I am trying to be a successful internet marketer for the past 2 years. To be honest I have had very little success in these two years. The maximum I have earned is $30 per month from one of my sites. That was due to an increased traffic as I had tried adwords cpc. In my journey, I have read many IM forums, websites such as warriorforum, blackhatworld and watched multiple youtube videos seeking more information. The more info I digested, the more things I tried. However, without having big extra money to spend, one is handicapped to try out new strategies. And if one invests time and money in tools and research that is not guaranteed to work. I will just list out some things from my journey.
I purchased few domains out of which one was already blacklisted by Google which I got to know after I added it to webmaster tools. (So learnt that a new domain name needs to be checked for its previous history). There is no tool I have found which can say with certainty that the site is manually or algorithmically penalized by Google.
I have usually written unique articles myself and made sure no spun content is used. Again hiring writers costs money. However, there is no guarantee that unique quality content will get higher ranking just by itself. I have seen total junk content ranking on pages one and two.
Link building is a must for quality content to get ranking. I read on various forums that blog commenting, forum posting, article directories does not work anymore. Spamming with GST or other scrapers definitely does not work anymore. In addition, sudden spikes during link building might raise red flags. Also removing bad quality spam links is a big task and takes many months with the help of Disavow tool. Therefore, I abandoned a domain, which had many spam links. Then guest posting takes time and again you need to write quality content if you want to submit to authoritative sites. You article may or may not be accepted. There are hardly dofollow blog comments.
Then I learnt that only relevant quality backlinks will work in the longer run. I have read some people are building multi tiered linking system. Tier1 > tier2 > Tier3. That again requires money and time. Many site owners buy authority expired domains and redirect them to their sites. I want to know that does it work? Has anyone tried it? Good quality expired domains are like diamonds, extremely hard to find. All of them are taken by big domaineers in auctions as soon they are dropped. They then resell them at higher prices. I purchased some expired domains from Fiverr which turned out to be extremely spammed. I got to know that DA/PA can be faked just like PR by adding thousands of links. Many big domaineers have large scale scraping tools that run on cloud platforms with high RAM, CPU resources. That leaves our tools like scrapebox with limited computing power look small.
Then has anyone tried PBN? It seems many PBN services have been banned. Again, you need good domains with good profiles for building domains. That again costs money and time which leaves a small time IMer disappointed and disoriented