actively used the application to log data. Spending more time towards this, I neglected studies a bit. My grades were still the same thanks to the easing up of the portions and subjects. I absolutely loved what I was doing and the fact that I could see a weekly impact when I release a new version of the app was something that gave me immense thrill. The professor, too, was extremely impressed by my efforts and gave me a couple of interns to "manage" in order to churn more apps. This was fun, we experimented with multiple frameworks, presented our "research" work to a couple of potential "investors" and this experience improved my communication, presentation, documentation, coding and every other skill I could think off. In one of the monthly "appraisal" scheduled by the professor, I asked him how "industry-ready" I was and he gave me compliments like I was the one of the many forms of Lord Vishnu. I was pretty satisfied and I could nail interviews (is what I thought).
Chapter 3: Placement Season (Please dont skip)
As 3rd year came to an end, placement season began. If placement season was a mood, it would be the mood associated with "winter is coming". First company that opened up doors to an interview was Uber. With a pay package that equates to my family's 2-year pay, they came in with a bang. The first round was an online round. As I read the questions, i could physically feel my hair jump and fall off and the one's remaining grey themselves in order to fool my body that we're old now and death was only a matter of time right now. I could solve 1 question, but most people could solve 2. I discussed this online and found out that Uber is notoriously asking difficult questions and that makes sense because they're paying a huge salary.
I was not aiming for such a huge salary, so I was fine. After this came Intuit, Microsoft, GS, AWS, HP, Cisco, Myntra, Sabre, Shell, Infosys and I could not clear even one of the first coding rounds. Sometimes I got 2 questions right, sometimes I got 1. But all the times I never got the interview.
I was genuinely depressed and realized that it is time to up my DSA game. This game isn't new to me. I was "preparing for placements" by referring to sources like HackerRank (which was the go-to choice of more than 90% of the recruiters). I reduced the time spent on this because I was convinced that my practical experiences will be valued. I restarted my practice and one fine day a small company came to campus. They asked the most simplest coding questions that just tested if you can translate the logic to code. I could and I got in, after 38 rejections and 1 interview. Pretty much a TWICH-isq company.
Chapter 4: The work (Please dont, thx)
The company that I got into typically trains all the employees for 6-8 months before giving them work. But thanks to my practical experience, I was one of the 10% people who was offered a role to join immediately out of college for a 2.5x increase in pay. I thought my luck is changing and apna time aayega. I joined the company. Next month, I will have completed 3 years in this company. The most "development" work I have done is add 3-4 minor "adapters" to the existing product and expand support. Apart from that, I aided migration to Jira, Github, setup CI / CD pipelines, got the Wiki culture, etc. It's a very old fashioned place but what I got going for me is that my team is not rigid in their mindset. In the 3 years that I am here, my salary has increased by a grand total of 7% (not annually, overall).
The ACTUAL question.
I am restarting my algo and DS journey. But is there anything else I can do to get a job? Should I look at changing fields? If yes, how. I love management, CX, etc. I do love coding too, but I am not the competitive coder and that makes me believe that I am the impostor Among Us. I am not looking to go abroad as I am the sole breadwinner in my family and I can barely sustain with my present salary.
Thanks for reading if you did.
Sorry for making this Quora-isque, lordships of Reddit.
Thanks,
Regards,
Bye.
submitted by YentaSaawa to india [link] [comments]

[Month 0] Growing An Informational Intent Site To $10,000 A Month From Scratch!

