My Story

Hey again, Thanks for visiting and taking time to read My Story. My hope is that by providing transparency and chronicling what I am doing that it might help others on the same journey trying to find an income online, not just an income but a reliable and stable income. Making money online is definitely not hard, but making stable life changing income is the goal. Again, my name is Steve Miller owner of Protectorian as well as many other websites online.

I have been a technician since the before the internet. I have had access to the internet long before most people even heard of it. My first exposure to the internet was when a friend of mine was doing civilian contracting to repair electronics for the military and the would post the availability of repairs on the net. At that time there was no AOL. We dialed in with a direct line and acoustic modem to access the internet. There was no Google so you had to use web crawlers or gophers to find something online. If you know what Lycos is, well it was even before that.

Anyway move into the future, I first got involved on ebay mostly as a buyer at first, and I found that there were some real problems for buyers on ebay”trust” at the time from fraudulent sellers. So I began looking for a way to investigate these sellers and how to file a complaint, well I couldn't find anything so I decide to build my own resource and called it AuctionBlacklist.com . In a big way this Site was what got me interested in Internet marketing, that was 1999. I shut the site down in 2008. But what caught my attention was that a little banner on my site that was adsense, made me about 80 bucks per month. The website taught me a great deal about SEO and adsense. Since my website was in the top 25 thousand site online. I had as many as 3 million visitors at times. The site ended up being linked to from over 50 thousand websites, newspapers, television stations, etc. However, that being said, I wanted to know How to make money with the site. So I spent the next 8 years trying to figure that out. So Maybe this will help you guys to know, what I learned. So here is what I learned about SEO, internet marketing, and more;

Negative content will not make you money legitimately. You can make money with negative content if you are willing to be unethical. That is why you don't see alot of negative content sites. The only real way to make money with negative style content is if you are willing to black male people to remove them from the site. Plus I discovered something else. Advertisers will advertise with you just so they can attempt to control your content. So if you have a website that prints real Legitimate content then someone will target you to get rid of it or try to black male you with it. So you are probably wondering what does this have to do with internet marketing, well it unfortunately it has everything to do with it. If you attempt to have a balanced website where you really review products, then people will start attacking your website, your content, and will stop allowing to review there products, and on and on…. So that is why you don't see real true reviews of internet marketing products, because you will be pushed out of the internet marketing community. I learned this because 10 years of experience running a website that primarily focused on fraudulent sellers and buyers on ebay. I can't tell you how many threats I got, including calls to my home. Although I have a very strong will and don't really pay attention to threats, it still consumed my time, and made my days less fun. Remember one thing, People who are willing to make strong wild accusations, those claims are usually come from guilty people. Anyway, negative content even as simple as negative reviews are not the way to go unless you want a difficult path.

So Providing a website with Genuine true reviews of internet marketing products will eventually get you band from the community.

Since Auctionblacklist.com I have built hundreds of websites, html, css, dxthml, java, flash, .net, vb. wordpress. jquery, etc. mostly as a hobby and mostly for friends family and occasionally for business owners. But I knew that it wasn't going to be an answer to long term income. Because building websites is just another job and takes time.

I also made money selling on ebay. My biggest year was in 2008, I made 80k but I was also working an 60 hour a week job on top of it. So I quit that year because I was burned out and I knew i couldn't keep it up. I made upwards of 90k per year working, so ebay was not a job replacing income for me.

Also Made money building adsense websites between 2008 and 2013. It didn't make me rich but it was hands off income. I would build a site and the site would generate income from either google adsense or from some affiliate income associated with a specific topic. None of my sites had anything to do with internet marketing. I had sites in dozens of niches, construction plans, kids charts, fish, ecigarettes, etc. some of these made some pretty good money. But like everything stuff changes.

So once I started working back in radio in 2011 until 2015 I was too busy to do much work online. I still built websites and still kept up with the internet marketing materials, just buying internet marketing products and reading them. But what I found trending in 2018 began to really bug me. I really kept up with what was happening online, not just junk from other internet marketers but reading google, facebook, and other global websites and the news channels. This is probably why I have always I stay ahead of the trends. One thing to note, the more you know about the business world then the more you know about the internet. Historically the same exact things happen online that also happen in the real world, they just happen a hundred times faster. I knew that amazon would be the next big thing back in 2008. I won't bore you with my history with that but I also knew that the real money on amazon would only last just a few years, because the same thing has happened over and over again, and that is as soon as internet marketers get a hold of something they destroy it. That's what is happening to amazon. I could show the the trends for what takes place, but again I don't want to waste anymore of your time. In Short You have to be the first in a winning solution to make any real money after that only the crumbs are left for the rest. Another words if you wait, you loose. Because the competition kills it. Now that being said, that doesn't mean you can't revive something that has been dead for awhile.

This is off topic a little bit but I feel it might shed some light on things. I use to buy products for resale on ebay. Something that was really trending. What I would do is wait until the top buyers were selling it like wild fire and then I would wait for that trend to start slowing down, because that ment all that inventory that those sellers had, well… they would have to get rid of it while they could and I would buy it up. Then I would wait a couple of years until no one else was selling it, and I would start selling it again, and double my money at least sometimes alot more. You may not thing this is true in every market but  I did something similar in real world also with out dated computers and I quadrupled my money. Every market has these type of trends, you just have to know what to look for. I know what's coming next….. Would you like to Know ? stay tuned !

