Charles Floate

20 Years Old, British, Internet Marketing Consultant.

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You are here: Home / Me / Before I Got “Big” & The Mistakes That Got Me There

Before I Got “Big” & The Mistakes That Got Me There

June 29, 2016 by Charles Floate 18 Comments

Before I Got “Big” & The Mistakes That Got Me There

This post is a bit more of a story post, giving you some background to how I grew my career and hopefully some help with learning experiences and mistakes I made for your career.


I recently did an interview with LionZeal –

In this interview, I talked about my “rise” to popularity, and how I grew my SEO business from nothing.. This lead several people to have a ton of followup questions about starting out and the best ways to go about it. I thought I’d elaborate on this and tell you exactly how I got big, and some lessons I (and others) learned along the way.

This post isn’t just for those in the SEO space, it can be translated to almost any industry or internet entrepreneur that’s just getting started. I made a LOT of mistakes (as everyone does) along the way.. and it’s what molded my career.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Before we get into it, I just want to give a big shoutout to James Gregory in this post, James is someone I started mentoring back in 2013 and has become a powerhouse in the industry, now dominating international casino terms.

Table of Contents

  • 1 Starting Out
    • 1.1 Adsense Sites
    • 1.2 YouTube Monetizing
  • 2 Agency Job
    • 2.1 Upgrading Positions
    • 2.2 Leaving
  • 3 Doing My Own Thing
  • 4 Thanks For Reading

Starting Out

In my early teens I met Todd, who’s been my SEO mentor.. An ex-rugby playing British friendly giant, I met Todd on some underground gaming forum where he was re-selling Fiverr backlink packages for 3 times the price, with huge success.

We got to talking via Skype, I bought some links off him and played some video games together before eventually getting into 2 business ventures. The rewards seemed like fortunes to bedroom dwelling high school students.

Adsense Sites

The first venture we did was adsense sites. Coming up with longtails (120 to 880 MS Keywords) of pop culture references such as (and this is one of the legitimate sites we made) “Harry Potter Tattoos” – You’d be surprised to learn that a $150 auto-generated site, with an SENuke blast back in the day could earn hundreds of dollars, each, per week… We were making too much money, and had too many sites for Google to ever want to ban us in their growth era.

I bought my first high spec gaming PC, invested in a Starcraft 2 clan (which I eventually sold to one of the biggest gaming organizations in the US) which won several tournaments in the UK and in online EU tournaments.

As I faded away from the SEO scene and more and more into video games, I started making YouTube videos for fun. I quickly gained a few hundred subscribers, pumping out a new video a day within a month I’d hit over 300,000 views and in 2011 – 2012, monetizing YouTube views was worth a LOT more than it is now.

YouTube Monetizing

I brought Todd in and we started a fresh channel. We started off by making a few of our own videos, whilst in the backround hiring “directors” of other gaming channels with 200 – 5,000 subscribers to make videos for us. Mostly other teenagers who’d be happy to get $5 – $30 per video, we could then translate that into thousands and tens of thousands of views, getting us a 200 – 800% return, whilst also growing our own subscriber count and brand.

YouTube kept on changing things and the site grew at an exponential rate, whilst the technology to deliver the content become cheaper and as such, the commission you got paid on ads fell.

We decided to quit the YouTube business, right around the time I got kicked out of school.

Agency Job

So my Mum screaming at me, my teachers saying I was throwing my life away by not going to school and a fat cheque from adsense sitting on my desk.. I sat down, looked on Gumtree (the equivalent to Craigslist) in the UK for some jobs local to me, applied for several, got interviewed at all of them and chose a company pretty close to me.

I needed to have money, whilst learning SEO again, properly and access to tools that’d costs hundreds, if not thousands of pounds.. Per month.

I spent the next few months reading every moment I could, I even got the #1 commenter on Moz that year. Whilst I was learning, I spent time implementing small OnPage changes and new link building techniques I’d learn on the clients I was given, to great success.

Upgrading Positions

After I saw a post by Matthew Barby on the Moz blog, I PM’d him to organize a meet as I noticed he worked in the same area as my office. We met up for what seemed like 30 mins, and was actually more like 2 hours.. He offered me a position at the agency he was working at (where he was the manager) and I accepted his offer, and jumping aboard a new ship about a week later.

I spent a lot of time learning how to do outreach, using tools like BuzzSumo and BuzzStream, whilst also showing Matt some of the more black hat stuff as well – It was a good mix.