Although I have been wanting to start a new informational intent-based domain for a while now, I was planning to wait until 2021 to start it but due to the new round of commission changes in the Amazon Affiliate program, I have decided to put all of my Amazon projects on hold for now as I am massively overexposed to Amazon right now. Although I managed to earn almost $3600 last month from my money site network, the vast majority of it was from the Amazon Affiliate program.
Thankfully, I only had one small site hit by this latest round of changes with it taking about a 60% hit in commissions. My other two main domains are predominantly in the “All Other Categories” section and held at a 4% commission rate. That said though, I definitely think that there will be additional cuts and changes to the Amazon affiliate program in a few years so I want to get this informational intent domain off the ground as soon as possible.
My goal is to diversify both income and traffic sources with this new domain to help reduce future risk too as I have had a number of domains slapped by Google updates in the past. It will hopefully be making most of its money from display ad networks supplemented with a number of different affiliate programs with its traffic predominantly coming from organic search traffic supplemented by Pinterest and eventually Quora with any luck.
The majority of the content I am publishing right now is based around high search volume, low competition informational intent searches to try and scale the traffic on the domain as fast as possible to be able to apply to the Mediavine ad network. After that, I will start adding more content that is more suited to Pinterest and Quora traffic generation.
Niche
Although I have chased the commissions in the past and made sites around niches I had zero interest in, over the last year or two I have gone for lower-income potential niches that I actually know more about and enjoy. So far this is working well for me as I have been able to churn out tons of content without having to put much research in as I know a large amount of the information already as my last three domains have been based around my hobbies.
Although this new domain is not based around a hobby, it is based around something where I know a number of the sub-niches that I plan to cover on the domain well. This should allow me to churn out a ton of content when I have time while also bringing on freelance writers when possible to help me scale this new project as quickly as possible to get it off the ground.
Although the niche of the domain is specific, it is very broad so I should not be running into any problems with running out of content to write about any time soon. This has been an issue for a domain that I made in 2018 as well as one in 2019 where they are hard to scale at their current stage due to having covered so much of the niche already. With this new domain, I should be able to scale it for years to come without much of an issue. Also, I don't give out the specific niche to any of my projects so don't plan to reveal the niche that this domain is in.
Starting With The End In Mind
Although I do plan to keep this new domain going for a few years yet and focus on growing it, I am trying to build the domain in a way where it should be quick and easy to sell once its traffic and income are high enough. This should give me a way to quickly sell the domain if I want in a few years without having any issues but time will tell. On the subject of selling sites, I may sell one of my Amazon Affiliate sites in a few months to fire up some cash to scale this new domain even quicker depending on how it is looking in a few months but so far I have $1000-$2000 a month for this new project for various tasks.
One of my friend's purchases sites to diversify her investing portfolio and I reached out to her for things she looks for in a potential new domain and this is what she came back with saying the first 6 are the main ones she will try to get in any potential new purchase:-
Hosting Theme CMS
Although I have been a big fan of Cloudways previously, the ease of use of Sitegounds has won me over so I have gone with Sitegrounds for this new domain as my host of choice. I have stuck with Namecheap as my domain registrar as I have used them for years and never had a problem with them to date and I like how you get free WhoIs protection with them too.
CMS wise, Wordpress was a no brainer due to having so much experience with the CMS from my other projects. The developer community behind Wordpress pretty much ensures that I always have a plugin or custom code that I can use to do anything I need with ease too.
Although I used to use Newspaper and Colormag as my go-to themes of choice, I have since moved over to Astra as it is so quick and easy to set up so I have gone with Astra as my theme of choice for this new domain too. Without the adsense code on the domain, it is giving me a page load time of around 0.6 seconds for a 2000 word article and around 2.5 seconds load time for the same page with the ad code on it.
This is the load times for a 2000 word article on the domain. The top left is Pingdom without having adsense code on the domain, the top right is Pingdom with adsense code on the domain and the bottom is GTMetrics with adsense code on the domain. GTMetrics were having issues on the day I set the domain up so I never managed to get a speed test before adding the adsense code with GTMetrics. The page sizes are different due to the compression from the autooptimize plugin covered below.
Plugins
AAWP
AAWP is a premium plugin that allows me to quickly and easily make product comparison table and link out to the items on Amazon. It also offers automatic geo-targeting for Amazon as well as a few other things but it does need access to the Amazon API so if you are brand new to this, the normal Amazon One Link system will probably be better and easier until you get your Amazon account approved and get access to their API calls.
If you are new to making affiliate blogs then I go over how you are able to make decent looking comparison tables here using free tools. If you don't have access to the API for Amazon or are on a budget for your blog then it might be worth checking out as you can make them look surprisingly good and they don't take too long to build.
Ads.txt Manager
Not a plugin that I usually use and there are a bunch that does the same thing but it basically allows me to quickly and easily edit my ads.txt file to add the different networks IDs to serve ads on my domain. As this new project is mainly going to be an informational content domain, display ads should make up a solid part of its income and I plan to switch ad networks as traffic grows so this should save me a little time in the future.
Autoptimize
One of my favorite free plugins and offers basic caching and lazy loading of images to help compress your pages and speed your pages up. It's very easy to set up and can help you improve your GTMetrix scores if you care about stuff like that while getting your page load times down. I actually purchased the WP Rocket plugin that is a premium plugin that does a similar job but refunded it and came back to Autoptimize as I personally had better results with it and its free.
Disable Comments
I’m not looking to build a community in the blog comments of this domain or attract bots/spammers so I just disable all comments on all posts with this plugin. Quick and easy and takes ten seconds to set up and can prevent a ton of heartache if you end up on some bot auto-accept bot list.
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
I use this to automatically inject the analytics tracking code for Google Analytics for my domains. Although it is easy enough to do it yourself and manually add it to your theme's header, you have to remember to re-add it every time you update your theme if you do it manually so I just use a plugin to keep things easy.
Google XML Sitemaps
I have seen mixed reports about sitemaps and if it's even worth using them anymore, I still do but it's mainly out of habit rather than knowing if Google still needs them or just crawls your domain. This plugin lets you quickly and easily build out a constant sitemap with a few seconds of adding it to your domain.
Insert Headers and Footers
Pretty sure you can use this to auto inject your Google Analytics code to your header if needed instead of Monster Insights but I have never tried it. I use it to inject the Google Adsense auto ads code to the header of my pages to show their display ads, quick and easy, and offers the same advantage of you not having to go back in and re-add it after each theme update.
Pretty Links
A few uses but the main thing that I use it for is to add place holder links as I publish my content to later turn into affiliate links on the back end once I get approved to different programs. Make sure that the TOS for any affiliate program you apply to actually allows you to do this, it's a grey area with Amazon and a few other networks so be aware of that. It also lets you quickly and easily flip your links from one network to another.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Another great tool although it is freemium but for the majority of bloggers, the 100 credits a month that you get for free should be more than enough. It basically compresses your images when you upload them and has one of the best compression systems going from what I can see. It can drastically reduce the size of your images without having much effect on the actual image quality. This means the don’t take as much space up on your hosting while needing less bandwidth to actually send on a page required letting your page load quicker too.
Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg
Made by the same team who make the Astra theme, solid plugin considering its free, basically ads some additional blocks for the Gutenberg editor in Wordpress to let you do a few other things with it.
WP Revisions Control
This lets you quickly and easily set a maximum number of revisions for each post to stop it clogging up your database on bigger sites. This plugin does have its negative sides as if you set it to only a small number of revisions then you may not be able to back up to an old version of the post if you make a mistake or something but I like it.
WP Word Count
Probably useless/nothing more than a vanity metric for most people but I use it to quickly and easily screenshot the total word count for my domains for YouTube videos/Forum/Reddit posts. Basically you click its tab and you can see the information like this as well as your monthly published content and a few other things.