You will only really understand it if you are actually investing your time and money into a business, like ebay, and then you discover all the problems, loop holes, and the winners and losers. But you will see trends that parallel the real world. The problem with the internet vs the real world is it happens on line in a blink of an eye vs the real world where it takes months or even years for those same affects to impact your business.

So, I predicted the amazon slam back in 2008, so here is my goal and why for 2019/20. I know I am not some big guru or some genius but trends are obvious if you know what to look for. So as along as facebook doesn't go bankrupt or google or youtube don't change, or some new social network doesn't take all the traffic from them the future is pretty predictable or some war doesn't start. But here comes my warning; EMAIL is going to be the next big deal this year. I know you probably thinking that is just another re-hash of the past and that maybe but be Warned in 2020 there is going to be a good reason. If you don't have a list, email, or facebook or google pixel retargeting list, or something that allows you to collect customers on a list you control, you will be in trouble. In 2020 email laws are going to change in a really big way. Internet marketing will be for ever changed, and so if you aren't building the number one thing that all marketers use to make money, then just like amazon, ebay, facebook, foursquare, and myspace, the end of email marketing is coming. Email will still be possible, it just will not be cost effective, it will take longer and cost a lot more.

Now you are probably saying what do you mean Google isn't dead, facebook isn't dead, so on and so on. They are dead for Most Of Us Normal Non Guru's and here is why, if you can't sell a product and make a profit easily and make a huge margin, then you have no chance of starting a new business and getting up and running and being in profit. So for a newbie to start using Google or Facebook ads to generate revenue… forget it… No reasonable solution there. However, the free traffic methods still work if you know how. Here is an example; at one time google ads were cheap and you could place an ad for pennies and get thousand of people to your ad and make lots of sales,  now it costs dollars and if you don't make a sale within the first 30 people, you lose money. That's why retargeting is popular, because you have to keep paying for ads to keep your product in front of the same person over and over again.

So right about here you are saying this isn't My story, but that's where you are wrong, Becuase this is where my story is heading. From adsense, ebay, cpa, affiliate marketing, website sales and now email.

Well. That's why I started this blog, is to hopefully allow people to follow what I am doing and to see my results. I will be posting various attempts about what, where, when and how to find a reasonable path to making a stable online income.

Ponder this, What do you think is going to be a gold mine in 2020, better than gold in fact…. If you said Email lists retargeting lists, etc, you would be right. Although I am not sold on retargeting and I will tell you why, you don't actually own the list, again its' controlled by the pixel creator, facebook, google, etc. Plus I have had no luck using retargeting. I know that everybody swears by it, but here the 2 problems I see with it and have experienced. 1. I first pay for traffic, then I pay for that same traffic over again, and over again. 2. The retargeting traffic I have used has not been cheaper but rather more expensive. Maybe I am wrong or just don't know what I am doing, but I tell you email is free, well technically it's not free but its alot more free than retargeting.

So I have spent from 1999 until today involved in making money online, but I have never built an email list. That's the Journey I will be on this year. If you want to follow along on my journey then subscribe to my email list. If you subscribe to my email list you will also be grandfathered into my membership area of this site. In the beginning there may not be much in the membership area, but over time I tend to develop software and purchase a great deal of white label stuff that I will make available to my members. Plus I will be posting special posts in the members area that will provide solutions to problems I have run into in my journey. Solutions that I won't be posting in the public area.

Yes this has the purpose of developing my email list. Keep in mind, I hate spam, and I really hate those guru's that when you unsubscribe, that just means they put me on a different list.

I will not be selling your email, I will not spam your inbox.

When I owned AuctionBlacklist.com I had offers to sell the website for lots of money to 2 different buyers. I refused to sell the site and just shut it down and here is the reason why, EMAIL. All the posts in my database had email addresses attached to them. hundreds of thousands of emails, and if I sold the website those emails would have been apart of the sale and I rather just shut down the website rather than sell someones email address. I will treat your email with all the respect I want someone to treat my email address.

Now that I have said that, let me tell you, what you can expect. I will use your email to contact you and update you when I post something on the blog, maybe not in every case, except for the membership area posts, I will likely send out an update for the membership area. I will send out informational emails, updating you on things that I feel are important in the internet marketing arean and Finally I will be sending out emails that carry affiliate links and products for sale weather they are affiliate products, CPA, or even my own. There are 2 reasons why…. Remember when I said you won't find true review sites well, when I find a product I do like, I will review it and send out a notice to you. I will send out CPA and other affiliate product offers, not just because I want to make money, but I feel if I am using something in my business that is really making a big difference and or I have found a product I really like then my endorsement of that product and letting you know about it, well…. that's the whole point of being on my email list, Isn't it????

One Disclaimer here. Unlike Auctionblacklist.com where I had a specific privacy policy to protect the email of those who signed up to my database, I will NOT be offering the same thing here. Even though I will never sell your email address as a list to another person, I might choose to sell this website in the future. I am not saying that is the point but I will likely want to get out of this business at some point and I will sell the email address database as a part of the sale of this website. The reason being, is this is an investment of my time and my money to build this, and I hope I will be offering a great deal of value to my customer base, and any buyer will may choose to purchase this site will hopefully carry that on.

So, at any rate please join me in my continuing Safe Journey To Earn While I learn.

Steve M