Middle PHP Developer

After the end of cooperation with Revieweek.com, I took up custom website development again, gradually gained clients, but at some point I realized that it’s not for me at all. To keep my pants on – fine, but it’s wildly boring to develop diverse and uncomplicated sites for completely different clients, constantly looking for new ones and supporting old ones in parallel, while my experience and ambitions have long outgrown the tasks that arise in the framework of such cooperation. As a result, I stopped all this and went into the development of my own multifunctional template for WordPress, which I am currently engaged in, and which I am ready to turn into a hobby, if I meet an interesting job for me in an affiliate team or an affiliate network related to SEO and traffic websites.

For me it was the first conscious experience of working as an employee. Before that I avoided getting into a structure where I have a boss, but here everything matched up so that I agreed – an interesting long-term project, inspiring tasks that correspond with my vision of a quality website for branded traffic. When I came to the project – it was just a small review site on a slightly modified template. During three years of work we completely redesigned the entire engine, developed from scratch a lot of new and finally successful functionality, implemented multi-lingualism, parsers, various integrations, our own system of reviews and dynamic review tables, and much more. At some point, the tasks started to run out and we paused our collaboration. A year later, we made another iteration of several months, during which we implemented a number of improvements.

My brainchild, which grew out of the experience of creating and promoting my own medical websites with SEO traffic. Over three years we developed and refined a work scheme from scratch, where we were intermediaries in placing advertisements from big pharmaceutical brands on near-medical content sites. On the one side – we built a small sales team and negotiated contracts, on the other side – we scouted for webmasters and assembled a network of over 3000 traffic sites. As the volume of deals grew, we started to have problems in traffic purchasing due to long postpayments from clients, solutions to which we managed to find after the business was closed. I certainly do not regret the closure, as the most interesting thing for me during all this time was to develop various application tools for our needs (internal CRM, analytics system, variouss and inter-service integrations for automation), and now I realize that it was just another stage on the way to becoming a programmer in the niche of affiliate marketing.

A small utilitarian project that gradually created three plugins to simplify content sites and increase revenue. The first were plugins for searching and posting photos and videos directly from the WordPress admin, which significantly saved the budget for article publishing. The flagship was the Custom Advert Blocks plugin, which allowed to place various advertising formats directly inside the content, with deep settings for targeting and A/B testing, which in the end allowed to increase profits from both teaser networks and affiliate programs after a couple of days of simple project configuration. Here I did not act as a programmer yet – I did not have enough experience for such developments. For my part I provided the logic of the plugins and promotion among the community, the plugins themselves were made by freelancers, and of course now I have a lot of questions to their code and approaches. I regret a bit that the project was maintained with the left heel of my right foot in parallel with others and was eventually abandoned, but it gave me experience in creating and selling my own digital products to a highly specialized audience. Just through word of mouth did the project manage to generate significant profits.

At some point I got in touch with investors who gave budgets for content creation for new information sites, which resulted in a significant increase in the scale of content production, search and selection of hundreds of authors on the ETXT exchange (the profile still exists), and development of variouss to automate the process. In order not to stop the speeding up car, for several years I provided content services to other webmasters, which gave me interesting experience in packaging my own product, as well as in working with high budgets.

As soon as I started making my first websites, I started receiving orders for development. This, in principle, has always been the main driver in my evolution – it opened doors to related projects, and also brought profit. I started with HTML, then discovered Joomla and other forgotten CMS. At some point I got to WordPress, made a blog, through which I joined the movement of money makers from that time, started making content sites, and so on…. In parallel, in the last years of university I created two online stores with partners, which we lifted from scratch and successfully sold, and I have almost completely moved away from trying to do anything related to retail. Except for the idea of opening a bookstore, which I did open in the center of Moscow in the Chekhov Library, and I closed it as a delivery point for Internet orders from large delivery services. During this period, I was rather trying to determine what was mine and what was not mine, biting into it, trying it out. Something worked out, something not so well, but it all gave me a certain experience, which in one way or another is still useful today.