Other Plugins
Although I am only using the plugins listed above for this domain I have this post going over these plugins in a little more detail as well as a few other plugins that I use for my other domains. If you are looking to set your first domain up then it might be worth checking out.
Keyword Research
I have my old keyword research method posted on Reddit but keep in mind, its three years old now and has not aged well to keep up with how modern Google works and serves its page results for a user search. It shares the same problems as the KGR method and my own personal method that I use has evolved a ton since then but if you are brand new then it might be worth checking out but I have no plans to publish a guide for my current keyword research method as its one of my best assets for moving forward.
As this domain is based around broad, informational content rather than laser-targeting buyer intent keywords like my affiliate projects, I have been having great results from the free version of answer the public due to using much broader initial terms when using the tool. It's well worth checking out as it's free and provided you are careful with your free credits, you can probably stick to the free plan to get a ton of keywords.
I am also using keyword sh*tter too as its an excellent free tool. Although I never logged the keyword source for this current project, I think that answer the public has probably produced more high search volume/low comp keywords for this new project than keyword sh*tter but when it comes to the lower search volume stuff, keyword sh*tter blows answer the public out of the water so try both out if you want to do this yourself.
I have seen so many people say that they want to outsource their keyword research and to date, I have not seen any services that actually offer good keywords. Although I made this going over a keyword research service from Fiverr, I have had similar results with other services charging much more for the keywords they sell you. In my experience, the people who are good at keyword research just outsource and article and use it for growing their own domains so don't be sucked in by flashy sales letters promising your high search volume, low competition keywords as in my experience they are far from it and a waste of money.
Content
Although I linked it earlier in the post, here is the launch content count for the domain. I basically spent two weeks or so churning out content for the project and leaving it in draft mode then published it all at once. I have nothing to back this up data wise or even a theory as to why I do it, I just prefer to have a big chunk of content on the domain when launching it.
I have chosen this parent niche as I know a few of the sub-niches within it pretty well so should be able to churn out a large amount of the content myself with ease. In addition to this, I am planning to bring a few freelance writers on to help me scale the project as quickly as possible to try and diversify my income sources between the Amazon Affiliate program and display ad networks as quickly as possible.
The majority of the articles on my other domains are usually between 1000 and 2500 words and I plan to do the same for this one. I will basically be looking at the first page of Google and checking the word counts of the keyword relevant pages already ranking and at least planning to match the word count of those pages. Different people have their own opinions on this but this will be my plan for word count moving forward.
If you are brand new to this type of thing then I think that for modern google, scaling into content is one of the best ways to get started and you should aim for something similar to what I cover in this screenshot. Although you will likely fail in a large number of the initial keywords that you target, it should put you on the right track to build out your own positive feedback loops as you move forward to improve your own keyword research and content creation methods.
Although I used to type my content directly into the Wordpress editor, I have been using the Surfer SEO content editor as it saves me a fair bit of time when prepping my articles and lets me build templates for the freelancer writers quickly and easily. Surfer SEO is far from essential for this though and I personally think that it is over prices for anyone who just uses it for its content editor. I managed to scale to $3500 a month with my current money site network without it so there's no need to run out and subscribe to it.
I have typed up millions of words of content over the years for various projects and I made this going over some of the main tips that I have picked up over the years. If you are new to blogging then this may be helpful, it’s not going to shave massive amounts of time off your content generation but every little helps and saving time on every article can quickly add up over the coming months as you churn your content out.
I also made this going over how you can easily optimize your images for your blog I would highly recommend people watch it as its one of the few things I really do wish I had known about years back. I got involved in this type of stuff back in 2013/2014 and only really started optimizing my images in January 2020 and it has managed to shave a bunch of time off my page load speeds and storage space requirements. Depending on where you source your images, it can potentially take your image file sizes from 4MB down to >100KB and takes about a minute to do per image if that. If you need sources to get images for your content that you are able to legally use then I made this going over the three main ways that I get free images for my content that may be helpful too.
Backlinks
Although I will be using backlinks for this domain, they are not essential if you are just starting and target keywords that are low enough competition. I got the project I cover here to around $350 a month without backlinks and the project I cover here to $800 a month before I started building backlinks for it. I will initially be focusing on guest posts, niche edits, and manual forum posts for this new project though, and may move into additional link type in the future with it all being outsourced via agencies.
I don’t give out recommendations for the backlinks services I use either as I was using one of the bigger services until a few months back when they tried to scam me by delivering a PBN link instead of the niche edit that I ordered that had a list price of over $300 if I remember rightly. Although it's not the main point of the video, I go over the various ways that you can check any links that you do choose to outsource in this video so you can at least double-check any links that you outsource for your own projects to see if they are just PBN links.
I know that some people like to wait a few months before they start to backlink their projects but I am planning to start backlinking right away as it worked so well for the domain that I started in August last year that made over $1700 last month. I basically use the guest posts and niche edits to pass link juice to help increase my domains strength and hopefully help my pages climb in the search results. Although the main reason for using the manual forum posts is to increase the referring domain count to my project and dilute the anchor text ratio, it does look like they can help for getting your pages to climb in the search results from some tests I did on the domain I started in August.
Also, just to be clear, these are not forum profile links where you make your profile on a niche related forum and just drop your link on your profile page for your account on the forum. These are links dropped in niche relevant threads that have a fair bit of content in the thread making them much easier to index and they tend to have a higher chance of being a do-follow link thank forum profile links too.
Budget
Current Budget Spend For The Project
As I am trying to scale this project as much as possible I am outsourcing a fair few of the tasks but this is not essential as I have typed up most of the content for my other projects myself with the two domains I mentioned above-having none/minimal link building too helping to keep their initial budget costs down. This thread on Reddit from a while back might be worth reading if you have a budget available for your project as it's from a guy asking for advice on how to spend his budget on his site. One of the users has deleted their account in the thread now though so you have to manually click on the + near the deleted account name to expand the full thread.
This video also goes over a number of different tools with the majority being free that I use to do various tasks for my money site network too. This can help you do a number of tasks without having to hike your budget spend up so it might be worth checking out too as it can keep your costs as low as possible.
submitted by shaun-m to juststart [link] [comments]

articles on Covid-19 long-term damage and after-effects

long-hauler studies/clinics
long-hauler theories
articles on long-term damage/after-effects from Covid-19
UK government working to help damaged survivors
US government working -against- helping survivors
long-term covid19 stories can be found at
For every Coronavirus Death, 18 more will have lifelong heart damage, 10 more will have lifelong lung damage
For every one person who dies:
So now all of a sudden, that “but it’s only 1% fatal!” becomes:
some good technical diagrams on how covid clots/damages
do you STILL not have an spO2 pulse oximeter oxygen meter? they are less than $20 and might save your life once sick
I've tried half a dozen thermometers and they all are unreliable, too expensve and inconsistent except this $10 one: Vicks Speed Read
LabCorp Pixel at-home Covid-19 test "free" no insurance needed
Cheapest "cash" Lab Tests / Lab Blood Work in USA (even vs insurance sometimes)
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) the new nightmare of this decade, millions will be affected
part 2
lesser known/smaller subs I browse
help also available CoronavirusSupport and COVAnonymous
(personal shoutout for help - I am trying to find a deal on a portable oxygen concentrator as months after covid lungs very damaged, spO2 is only 91 and without insurance had to return O2 rental as I could not afford it anymore, please PM if you know someone selling theirs cheap?)
submitted by thaw4188 to u/thaw4188 [link] [comments]

[Month 0] Growing An Informational Intent Site To $10,000 A Month From Scratch!