I then met a guy called Kennan Clark, New Yorker, has an agency on Broadway who showed me how to do spam (properly) and we started creating these vast link building campaigns to go after keywords for all sorts of things – At one point we were ranking #1 for “new york seo”, “buy twitter followers”, “buy instagram followers”, “SEO UK” and a bunch of other terms, all within a weeks work. We just out linked people.

I then got influenced by Matt’s posts on Moz to start writing my own, more detailed posts. I already had thrown together a few pieces on the GodOfSEO.co domain, after following Matthew Woodward’s how to build a blog tutorial. So I decided to hire a developer to re-design the site, and started staying up until 4am to work on blog posts.

Note: Something that James Gregory suggested in my Facebook group:

james gregory

I could of very easily done something along these lines with both of the agencies I left, but it wouldn’t of been a student becoming the master moment now, would it?

Leaving

My blog quickly outgrew the income I could make at an agency, and with my JVs with people growing and some family stuff happen, I decided it was time to leave the agency life and go it alone.

I wrote my E-Commerce guest post on Matt Woodward’s blog within the first 2 weeks of leaving, and it was an instantaneous hit. I signed on several new clients, all over £1k/month and found new people to partner with, whilst also growing an audience to my blog.

Doing My Own Thing

It was from here that I could of made a lot better options.

I should of stayed laser focused on one thing, instead of trying to do a whole bunch of stuff at once – Run a small, cheap SEO course, selling a PBN link service, offering client SEO, consulting and JV’ing with too many people – This meant I became laid back in what I could actually accomplish.. I wasn’t anywhere near the level of what I am at now, because now I do “block focuses” – I spend a set amount of time working on a particular task, 1 week, for example, may be dedicated to creating a load of blog posts, the next could be videos and course or info product content, the next an affiliate site and so on.. It means you get a lot more ROI from the time you input, and you become very well known for specific things and a higher quality of work.

Note: You can have a read of my productivity hacks here:

How I’m So Productive

I had a slip up for just under a year in which I wasn’t allowed to work due to being under investigation for hacking offences, and once I came out the other end, didn’t have much capital.

What I did have though, was an increased ability at writing (as I’d spent a LOT of the internet ban, writing my thoughts out in Notepads) and a knowledge beyond anyone else – I literally had people printing out every article they could find for SEO and reading them, I’d read 30 posts a week, on A4 sheets of paper.

I came back, and initially started writing blog posts to get my traction back. I then offered consulting services to gain some initial 100% capital and invested ALL of it into affiliate sites. I grew those, and wrote a premium eBook whilst blogging throughout December to continually grow my audience – One thing I wish I had done, was setup some kind of guest posting campaign as since being back I haven’t done a single guest post.

My eBook flew off the shelves, quickly doing over 100 copies and I decided whilst working in the background, I’d invest all that money into a full blown course. Once I had shell of the course completed, I opened it for pre-orders and had my developers working around the clock to make it the best it could be, whilst promoting my site as much as possible and doing ad campaigns to grow my email list – Which has grown by over 10,000 people in just 7 months time… Blog post?

I slowed down my consultancy, cut down the number of sites I owned and invested my earnings into growing out the select few sites I did have in a really white hat way – They’d gotten to where they were (thousands or tens of thousands per month) the black hat way, and I wanted true, long term passive income… So I started deleting PBN links and doing content marketing campaigns, and infographic submissions *hint, hint*

And there we have it… We’re all caught up with where I’m at, and where I came from.. I hope this gave you a few helpful tips along the way and enlightened you on my own experiences.

Thanks For Reading

I hope you enjoyed this post, it’s a bit different from what I normally put out. I have a TON of content on the way though, so stay tuned and make sure you join my email list below.

Drop a comment with your experiences, either if you’re just starting out yourself or have been in the game for a few years already.

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18 Comments on "Before I Got “Big” & The Mistakes That Got Me There"

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Ken Clark
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Ken Clark

Charles Floate whyd you leave out the part about how we started working together? Thats very funny in and of itself lol.

