What's the best way to get started?

[xetsu]

So its been a long time since I've been around. I had some very, very mild success with adsense back in 2009, didn't really take it seriously, launched some sites, think I made like 2 dollars or something. Other things were happening at my life at the time and was kind of distracted by a bunch of social stuff (senior year is pretty distracting).

Fast-forward to now, I've made some good money doing other stuff online, not related to internet marketting, just some random stuff I've delved into. Looking around a lot of forums and websites and such and IM is still going strong and turns out a lot of people are using it to live semi 4 hour work week-style lives, Some are using to set up business and develop authority, and others are just kind of on the edges making thousands a day off loopholes and unknown strategies. Interestingly though, words like PPC, conversion rates, and SEO have entered common lexicon.

Anyways, I've heard SEO has gotten significantly more complex and the competition has increased a lot, but at the same time many new avenues have developed because of Social media and such (since 2009 at least) So my question is, where should i get started?

I'm not asking where is the best way to make money. No, Im asking where should I start? PPC? Adsense? affiliate? make my own product? Amazon? whats relatively newb friendly and straight forward? I don't mind if I dont make bank, I just wanna get back in the groove and start getting some motivation by picking the low hanging fruit first.

 

[AdamC]

if you're not bothered about making money, why not just get started with something that matches your skill set?

 

[sk4rlet]

I've been making a solid amount of money doing relatively nothing for SMBs... a lot of local. A little organic. I've got Yelp's number. I'm really tired of all of it though, and I have a habit of thinking really far ahead which keeps my head on straight; building real businesses is what the big girls and boys do, and I'd argue a humble, experienced marketer, is the best kind of founder.

I'm personally studying networks (+ eating up CRO content), and as a result I'm first studying buying expired domains for the time being. I don't see myself getting past this for at least another month or two, it's a very in-depth topic. My huge girl brain is sucking up ccarter and friends copy 24/7 on flat out network building info though. This stuff is super interesting, super exciting, and really it's not all that hard.

Go find hobbster's and ccarter's and the other experts' posts on building long-term networks/brands/authority sites. Everytime you get stuck, stop reading and go learn until you can keep reading. And write your thoughts down... in a notepad, a blog, or whatever - it's all incredibly helpful for your memory... god knows there's enough subtleties! You learn all the other things along the way.

Execute, babe.