Note - Blogging is far from passive when initially getting the domain off the ground and setting everything up but the three established domains that I earn most of my income from have not been touched since January 2020, September 2019, and sometime in 2018 respectively so all the effort can pay off and lead to some solid delayed income that some people may call passive income.
Although I have been wanting to start a new informational intent-based domain for a while now, I was planning to wait until 2021 to start it but due to the new round of commission changes in the Amazon Affiliate program, I have decided to put all of my Amazon projects on hold for now as I am massively overexposed to Amazon right now. Although I managed to earn almost $3600 last month from my money site network, the vast majority of it was from the Amazon Affiliate program.
Thankfully, I only had one small site hit by this latest round of changes with it taking about a 60% hit in commissions. My other two main domains are predominantly in the “All Other Categories” section and held at a 4% commission rate. That said though, I definitely think that there will be additional cuts and changes to the Amazon affiliate program in a few years so I want to get this informational intent domain off the ground as soon as possible.
My goal is to diversify both income and traffic sources with this new domain to help reduce future risk too as I have had a number of domains slapped by Google updates in the past. It will hopefully be making most of its money from display ad networks supplemented with a number of different affiliate programs with its traffic predominantly coming from organic search traffic supplemented by Pinterest and eventually Quora with any luck.
The majority of the content I am publishing right now is based around high search volume, low competition informational intent searches to try and scale the traffic on the domain as fast as possible to be able to apply to the Mediavine ad network. After that, I will start adding more content that is more suited to Pinterest and Quora traffic generation.
Niche
Although I have chased the commissions in the past and made sites around niches I had zero interest in, over the last year or two I have gone for lower-income potential niches that I actually know more about and enjoy. So far this is working well for me as I have been able to churn out tons of content without having to put much research in as I know a large amount of the information already as my last three domains have been based around my hobbies.
Although this new domain is not based around a hobby, it is based around something where I know a number of the sub-niches that I plan to cover on the domain well. This should allow me to churn out a ton of content when I have time while also bringing on freelance writers when possible to help me scale this new project as quickly as possible to get it off the ground.
Although the niche of the domain is specific, it is very broad so I should not be running into any problems with running out of content to write about any time soon. This has been an issue for a domain that I made in 2018 as well as one in 2019 where they are hard to scale at their current stage due to having covered so much of the niche already. With this new domain, I should be able to scale it for years to come without much of an issue. Also, I don't give out the specific niche to any of my projects so don't plan to reveal the niche that this domain is in.
Starting With The End In Mind
Although I do plan to keep this new domain going for a few years yet and focus on growing it, I am trying to build the domain in a way where it should be quick and easy to sell once its traffic and income are high enough. This should give me a way to quickly sell the domain if I want in a few years without having any issues but time will tell. On the subject of selling sites, I may sell one of my Amazon Affiliate sites in a few months to fire up some cash to scale this new domain even quicker depending on how it is looking in a few months but so far I have $1000-$2000 a month for this new project for various tasks.
One of my friend's purchases sites to diversify her investing portfolio and I reached out to her for things she looks for in a potential new domain and this is what she came back with saying the first 6 are the main ones she will try to get in any potential new purchase:-
Hosting Theme CMS
Although I have been a big fan of Cloudways previously, the ease of use of Sitegounds has won me over so I have gone with Sitegrounds for this new domain as my host of choice. I have stuck with Namecheap as my domain registrar as I have used them for years and never had a problem with them to date and I like how you get free WhoIs protection with them too.
CMS wise, Wordpress was a no brainer due to having so much experience with the CMS from my other projects. The developer community behind Wordpress pretty much ensures that I always have a plugin or custom code that I can use to do anything I need with ease too.
Although I used to use Newspaper and Colormag as my go-to themes of choice, I have since moved over to Astra as it is so quick and easy to set up so I have gone with Astra as my theme of choice for this new domain too. Without the adsense code on the domain, it is giving me a page load time of around 0.6 seconds for a 2000 word article and around 2.5 seconds load time for the same page with the ad code on it.
This is the load times for a 2000 word article on the domain. The top left is Pingdom without having adsense code on the domain, the top right is Pingdom with adsense code on the domain and the bottom is GTMetrics with adsense code on the domain. GTMetrics were having issues on the day I set the domain up so I never managed to get a speed test before adding the adsense code with GTMetrics. The page sizes are different due to the compression from the autooptimize plugin covered below.
Plugins
AAWP
AAWP is a premium plugin that allows me to quickly and easily make product comparison table and link out to the items on Amazon. It also offers automatic geo-targeting for Amazon as well as a few other things but it does need access to the Amazon API so if you are brand new to this, the normal Amazon One Link system will probably be better and easier until you get your Amazon account approved and get access to their API calls.
If you are new to making affiliate blogs then I go over how you are able to make decent looking comparison tables here using free tools. If you don't have access to the API for Amazon or are on a budget for your blog then it might be worth checking out as you can make them look surprisingly good and they don't take too long to build.
Ads.txt Manager
Not a plugin that I usually use and there are a bunch that does the same thing but it basically allows me to quickly and easily edit my ads.txt file to add the different networks IDs to serve ads on my domain. As this new project is mainly going to be an informational content domain, display ads should make up a solid part of its income and I plan to switch ad networks as traffic grows so this should save me a little time in the future.
Autoptimize
One of my favorite free plugins and offers basic caching and lazy loading of images to help compress your pages and speed your pages up. It's very easy to set up and can help you improve your GTMetrix scores if you care about stuff like that while getting your page load times down. I actually purchased the WP Rocket plugin that is a premium plugin that does a similar job but refunded it and came back to Autoptimize as I personally had better results with it and its free.
Disable Comments
I’m not looking to build a community in the blog comments of this domain or attract bots/spammers so I just disable all comments on all posts with this plugin. Quick and easy and takes ten seconds to set up and can prevent a ton of heartache if you end up on some bot auto-accept bot list.
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
I use this to automatically inject the analytics tracking code for Google Analytics for my domains. Although it is easy enough to do it yourself and manually add it to your theme's header, you have to remember to re-add it every time you update your theme if you do it manually so I just use a plugin to keep things easy.
Google XML Sitemaps
I have seen mixed reports about sitemaps and if it's even worth using them anymore, I still do but it's mainly out of habit rather than knowing if Google still needs them or just crawls your domain. This plugin lets you quickly and easily build out a constant sitemap with a few seconds of adding it to your domain.
Insert Headers and Footers
Pretty sure you can use this to auto inject your Google Analytics code to your header if needed instead of Monster Insights but I have never tried it. I use it to inject the Google Adsense auto ads code to the header of my pages to show their display ads, quick and easy, and offers the same advantage of you not having to go back in and re-add it after each theme update.
Pretty Links
A few uses but the main thing that I use it for is to add place holder links as I publish my content to later turn into affiliate links on the back end once I get approved to different programs. Make sure that the TOS for any affiliate program you apply to actually allows you to do this, it's a grey area with Amazon and a few other networks so be aware of that. It also lets you quickly and easily flip your links from one network to another.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Another great tool although it is freemium but for the majority of bloggers, the 100 credits a month that you get for free should be more than enough. It basically compresses your images when you upload them and has one of the best compression systems going from what I can see. It can drastically reduce the size of your images without having much effect on the actual image quality. This means the don’t take as much space up on your hosting while needing less bandwidth to actually send on a page required letting your page load quicker too.
Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg
Made by the same team who make the Astra theme, solid plugin considering its free, basically ads some additional blocks for the Gutenberg editor in Wordpress to let you do a few other things with it.
WP Revisions Control
This lets you quickly and easily set a maximum number of revisions for each post to stop it clogging up your database on bigger sites. This plugin does have its negative sides as if you set it to only a small number of revisions then you may not be able to back up to an old version of the post if you make a mistake or something but I like it.
WP Word Count
Probably useless/nothing more than a vanity metric for most people but I use it to quickly and easily screenshot the total word count for my domains for YouTube videos/Forum/Reddit posts. Basically you click its tab and you can see the information like this as well as your monthly published content and a few other things.
Other Plugins
Although I am only using the plugins listed above for this domain I have this post going over these plugins in a little more detail as well as a few other plugins that I use for my other domains. If you are looking to set your first domain up then it might be worth checking out.
Keyword Research
I have my old keyword research method posted on Reddit but keep in mind, its three years old now and has not aged well to keep up with how modern Google works and serves its page results for a user search. It shares the same problems as the KGR method and my own personal method that I use has evolved a ton since then but if you are brand new then it might be worth checking out but I have no plans to publish a guide for my current keyword research method as its one of my best assets for moving forward.
As this domain is based around broad, informational content rather than laser-targeting buyer intent keywords like my affiliate projects, I have been having great results from the free version of answer the public due to using much broader initial terms when using the tool. It's well worth checking out as it's free and provided you are careful with your free credits, you can probably stick to the free plan to get a ton of keywords.
I am also using keyword sh*tter too as its an excellent free tool. Although I never logged the keyword source for this current project, I think that answer the public has probably produced more high search volume/low comp keywords for this new project than keyword sh*tter but when it comes to the lower search volume stuff, keyword sh*tter blows answer the public out of the water so try both out if you want to do this yourself.
I have seen so many people say that they want to outsource their keyword research and to date, I have not seen any services that actually offer good keywords. Although I made this going over a keyword research service from Fiverr, I have had similar results with other services charging much more for the keywords they sell you. In my experience, the people who are good at keyword research just outsource and article and use it for growing their own domains so don't be sucked in by flashy sales letters promising your high search volume, low competition keywords as in my experience they are far from it and a waste of money.
Content
Although I linked it earlier in the post, here is the launch content count for the domain. I basically spent two weeks or so churning out content for the project and leaving it in draft mode then published it all at once. I have nothing to back this up data wise or even a theory as to why I do it, I just prefer to have a big chunk of content on the domain when launching it.
I have chosen this parent niche as I know a few of the sub-niches within it pretty well so should be able to churn out a large amount of the content myself with ease. In addition to this, I am planning to bring a few freelance writers on to help me scale the project as quickly as possible to try and diversify my income sources between the Amazon Affiliate program and display ad networks as quickly as possible.
The majority of the articles on my other domains are usually between 1000 and 2500 words and I plan to do the same for this one. I will basically be looking at the first page of Google and checking the word counts of the keyword relevant pages already ranking and at least planning to match the word count of those pages. Different people have their own opinions on this but this will be my plan for word count moving forward.
If you are brand new to this type of thing then I think that for modern google, scaling into content is one of the best ways to get started and you should aim for something similar to what I cover in this screenshot. Although you will likely fail in a large number of the initial keywords that you target, it should put you on the right track to build out your own positive feedback loops as you move forward to improve your own keyword research and content creation methods.
Although I used to type my content directly into the Wordpress editor, I have been using the Surfer SEO content editor as it saves me a fair bit of time when prepping my articles and lets me build templates for the freelancer writers quickly and easily. Surfer SEO is far from essential for this though and I personally think that it is over prices for anyone who just uses it for its content editor. I managed to scale to $3500 a month with my current money site network without it so there's no need to run out and subscribe to it.
I have typed up millions of words of content over the years for various projects and I made this going over some of the main tips that I have picked up over the years. If you are new to blogging then this may be helpful, it’s not going to shave massive amounts of time off your content generation but every little helps and saving time on every article can quickly add up over the coming months as you churn your content out.
I also made this going over how you can easily optimize your images for your blog I would highly recommend people watch it as its one of the few things I really do wish I had known about years back. I got involved in this type of stuff back in 2013/2014 and only really started optimizing my images in January 2020 and it has managed to shave a bunch of time off my page load speeds and storage space requirements. Depending on where you source your images, it can potentially take your image file sizes from 4MB down to >100KB and takes about a minute to do per image if that. If you need sources to get images for your content that you are able to legally use then I made this going over the three main ways that I get free images for my content that may be helpful too.
Backlinks
Although I will be using backlinks for this domain, they are not essential if you are just starting and target keywords that are low enough competition. I got the project I cover here to around $350 a month without backlinks and the project I cover here to $800 a month before I started building backlinks for it. I will initially be focusing on guest posts, niche edits, and manual forum posts for this new project though, and may move into additional link type in the future with it all being outsourced via agencies.
I don’t give out recommendations for the backlinks services I use either as I was using one of the bigger services until a few months back when they tried to scam me by delivering a PBN link instead of the niche edit that I ordered that had a list price of over $300 if I remember rightly. Although it's not the main point of the video, I go over the various ways that you can check any links that you do choose to outsource in this video so you can at least double-check any links that you outsource for your own projects to see if they are just PBN links.
I know that some people like to wait a few months before they start to backlink their projects but I am planning to start backlinking right away as it worked so well for the domain that I started in August last year that made over $1700 last month. I basically use the guest posts and niche edits to pass link juice to help increase my domains strength and hopefully help my pages climb in the search results. Although the main reason for using the manual forum posts is to increase the referring domain count to my project and dilute the anchor text ratio, it does look like they can help for getting your pages to climb in the search results from some tests I did on the domain I started in August.
Also, just to be clear, these are not forum profile links where you make your profile on a niche related forum and just drop your link on your profile page for your account on the forum. These are links dropped in niche relevant threads that have a fair bit of content in the thread making them much easier to index and they tend to have a higher chance of being a do-follow link thank forum profile links too.
Budget
Current Budget Spend For The Project
As I am trying to scale this project as much as possible I am outsourcing a fair few of the tasks but this is not essential as I have typed up most of the content for my other projects myself with the two domains I mentioned above-having none/minimal link building too helping to keep their initial budget costs down. This thread on Reddit from a while back might be worth reading if you have a budget available for your project as it's from a guy asking for advice on how to spend his budget on his site. One of the users has deleted their account in the thread now though so you have to manually click on the + near the deleted account name to expand the full thread.
This video also goes over a number of different tools with the majority being free that I use to do various tasks for my money site network too. This can help you do a number of tasks without having to hike your budget spend up so it might be worth checking out too as it can keep your costs as low as possible.
submitted by shaun-m to passive_income [link] [comments]