My old partner and i had an agency site ranking locally in New York / nyc for alot of top terms using very black hat tactics and he actually exposed them all on a thread on blackhatworld. Knowing that was a place that googles webspam team spends time i tweaked out and tried to figure out who was outting us. Four hours later, a guy jumps on the live chat on my site from the UK and starts telling me how obvious my blackhat links were and how he easily found them all as well as the sources for said links. Some shit talking and name calling ensued and frustrated at my own inability to type my shit talk fast enough to keep up with the 17 year old super shit talking typist i told him to call me. 30 minutes more of back and forth shit talking on the phone and i asked him to help us with our projects haha. We then launched a crappy seo reviews site and ranked it internationally for all the top seo terms for about 9 months. He followed suit in the UK – ranking nationally after working with us on it and our clients for a time. Ever since, i have tried to get charlie to partner in an agency but i just cant seem to lock him in. 🙂

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1 year ago
Charles Floate
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Charles Floate

Haven’t left it out now that you’ve commented 😉

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1 year ago
John Vanderlaan
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John Vanderlaan

Hey Charles,

Great post my friend. It’s good to know that other people make mistakes as well.
I find it interesting that you are going white hat with the websites that you value, and I love the hint about infographics. That has been one of my top link building strategies if late.
Thanks again Charles for confirming that it is never all roses and those who perservere all have something in common.
Best,
JV

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1 year ago
Charles Floate
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Charles Floate

Thanks John, glad you enjoyed it 🙂

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1 year ago
Shane
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Shane

Class post mr Floate

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1 year ago
Sam
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Sam

Motivating and enlightening. I’m close to getting my first website to page 1. Once it does, the possibilities are endless.

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1 year ago
Carlos Polanco
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Carlos Polanco

A lot of Golden nuggets here, the main thing is to focus on one thing at the time. When you are doing a lot of things by yourself you tend to make mistake and get a crappy finish product or even slow down the results. SEO is not easy so don’t feel stupid if you don’t make a lot of money the first year or so.

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1 year ago
Charles Floate
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Charles Floate

Completely agree 🙂

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1 year ago
Matt Davison
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Matt Davison

Been following you since godofseo days but still didnt know the full story. I really liked the video with Daryl but this kinda puts all the pieces together.

Big things still to come im sure. Thanks for writing this

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1 year ago
Charles Floate
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Charles Floate

Thanks Matt, yeh, got a lot in store yet 😉

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1 year ago
Woz Giffin
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Woz Giffin

Hi Charles, been following you for the past few years mate and find your stuff not only incredibly useful and actionable, but also quite inspirational. Thanks man 🙂

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1 year ago
Charles Floate
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Charles Floate

Thanks man, glad you’ve enjoyed it – More to come!

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1 year ago
neveeve
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neveeve

Is there a way to work for some digital agency online? I’m good at SEO but pretty much broke because I lost 20k$ in my last venture and SEO is not free traffic anymore everything requires money. What would you do Charles? Would you search online for some agencies and accept to work for $2000-3000?

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1 year ago
Charles Floate
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Charles Floate

If it gives you the capital to go it alone, then definitely.

You can be a VA online for an agency, but you won’t be paid as highly as internal staff.

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1 year ago
Andrew
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Andrew

Good share Charles – for someone so young I’m impressed. I see you doing some cool shit in the years to come.

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1 year ago
Charles Floate
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Charles Floate

Thanks Andrew 🙂

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1 year ago
Igor Buyseech @ SEOPRO.si
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Igor Buyseech @ SEOPRO.si

Hey Charles,
thanks for sharing your story. I will keep mine shorter but to the point 🙂

2008 – 2 weeks before the crisis started i quit college and started my first business (own brand of martial arts gear sold direct or via online store)

2010 – closed shop eventhough I made decent money, but saw that my meazly adsense and affiliate sites I ve made started making more than 10$ per day and it was time to scale.

2011 – February – Making barely 4 figures a month…met my GF….she obviously inspired me for greater things and in 6 months I ramped my income to 5 figures monthly and 400+ adsense/affiliate sites.

2011- GF leaves and 2 weeks later all my adsense sites are deindexed and went to 0$ per month overnight (ON MY BIRTHDAY! <- no joke)

2012 – got back together with my GF (still together today :D) and got into client SEO..started from nothing and ramped it up with 30-50% yearly growth,

2016 – Adding Payper call / Pay per lead tactics in the US market for a high paying niche and if all goes well hopefully finishing out this year with 5 figures monthly again.

Ups and downs anyone? 😀

Sincerely, Igor

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1 year ago
Charles Floate
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Charles Floate

Awesome Igor! Sounds like you’ve been threw the ups and downs of a true SEO! Happens to the best of us.

Good luck with your 2016 goal, I’m sure you’ll achieve it.

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1 year ago
ABOUT ME
Charles Floate
I'm a 21 year old SEO consultant from the UK. I run an E-Commerce SEO Agency & a small affiliate site empire. This is my blog, where I cover everything from online marketing strategies & tutorials to movie & product reviews.
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