About This Site
If you are anything like me you have probably looked at a lot of websites and brought a lot of different products, trying to find a way to make some decent money online.
It is easy to get caught up by the hype. We search around for the “magic bullet”. We all know that it doesn’t exist but that doesn’t stop us searching anyway. We waste a ton of time and money following directions that ultimately lead to dead ends.
It is a vicious circle of frustration – buy something, try it for a day or two (or maybe not even try it at all), then get distracted by the next “big thing”. There is always something different coming along to grab your attention.
Time to face facts – the shortcut, the magic bullet, the push button method – doesn’t exist. The sooner you accept this the more likely you are to succeed.
Getting back to basics, recognising what is hype and what isn’t, focussing on a plan of action and sticking to it – that is what this website is about.
About Me
My name is Johnno and I live in Australia. I’m not going to tell you my age, but lets just say I’m old enough to remember when computers were as big as a room and used punched cards for input!
After getting a degree in science I started my working life as a chemist in a lab and a few years later I ended up getting a job as a forensic scientist. This was a bit like CSI on TV, except in Australia the forensic people don’t have guns and don’t go out chasing the bad guys – we stay in the lab and leave all the dangerous stuff to the police!
Believe it or not even forensic work gets boring and I became fascinated with PCs and Windows and the whole personal computer revolution. Once the internet took off I decided that I was sick of working 9-5 and quit the forensic job to become self employed as a computer/IT consultant. I worked for various small businesses doing anything that related to computers and IT – websites, computer and software installation, accounting, quality assurance etc etc.
Because I had more spare time I started getting interested in the whole “make money online” thing. I spent literally years dabbling in this and that without much success. I never got sucked in to spending huge amounts of money on “guru” products – I’m too “tight”, plus I had this nagging feeling that if it sounded to good to be true then it probably was.
The only thing I had some moderate success with was Adwords/Adsense arbitrage – buying cheap clicks using Adwords and sending them to pages full of Adsense ads. However Google killed that off after about 12 months, so I pretty much gave the make money online thing away as too hard for me.
Around this time the blogging craze started and I began using WordPress to build some websites for clients. I became hooked on WordPress, and I started visiting the Warrior forum to see what opportunities this whole blogging thing might offer.
Anyway, to cut this long story short I got right into creating niche WordPress sites to make money (predominantly with Adsense). However I am always looking for shortcuts – I mean, efficiencies – and I began to try out different methods of auto blogging to increase the earning potential of the sites I was creating.
After about 2 years of trying different auto blogging systems and strategies I came up with my own method which gave a good combination of results from not too much effort. In order to cut down the learning curve for other people I documented my system as the Advanced Auto Blogging Blueprint – this is the document I wish I had access to when I started niche blogging!
I also decided to start a blog – Advanced Autoblogging – to document my investigations and discuss developments in the field of auto blogging.
Everything was going along nicely until early 2012 when the Google Panda and Penguin updates hit. Income from my niche sites dropped approximately 50%. Not one of my sites was de-indexed though, but most of the exact match domains I had lost their page one positions. Long tail search traffic was still strong because I had built out most of my sites with heaps of content (the autoblogging part).
This has caused me to refocus away from specifically autoblogging towards more general internet marketing, which brings us to this blog – Sure Know Something. The aim of this blog, as described by the tagline KNOW & TELL, is to “tell it like it really is”, and not be an affiliate link stuffed cheerleader for whatever happens to be the latest flavor of the month.
Feel free to join in and I hope we can help each other to make some money from this wonderful thing called the internet.