[Month 0] Growing An Informational Intent Site To $10,000 A Month From Scratch!

Although I have been wanting to start a new informational intent-based domain for a while now, I was planning to wait until 2021 to start it but due to the new round of commission changes in the Amazon Affiliate program, I have decided to put all of my Amazon projects on hold for now as I am massively overexposed to Amazon right now. Although I managed to earn almost $3600 last month from my money site network, the vast majority of it was from the Amazon Affiliate program.
Thankfully, I only had one small site hit by this latest round of changes with it taking about a 60% hit in commissions. My other two main domains are predominantly in the “All Other Categories” section and held at a 4% commission rate. That said though, I definitely think that there will be additional cuts and changes to the Amazon affiliate program in a few years so I want to get this informational intent domain off the ground as soon as possible.
My goal is to diversify both income and traffic sources with this new domain to help reduce future risk too as I have had a number of domains slapped by Google updates in the past. It will hopefully be making most of its money from display ad networks supplemented with a number of different affiliate programs with its traffic predominantly coming from organic search traffic supplemented by Pinterest and eventually Quora with any luck.
The majority of the content I am publishing right now is based around high search volume, low competition informational intent searches to try and scale the traffic on the domain as fast as possible to be able to apply to the Mediavine ad network. After that, I will start adding more content that is more suited to Pinterest and Quora traffic generation.
Niche
Although I have chased the commissions in the past and made sites around niches I had zero interest in, over the last year or two I have gone for lower-income potential niches that I actually know more about and enjoy. So far this is working well for me as I have been able to churn out tons of content without having to put much research in as I know a large amount of the information already as my last three domains have been based around my hobbies.
Although this new domain is not based around a hobby, it is based around something where I know a number of the sub-niches that I plan to cover on the domain well. This should allow me to churn out a ton of content when I have time while also bringing on freelance writers when possible to help me scale this new project as quickly as possible to get it off the ground.
Although the niche of the domain is specific, it is very broad so I should not be running into any problems with running out of content to write about any time soon. This has been an issue for a domain that I made in 2018 as well as one in 2019 where they are hard to scale at their current stage due to having covered so much of the niche already. With this new domain, I should be able to scale it for years to come without much of an issue. Also, I don't give out the specific niche to any of my projects so don't plan to reveal the niche that this domain is in.
Starting With The End In Mind
Although I do plan to keep this new domain going for a few years yet and focus on growing it, I am trying to build the domain in a way where it should be quick and easy to sell once its traffic and income are high enough. This should give me a way to quickly sell the domain if I want in a few years without having any issues but time will tell. On the subject of selling sites, I may sell one of my Amazon Affiliate sites in a few months to fire up some cash to scale this new domain even quicker depending on how it is looking in a few months but so far I have $1000-$2000 a month for this new project for various tasks.
One of my friend's purchases sites to diversify her investing portfolio and I reached out to her for things she looks for in a potential new domain and this is what she came back with saying the first 6 are the main ones she will try to get in any potential new purchase:-
Hosting Theme CMS
Although I have been a big fan of Cloudways previously, the ease of use of Sitegounds has won me over so I have gone with Sitegrounds for this new domain as my host of choice. I have stuck with Namecheap as my domain registrar as I have used them for years and never had a problem with them to date and I like how you get free WhoIs protection with them too.
CMS wise, Wordpress was a no brainer due to having so much experience with the CMS from my other projects. The developer community behind Wordpress pretty much ensures that I always have a plugin or custom code that I can use to do anything I need with ease too.
Although I used to use Newspaper and Colormag as my go-to themes of choice, I have since moved over to Astra as it is so quick and easy to set up so I have gone with Astra as my theme of choice for this new domain too. Without the adsense code on the domain, it is giving me a page load time of around 0.6 seconds for a 2000 word article and around 2.5 seconds load time for the same page with the ad code on it.
This is the load times for a 2000 word article on the domain. The top left is Pingdom without having adsense code on the domain, the top right is Pingdom with adsense code on the domain and the bottom is GTMetrics with adsense code on the domain. GTMetrics were having issues on the day I set the domain up so I never managed to get a speed test before adding the adsense code with GTMetrics. The page sizes are different due to the compression from the autooptimize plugin covered below.
Plugins
AAWP
AAWP is a premium plugin that allows me to quickly and easily make product comparison table and link out to the items on Amazon. It also offers automatic geo-targeting for Amazon as well as a few other things but it does need access to the Amazon API so if you are brand new to this, the normal Amazon One Link system will probably be better and easier until you get your Amazon account approved and get access to their API calls.
If you are new to making affiliate blogs then I go over how you are able to make decent looking comparison tables here using free tools. If you don't have access to the API for Amazon or are on a budget for your blog then it might be worth checking out as you can make them look surprisingly good and they don't take too long to build.
Ads.txt Manager
Not a plugin that I usually use and there are a bunch that does the same thing but it basically allows me to quickly and easily edit my ads.txt file to add the different networks IDs to serve ads on my domain. As this new project is mainly going to be an informational content domain, display ads should make up a solid part of its income and I plan to switch ad networks as traffic grows so this should save me a little time in the future.
Autoptimize
One of my favorite free plugins and offers basic caching and lazy loading of images to help compress your pages and speed your pages up. It's very easy to set up and can help you improve your GTMetrix scores if you care about stuff like that while getting your page load times down. I actually purchased the WP Rocket plugin that is a premium plugin that does a similar job but refunded it and came back to Autoptimize as I personally had better results with it and its free.
Disable Comments
I’m not looking to build a community in the blog comments of this domain or attract bots/spammers so I just disable all comments on all posts with this plugin. Quick and easy and takes ten seconds to set up and can prevent a ton of heartache if you end up on some bot auto-accept bot list.
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
I use this to automatically inject the analytics tracking code for Google Analytics for my domains. Although it is easy enough to do it yourself and manually add it to your theme's header, you have to remember to re-add it every time you update your theme if you do it manually so I just use a plugin to keep things easy.
Google XML Sitemaps
I have seen mixed reports about sitemaps and if it's even worth using them anymore, I still do but it's mainly out of habit rather than knowing if Google still needs them or just crawls your domain. This plugin lets you quickly and easily build out a constant sitemap with a few seconds of adding it to your domain.
Insert Headers and Footers
Pretty sure you can use this to auto inject your Google Analytics code to your header if needed instead of Monster Insights but I have never tried it. I use it to inject the Google Adsense auto ads code to the header of my pages to show their display ads, quick and easy, and offers the same advantage of you not having to go back in and re-add it after each theme update.
Pretty Links
A few uses but the main thing that I use it for is to add place holder links as I publish my content to later turn into affiliate links on the back end once I get approved to different programs. Make sure that the TOS for any affiliate program you apply to actually allows you to do this, it's a grey area with Amazon and a few other networks so be aware of that. It also lets you quickly and easily flip your links from one network to another.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Another great tool although it is freemium but for the majority of bloggers, the 100 credits a month that you get for free should be more than enough. It basically compresses your images when you upload them and has one of the best compression systems going from what I can see. It can drastically reduce the size of your images without having much effect on the actual image quality. This means the don’t take as much space up on your hosting while needing less bandwidth to actually send on a page required letting your page load quicker too.
Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg
Made by the same team who make the Astra theme, solid plugin considering its free, basically ads some additional blocks for the Gutenberg editor in Wordpress to let you do a few other things with it.
WP Revisions Control
This lets you quickly and easily set a maximum number of revisions for each post to stop it clogging up your database on bigger sites. This plugin does have its negative sides as if you set it to only a small number of revisions then you may not be able to back up to an old version of the post if you make a mistake or something but I like it.
WP Word Count
Probably useless/nothing more than a vanity metric for most people but I use it to quickly and easily screenshot the total word count for my domains for YouTube videos/Forum/Reddit posts. Basically you click its tab and you can see the information like this as well as your monthly published content and a few other things.
Other Plugins
Although I am only using the plugins listed above for this domain I have this post going over these plugins in a little more detail as well as a few other plugins that I use for my other domains. If you are looking to set your first domain up then it might be worth checking out.
Keyword Research
I have my old keyword research method posted on Reddit but keep in mind, its three years old now and has not aged well to keep up with how modern Google works and serves its page results for a user search. It shares the same problems as the KGR method and my own personal method that I use has evolved a ton since then but if you are brand new then it might be worth checking out but I have no plans to publish a guide for my current keyword research method as its one of my best assets for moving forward.
As this domain is based around broad, informational content rather than laser-targeting buyer intent keywords like my affiliate projects, I have been having great results from the free version of answer the public due to using much broader initial terms when using the tool. It's well worth checking out as it's free and provided you are careful with your free credits, you can probably stick to the free plan to get a ton of keywords.
I am also using keyword sh*tter too as its an excellent free tool. Although I never logged the keyword source for this current project, I think that answer the public has probably produced more high search volume/low comp keywords for this new project than keyword sh*tter but when it comes to the lower search volume stuff, keyword sh*tter blows answer the public out of the water so try both out if you want to do this yourself.
I have seen so many people say that they want to outsource their keyword research and to date, I have not seen any services that actually offer good keywords. Although I made this going over a keyword research service from Fiverr, I have had similar results with other services charging much more for the keywords they sell you. In my experience, the people who are good at keyword research just outsource and article and use it for growing their own domains so don't be sucked in by flashy sales letters promising your high search volume, low competition keywords as in my experience they are far from it and a waste of money.
Content
Although I linked it earlier in the post, here is the launch content count for the domain. I basically spent two weeks or so churning out content for the project and leaving it in draft mode then published it all at once. I have nothing to back this up data wise or even a theory as to why I do it, I just prefer to have a big chunk of content on the domain when launching it.
I have chosen this parent niche as I know a few of the sub-niches within it pretty well so should be able to churn out a large amount of the content myself with ease. In addition to this, I am planning to bring a few freelance writers on to help me scale the project as quickly as possible to try and diversify my income sources between the Amazon Affiliate program and display ad networks as quickly as possible.
The majority of the articles on my other domains are usually between 1000 and 2500 words and I plan to do the same for this one. I will basically be looking at the first page of Google and checking the word counts of the keyword relevant pages already ranking and at least planning to match the word count of those pages. Different people have their own opinions on this but this will be my plan for word count moving forward.
If you are brand new to this type of thing then I think that for modern google, scaling into content is one of the best ways to get started and you should aim for something similar to what I cover in this screenshot. Although you will likely fail in a large number of the initial keywords that you target, it should put you on the right track to build out your own positive feedback loops as you move forward to improve your own keyword research and content creation methods.
Although I used to type my content directly into the Wordpress editor, I have been using the Surfer SEO content editor as it saves me a fair bit of time when prepping my articles and lets me build templates for the freelancer writers quickly and easily. Surfer SEO is far from essential for this though and I personally think that it is over prices for anyone who just uses it for its content editor. I managed to scale to $3500 a month with my current money site network without it so there's no need to run out and subscribe to it.
I have typed up millions of words of content over the years for various projects and I made this going over some of the main tips that I have picked up over the years. If you are new to blogging then this may be helpful, it’s not going to shave massive amounts of time off your content generation but every little helps and saving time on every article can quickly add up over the coming months as you churn your content out.
I also made this going over how you can easily optimize your images for your blog I would highly recommend people watch it as its one of the few things I really do wish I had known about years back. I got involved in this type of stuff back in 2013/2014 and only really started optimizing my images in January 2020 and it has managed to shave a bunch of time off my page load speeds and storage space requirements. Depending on where you source your images, it can potentially take your image file sizes from 4MB down to >100KB and takes about a minute to do per image if that. If you need sources to get images for your content that you are able to legally use then I made this going over the three main ways that I get free images for my content that may be helpful too.
Backlinks
Although I will be using backlinks for this domain, they are not essential if you are just starting and target keywords that are low enough competition. I got the project I cover here to around $350 a month without backlinks and the project I cover here to $800 a month before I started building backlinks for it. I will initially be focusing on guest posts, niche edits, and manual forum posts for this new project though, and may move into additional link type in the future with it all being outsourced via agencies.
I don’t give out recommendations for the backlinks services I use either as I was using one of the bigger services until a few months back when they tried to scam me by delivering a PBN link instead of the niche edit that I ordered that had a list price of over $300 if I remember rightly. Although it's not the main point of the video, I go over the various ways that you can check any links that you do choose to outsource in this video so you can at least double-check any links that you outsource for your own projects to see if they are just PBN links.
I know that some people like to wait a few months before they start to backlink their projects but I am planning to start backlinking right away as it worked so well for the domain that I started in August last year that made over $1700 last month. I basically use the guest posts and niche edits to pass link juice to help increase my domains strength and hopefully help my pages climb in the search results. Although the main reason for using the manual forum posts is to increase the referring domain count to my project and dilute the anchor text ratio, it does look like they can help for getting your pages to climb in the search results from some tests I did on the domain I started in August.
Also, just to be clear, these are not forum profile links where you make your profile on a niche related forum and just drop your link on your profile page for your account on the forum. These are links dropped in niche relevant threads that have a fair bit of content in the thread making them much easier to index and they tend to have a higher chance of being a do-follow link thank forum profile links too.
Budget
Current Budget Spend For The Project
As I am trying to scale this project as much as possible I am outsourcing a fair few of the tasks but this is not essential as I have typed up most of the content for my other projects myself with the two domains I mentioned above-having none/minimal link building too helping to keep their initial budget costs down. This thread on Reddit from a while back might be worth reading if you have a budget available for your project as it's from a guy asking for advice on how to spend his budget on his site. One of the users has deleted their account in the thread now though so you have to manually click on the + near the deleted account name to expand the full thread.
This video also goes over a number of different tools with the majority being free that I use to do various tasks for my money site network too. This can help you do a number of tasks without having to hike your budget spend up so it might be worth checking out too as it can keep your costs as low as possible.
submitted by shaun-m to Blogging [link] [comments]

[Month 0] Growing An Informational Intent Site To $10,000 A Month From Scratch!

Although I have been wanting to start a new informational intent-based domain for a while now, I was planning to wait until 2021 to start it but due to the new round of commission changes in the Amazon Affiliate program, I have decided to put all of my Amazon projects on hold for now as I am massively overexposed to Amazon right now. Although I managed to earn almost $3600 last month from my money site network, the vast majority of it was from the Amazon Affiliate program.
Thankfully, I only had one small site hit by this latest round of changes with it taking about a 60% hit in commissions. My other two main domains are predominantly in the “All Other Categories” section and held at a 4% commission rate. That said though, I definitely think that there will be additional cuts and changes to the Amazon affiliate program in a few years so I want to get this informational intent domain off the ground as soon as possible.
My goal is to diversify both income and traffic sources with this new domain to help reduce future risk too as I have had a number of domains slapped by Google updates in the past. It will hopefully be making most of its money from display ad networks supplemented with a number of different affiliate programs with its traffic predominantly coming from organic search traffic supplemented by Pinterest and eventually Quora with any luck.
The majority of the content I am publishing right now is based around high search volume, low competition informational intent searches to try and scale the traffic on the domain as fast as possible to be able to apply to the Mediavine ad network. After that, I will start adding more content that is more suited to Pinterest and Quora traffic generation.

Niche

Although I have chased the commissions in the past and made sites around niches I had zero interest in, over the last year or two I have gone for lower-income potential niches that I actually know more about and enjoy. So far this is working well for me as I have been able to churn out tons of content without having to put much research in as I know a large amount of the information already as my last three domains have been based around my hobbies.
Although this new domain is not based around a hobby, it is based around something where I know a number of the sub-niches that I plan to cover on the domain well. This should allow me to churn out a ton of content when I have time while also bringing on freelance writers when possible to help me scale this new project as quickly as possible to get it off the ground.
Although the niche of the domain is specific, it is very broad so I should not be running into any problems with running out of content to write about any time soon. This has been an issue for a domain that I made in 2018 as well as one in 2019 where they are hard to scale at their current stage due to having covered so much of the niche already. With this new domain, I should be able to scale it for years to come without much of an issue. Also, I don't give out the specific niche to any of my projects so don't plan to reveal the niche that this domain is in.

Starting With The End In Mind

Although I do plan to keep this new domain going for a few years yet and focus on growing it, I am trying to build the domain in a way where it should be quick and easy to sell once its traffic and income are high enough. This should give me a way to quickly sell the domain if I want in a few years without having any issues but time will tell. On the subject of selling sites, I may sell one of my Amazon Affiliate sites in a few months to fire up some cash to scale this new domain even quicker depending on how it is looking in a few months but so far I have $1000-$2000 a month for this new project for various tasks.
One of my friend's purchases sites to diversify her investing portfolio and I reached out to her for things she looks for in a potential new domain and this is what she came back with saying the first 6 are the main ones she will try to get in any potential new purchase:-

Hosting Theme CMS

Although I have been a big fan of Cloudways previously, the ease of use of Sitegounds has won me over so I have gone with Sitegrounds for this new domain as my host of choice. I have stuck with Namecheap as my domain registrar as I have used them for years and never had a problem with them to date and I like how you get free WhoIs protection with them too.
CMS wise, Wordpress was a no brainer due to having so much experience with the CMS from my other projects. The developer community behind Wordpress pretty much ensures that I always have a plugin or custom code that I can use to do anything I need with ease too.
Although I used to use Newspaper and Colormag as my go-to themes of choice, I have since moved over to Astra as it is so quick and easy to set up so I have gone with Astra as my theme of choice for this new domain too. Without the adsense code on the domain, it is giving me a page load time of around 0.6 seconds for a 2000 word article and around 2.5 seconds load time for the same page with the ad code on it.
This is the load times for a 2000 word article on the domain. The top left is Pingdom without having adsense code on the domain, the top right is Pingdom with adsense code on the domain and the bottom is GTMetrics with adsense code on the domain. GTMetrics were having issues on the day I set the domain up so I never managed to get a speed test before adding the adsense code with GTMetrics. The page sizes are different due to the compression from the autooptimize plugin covered below.

Plugins

AAWP
AAWP is a premium plugin that allows me to quickly and easily make product comparison table and link out to the items on Amazon. It also offers automatic geo-targeting for Amazon as well as a few other things but it does need access to the Amazon API so if you are brand new to this, the normal Amazon One Link system will probably be better and easier until you get your Amazon account approved and get access to their API calls.
If you are new to making affiliate blogs then I go over how you are able to make decent looking comparison tables here using free tools. If you don't have access to the API for Amazon or are on a budget for your blog then it might be worth checking out as you can make them look surprisingly good and they don't take too long to build.
Ads.txt Manager
Not a plugin that I usually use and there are a bunch that does the same thing but it basically allows me to quickly and easily edit my ads.txt file to add the different networks IDs to serve ads on my domain. As this new project is mainly going to be an informational content domain, display ads should make up a solid part of its income and I plan to switch ad networks as traffic grows so this should save me a little time in the future.
Autoptimize
One of my favorite free plugins and offers basic caching and lazy loading of images to help compress your pages and speed your pages up. It's very easy to set up and can help you improve your GTMetrix scores if you care about stuff like that while getting your page load times down. I actually purchased the WP Rocket plugin that is a premium plugin that does a similar job but refunded it and came back to Autoptimize as I personally had better results with it and its free.
Disable Comments
I’m not looking to build a community in the blog comments of this domain or attract bots/spammers so I just disable all comments on all posts with this plugin. Quick and easy and takes ten seconds to set up and can prevent a ton of heartache if you end up on some bot auto-accept bot list.
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
I use this to automatically inject the analytics tracking code for Google Analytics for my domains. Although it is easy enough to do it yourself and manually add it to your theme's header, you have to remember to re-add it every time you update your theme if you do it manually so I just use a plugin to keep things easy.
Google XML Sitemaps
I have seen mixed reports about sitemaps and if it's even worth using them anymore, I still do but it's mainly out of habit rather than knowing if Google still needs them or just crawls your domain. This plugin lets you quickly and easily build out a constant sitemap with a few seconds of adding it to your domain.
Insert Headers and Footers
Pretty sure you can use this to auto inject your Google Analytics code to your header if needed instead of Monster Insights but I have never tried it. I use it to inject the Google Adsense auto ads code to the header of my pages to show their display ads, quick and easy, and offers the same advantage of you not having to go back in and re-add it after each theme update.
Pretty Links
A few uses but the main thing that I use it for is to add place holder links as I publish my content to later turn into affiliate links on the back end once I get approved to different programs. Make sure that the TOS for any affiliate program you apply to actually allows you to do this, it's a grey area with Amazon and a few other networks so be aware of that. It also lets you quickly and easily flip your links from one network to another.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Another great tool although it is freemium but for the majority of bloggers, the 100 credits a month that you get for free should be more than enough. It basically compresses your images when you upload them and has one of the best compression systems going from what I can see. It can drastically reduce the size of your images without having much effect on the actual image quality. This means the don’t take as much space up on your hosting while needing less bandwidth to actually send on a page required letting your page load quicker too.
Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg
Made by the same team who make the Astra theme, solid plugin considering its free, basically ads some additional blocks for the Gutenberg editor in Wordpress to let you do a few other things with it.
WP Revisions Control
This lets you quickly and easily set a maximum number of revisions for each post to stop it clogging up your database on bigger sites. This plugin does have its negative sides as if you set it to only a small number of revisions then you may not be able to back up to an old version of the post if you make a mistake or something but I like it.
WP Word Count
Probably useless/nothing more than a vanity metric for most people but I use it to quickly and easily screenshot the total word count for my domains for YouTube videos/Forum/Reddit posts. Basically you click its tab and you can see the information like this as well as your monthly published content and a few other things.
Other Plugins
Although I am only using the plugins listed above for this domain I have this post going over these plugins in a little more detail as well as a few other plugins that I use for my other domains. If you are looking to set your first domain up then it might be worth checking out.

Keyword Research

I have my old keyword research method posted on Reddit but keep in mind, its three years old now and has not aged well to keep up with how modern Google works and serves its page results for a user search. It shares the same problems as the KGR method and my own personal method that I use has evolved a ton since then but if you are brand new then it might be worth checking out but I have no plans to publish a guide for my current keyword research method as its one of my best assets for moving forward.
As this domain is based around broad, informational content rather than laser-targeting buyer intent keywords like my affiliate projects, I have been having great results from the free version of answer the public due to using much broader initial terms when using the tool. It's well worth checking out as it's free and provided you are careful with your free credits, you can probably stick to the free plan to get a ton of keywords.
I am also using keyword sh*tter too as its an excellent free tool. Although I never logged the keyword source for this current project, I think that answer the public has probably produced more high search volume/low comp keywords for this new project than keyword sh*tter but when it comes to the lower search volume stuff, keyword sh*tter blows answer the public out of the water so try both out if you want to do this yourself.
I have seen so many people say that they want to outsource their keyword research and to date, I have not seen any services that actually offer good keywords. Although I made this going over a keyword research service from Fiverr, I have had similar results with other services charging much more for the keywords they sell you. In my experience, the people who are good at keyword research just outsource and article and use it for growing their own domains so don't be sucked in by flashy sales letters promising your high search volume, low competition keywords as in my experience they are far from it and a waste of money.

Content

Although I linked it earlier in the post, here is the launch content count for the domain. I basically spent two weeks or so churning out content for the project and leaving it in draft mode then published it all at once. I have nothing to back this up data wise or even a theory as to why I do it, I just prefer to have a big chunk of content on the domain when launching it.
I have chosen this parent niche as I know a few of the sub-niches within it pretty well so should be able to churn out a large amount of the content myself with ease. In addition to this, I am planning to bring a few freelance writers on to help me scale the project as quickly as possible to try and diversify my income sources between the Amazon Affiliate program and display ad networks as quickly as possible.
The majority of the articles on my other domains are usually between 1000 and 2500 words and I plan to do the same for this one. I will basically be looking at the first page of Google and checking the word counts of the keyword relevant pages already ranking and at least planning to match the word count of those pages. Different people have their own opinions on this but this will be my plan for word count moving forward.
If you are brand new to this type of thing then I think that for modern google, scaling into content is one of the best ways to get started and you should aim for something similar to what I cover in this screenshot. Although you will likely fail in a large number of the initial keywords that you target, it should put you on the right track to build out your own positive feedback loops as you move forward to improve your own keyword research and content creation methods.
Although I used to type my content directly into the Wordpress editor, I have been using the Surfer SEO content editor as it saves me a fair bit of time when prepping my articles and lets me build templates for the freelancer writers quickly and easily. Surfer SEO is far from essential for this though and I personally think that it is over prices for anyone who just uses it for its content editor. I managed to scale to $3500 a month with my current money site network without it so there's no need to run out and subscribe to it.
I have typed up millions of words of content over the years for various projects and I made this going over some of the main tips that I have picked up over the years. If you are new to blogging then this may be helpful, it’s not going to shave massive amounts of time off your content generation but every little helps and saving time on every article can quickly add up over the coming months as you churn your content out.
I also made this going over how you can easily optimize your images for your blog I would highly recommend people watch it as its one of the few things I really do wish I had known about years back. I got involved in this type of stuff back in 2013/2014 and only really started optimizing my images in January 2020 and it has managed to shave a bunch of time off my page load speeds and storage space requirements. Depending on where you source your images, it can potentially take your image file sizes from 4MB down to >100KB and takes about a minute to do per image if that. If you need sources to get images for your content that you are able to legally use then I made this going over the three main ways that I get free images for my content that may be helpful too.

Backlinks

Although I will be using backlinks for this domain, they are not essential if you are just starting and target keywords that are low enough competition. I got the project I cover here to around $350 a month without backlinks and the project I cover here to $800 a month before I started building backlinks for it. I will initially be focusing on guest posts, niche edits, and manual forum posts for this new project though, and may move into additional link type in the future with it all being outsourced via agencies.
I don’t give out recommendations for the backlinks services I use either as I was using one of the bigger services until a few months back when they tried to scam me by delivering a PBN link instead of the niche edit that I ordered that had a list price of over $300 if I remember rightly. Although it's not the main point of the video, I go over the various ways that you can check any links that you do choose to outsource in this video so you can at least double-check any links that you outsource for your own projects to see if they are just PBN links.
I know that some people like to wait a few months before they start to backlink their projects but I am planning to start backlinking right away as it worked so well for the domain that I started in August last year that made over $1700 last month. I basically use the guest posts and niche edits to pass link juice to help increase my domains strength and hopefully help my pages climb in the search results. Although the main reason for using the manual forum posts is to increase the referring domain count to my project and dilute the anchor text ratio, it does look like they can help for getting your pages to climb in the search results from some tests I did on the domain I started in August.
Also, just to be clear, these are not forum profile links where you make your profile on a niche related forum and just drop your link on your profile page for your account on the forum. These are links dropped in niche relevant threads that have a fair bit of content in the thread making them much easier to index and they tend to have a higher chance of being a do-follow link thank forum profile links too.

Budget

Current Budget Spend For The Project
As I am trying to scale this project as much as possible I am outsourcing a fair few of the tasks but this is not essential as I have typed up most of the content for my other projects myself with the two domains I mentioned above-having none/minimal link building too helping to keep their initial budget costs down. This thread on Reddit from a while back might be worth reading if you have a budget available for your project as it's from a guy asking for advice on how to spend his budget on his site. One of the users has deleted their account in the thread now though so you have to manually click on the + near the deleted account name to expand the full thread.
This video also goes over a number of different tools with the majority being free that I use to do various tasks for my money site network too. This can help you do a number of tasks without having to hike your budget spend up so it might be worth checking out too as it can keep your costs as low as possible.

Moving Forward

I am planning to keep this domain as my primary focus for the foreseeable future and will be posting monthly updates on Reddit for it while also doing my regular weekly vlogs on my YouTube channel to log the progress of my full money site network as well as sharing other tips and tricks and stuff as I move forward too.
submitted by shaun-m to u/shaun-m [link] [comments]

8 Tips That May Help To Speed Up Your Blog!

8 Tips That May Help To Speed Up Your Blog!
This is actually a reply I made to a question over on Quora a few days back but I wanted to share it here too as it might be helpful to some people. I have only copy and pasted my replay over from Quora and then readded the relevant images/videos. Also, I accidentally deleted the original images so I have had to use the ones from Quora and their compression is not the best so they are a bit distorted but they still serve their purpose. The people on Quora seem to be browsing about a potential hobby rather than actually taking part in it some this is not meant as an extensive guide but it may still help some people.
https://preview.redd.it/i2piizlgy7z41.png?width=602&format=png&auto=webp&s=d5d109496c6f532dc2de8bdb7a1df205076809c7
The image above is the page load time for one of the pages on one of my affiliate blogs from the free GTMetrix site speed checker. As you can see, the page was fully loaded in less than 0.6 seconds so I hope that these insights will help anyone else looking to improve their page load times on their own blogs too. There are a number of steps that you can take and although you don't have to implement them all, the more that you implement with your own blogs the faster your own blog pages are likley to load for a visitor.

Hosting

One of the quickest and most effective things that you are able to do with your blogs to help improve your page load times is to get your domain hosted on a better hosting provider. So many people new to blogging go with services such as Bluehost and Hostgator that are all owned by EIG as so many other bloggers recommend them in their getting started guide for bloggers.
Unfortunately, both companies are pretty bad and are usually only recommended by these bloggers due to them having high affiliate commissions. There are much better and faster-hosting companies out there that you are able to use that usually offer much lower commissions than the EIG hosting companies so not many people promote them.
At the time of writing, my money site network is split pretty evenly with half being hosted on Cloudways and half being hosted on Site grounds. Although both have very similar page load times once your blog has been taken through the steps below, I feel that Sitegrounds is currently the better option as it is so user friendly and even if you are brand new to blogging, you should be able to easily set the package up and get it going with ease.
One little side note that I would highly recommend that you do during your hosting set up is to try and ensure that your domain will be on a server cluster as close to your primary target audience as possible. For example, I target the English speaking markets and with the USA being the highest population English speaking market, I try to ensure that my domains are hosted on server clusters in the USA. When setting your hosting package up, it is usually easy to do this and it's usually just a drop-down option where you select USA as your server cluster.
Taking this simple step can help improve your page load times as the server will be closer to the majority of your audience so when the request a page from the server, the data has less distance to travel. Although it may only save your 0.1 of a second, every little helps and it all adds up as you add the following steps below.

Image Optimization

Next up has to be image optimization and I go over my full process on how I optimize my images for the fasted possible load speeds in this video. Depending on the quality of your image, you can sometimes take an image that is 4MB in size down to less than 100KB when optimized correctly. If you have multiple images on your blog posts then this can actually end up shaving a surprising amount of time of your page load speed.
Although I do into a little more detail and show live examples in the video above, the basics of the process is as follows:-
  • If you are using Wordpress as your blog's content management system then resize the image before uploading it to your blog. The majority of modern versions of Wordpress will be able to natively load an image that is 1200px wide or less. If you are using an old version of Wordpress though, its native image loading may still be restricted to images that are 768px wide or less.
  • Prior to uploading your image to your blog, upload it to a free image compression service such as tinypng.com as it can drastically reduce the file size of your images without sacrificing the image quality.
  • Have the shortpixel plugin installed on your Wordpress blog prior to uploading your image. Although this is a freemium plugin, the free 100 credits a month should be enough for most people and it can further reduce the image size in addition to the improvements tinypng made.
This will ensure that all of the images on your page are as small as possible while still offering excellent image quality to anyone viewing them. As you can potentially be reducing the file size of every image on your blog post by over 97.5% by running them through this process, it can drastically improve the load times of your content while the process to optimize them can be done in less than 30 seconds with ease.

Theme

Using a theme that has been specifically designed for speed is another quick and easy step that you are able to implement to further reduce the page load speeds of your blog posts. I used the slow and clunky colormag and newspaper themes on my domains for years but I recently made the switch over to the free version of the Astra theme and I won't be going back.
Although I haven't actually used the OceanWP theme myself, I hear that it is just as fast as the Astra theme so it might be worth checking out too. Both Astra and OceanWP have been optimized for speed and had all of the things that slow a Wordpress theme down removed from them to keep your blog posts loading as quickly and easily as possible.

General Plugins

The plugins that you use on your domain can also end up slowing your page load speed down. Due to there being so many plugins that all do different things, it's hard to make a list of what is likley to slow your blog down. The easiest way to see if you are having issues with this is to probably use the free GTMetrixs page load speed checker and use their Waterfall tab shown by the red arrows in the image below.
https://preview.redd.it/9awn3ka108z41.png?width=602&format=png&auto=webp&s=1f24222f01da45ca0101b1a9216325e6b83859de
This will allow you to see the name and load times of the various things loading on your blog page. If you see any that are names of the plugins that you use then it might be an idea to play around with finding an alternative plugin that has been optimized for speed.

Caching Plugin

A caching plugin can be hit or miss in my experience and there is no need to go off and pay for a premium, paid plugin such as WPRocket. I have tried WPRocket previously and it actually ended up causing my blog posts to load at a slower speed than some of the free alternatives.
Although there are a number of blog posts that you are able to use to cache your blog, I personally use the Autoptimize plugin. I have tried the majority of the other caching plugins out there and nothing has been as easy to set up or as quick as Autoptimize to date.
You will likley be able to set Autoptimize up in less than a minute and get >80% of the speed benefit that it can offer you. If you want to get that final 20% then you can spend time playing with the plugin but I just set and forget it with the following settings in the plugin.
On the “JS, CSS, & HTML” tab I have the following options turned on:-
  • Optimize JavaScript Code.
  • Aggregate JS-files.
  • Optimize CSS Code.
  • Aggregate CSS-files.
  • Also aggregate inline CSS.
  • Optimize HTML Code.
  • Save aggregated script/css as static files.
  • Minify excluded CSS and JS files.
On the “images” tab I just turn on “Lazy-load images” as I prefer to manually do the ShortPixle stuff myself but you can tick that box if you wish.
https://preview.redd.it/vztx3cwb08z41.png?width=602&format=png&auto=webp&s=2ae56204bf4e4363dd3461b832b9341f871d82d4
https://preview.redd.it/e4tjhubg08z41.png?width=602&format=png&auto=webp&s=875003f96bddc98da56a705fdcb2dc6c4eba8fcd
The two-speed tests above are from the exact same page on one of my domains, the first one is will the Autoptimize plugin turned off and the second one is with it turned on with the settings as I covered above. As you can see, it helps to shave off around 1.3 seconds of load time and takes less than a minute to set up.

Display Ad Code

As you may have noticed in the two-speed tests images in the section above, even when optimized, the page comes in with a 2.3 second load time. This is much slower than the 0.6 seconds in my first image in the answer and I have intentionally done this. The images are both from different domains, the 0.6-second image is based around affiliate marketing and the 2.3-second image is from a domain-based around display ads.
Even when fully optimized in every way, a blog that has display ad code running on it will always be slower than a blog without. This is due to the page having to request the ads to serve from a third-party server, then render them, and display them before the page load is complete. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, there is no way to optimize this and reduce the time it takes for the third-party ad server to serve the ads.
Keep in mind, different ad networks also have different ad code running with some ad networks having reported load times of well over 10 seconds per page! From what I can tell, Adsense, Mediavine, and Adthrive seem to be the more optimized display ad networks and will likley have the fasted page load for your blog if you do have to use display ads.

Content Delivery Network

In theory, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) should be able to speed up your blog page load times but the benefit of this will depend on the location of your hosting server cluster and the location of the page request. A CDN is basically a network of third-party servers that will store all of the media on their servers that are located all around the world. When your blog gets a page request, the CDN then sends the media on the blog page to the user from the closest server to them rather than from your blogs actual server.
This can be hit and miss in my experience, especially if you are using a free package for a CDN. In my experience, the free packages often slow your domains down rather than speed them up and if you optimize your images as explained above and ensure you have a plugin with lazy loading turned on such as Autoptimize your blog will likely be fine without actually needing a CDN anyway.

Limit API Calls

If you are an affiliate marketer and using something like the Amazon Affiliate program then you are not able to use the images from the Amazon domain on your own blog posts unless they are pulled in real-time via their API. This goes for a number of other details about the products too so I would highly recommend that you look to limit the amount of API calls to the Amazon server is possible.
Each call can add time to your blog page load speed and slow you down and most of the time, there are workaround available. For example, if you are using the API call to pull and image from Amazon to show in your blog post, find an alternative image on a royalty-free stock photo site such as Unsplash, optimize the image as I covered above and then upload it to your blog and use that instead.
By taking this simple step I have shaved more than three seconds off the page load times for some of my affiliate posts. On some of my more recent affiliate posts, I don’t use any API calls at all as you are usually able to avoid using them without issue anyway.
submitted by shaun-m to u/shaun-m [link] [comments]

quora api testing video

Browse 19+ Free Public APIs for Developers APIs available on RapidAPI.com. Top Free Public APIs for Developers APIs include Open Weather Map, Google Translate, Yahoo Finance and more. Sign Up today for Free! Restful-Booker. Skills Learned: API Automation Restful-booker an API that you can use to learn more about API Testing or try out API testing tools against. Restful-booker is a Create Read Update Delete Web API that comes with authentication features and loaded with a bunch of bugs for you to explore.The API comes pre-loaded with 10 records for you to work with and resets itself every 10 ... An API or Application Programming Interface is a set of programming instructions for accessing a web-based software application. There are mainly 4 methods involve in API Testing like GET, POST, Delete, and PUT. We need to check response code, response message and response body in API Testing. I have used the below tools for testing SOAP and REST API’s 1. SOAP UI 2. Postman 3. QTP/UFT: In this case, we wrote code in VBScript to test a SOAP based webservice. We did not use the Webservice Addin as that would have added to the cost for the... Postman is a scalable API testing tool that quickly integrates into CI/CD pipeline. It started in 2012 as a side project by Abhinav Asthana to simplify API workflow in testing and development. API stands for Application Programming Interface which allows software applications to communicate with each other via API calls. This is the Definitive Guide to Do API Testing in 2020. Yes, I’ll cover the most important topics of API Testing from start to end. This guide is for any Software Tester or Test Automation engineer who is looking to learn What is API testing How it is done at enterprise level using CI/CD. Testing an API with PUT requests. Testing an APIs PUT methods is very similar to testing POST requests. But now that we know the difference between the two (idempotency), we can create API tests to confirm this behavior. Check for these things when testing PUT requests: Repeatedly calling a PUT request always returns the same result . In this connected world there are so many APIs at the offering and even more clients consume those APIs. More applications are being designed as State Machines using the "Code on Demand" principle of RESTful architectural style. This way applicati... Postman offers a comprehensive API testing tool that makes it easy to set up automated tests. You can aggregate the tests and requests you’ve created into a single automated test sequence. Run and manage your test workflow from the Postman app, Postman monitoring, or from the command line with Newman, Postman's command line tool. Quora API. Connect the people who have knowledge to the people who need it, to bring together people with different perspectives so they can ... Read More Classification. Q&a. Classification. Q&a. Facebook API. Helps developers build, grow and monetize their business. ... Read More Social. Webhooks.

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