Do you want to know a little more about me? The truth is you should talk to a specialist to have yourself checked out, because it’s not normal…
Who Is Julio Rodríguez Cruz
[FOTO TO XULA]
That’s me above, yes, I know, but it’s too early to fall in love with me. Wait until you know a little more.
What you need to know about me is that I can be a very serious person and a minute later be the most absurd person you’ll ever meet. That’s why it’s normal to find content of mine where, while explaining something serious, I throw jokes in the middle.
On the other hand, I’m a person who likes difficult and complex things. I like challenges and I get bored by the everyday. Anyone who knows me knows that if they want my help it has to be something interesting; if it isn’t, I don’t care about the money you can offer me.
Experience in the Online World
I’ve been doing things online for a very long time, so long that many of the things I did or learned are no longer useful for anything (for example, I was an expert in php-nuke).
I’ve been programming since the year 2000, although clearly as a complete hobbyist, and since around 2005 I’ve been doing everything that today takes a whole department: systems administration, marketing, SEO, blackhat, design… Thanks to that, though, I learned what I like and what I don’t.
Doing many things doesn’t mean doing them well.
Programming
I started programming very young, at 10 years old, and I’ve always learned on my own, although today I do watch courses on YouTube, Platzi or wherever there’s a good teacher.
Above all I like testing the capabilities of languages, since I believe every project has an ideal programming language. But always backend-oriented; I don’t like the front end very much.
In web programming, which is what I like the most, I’ve gone through many CMSs, such as php-nuke, nuke et, dedalus… honestly, those experiences were incredible.
When I was working on nuke-et/dedalus, I was a kid, and people noticed and treated me terribly. The nuke-et programmer, Rolando Caldas, without knowing it, was one of the people who shaped my future by helping me.
An incredible moment in my life was, in my twenties, meeting him in person and finding out he’s from the same city as me.
Systems Administration
I learned this the hard way: servers went down and nobody helped, and back then I had no money for a systems administrator.
When I started to have money for a systems administrator, I realized that most of them know the bare minimum and the good ones don’t have time for me, so I had no choice but to learn it myself.
Over time, I started to enjoy it, since every time it was a bigger challenge. Between attacks, DDoS, huge projects, I honestly earned a master’s degree in systems administration without knowing it. Today, I’m obsessed with controlling servers.
In my youth, like many other kids, I set up servers for Counter-Strike, WoW, Mu Online.
Day in, day out, it was a huge battle of DDoS attacks and other types of attacks. As they say, I learned the hard way.
SEO
I’ve lived through many eras of SEO, and honestly it amuses me to see talks from 2013 being repeated in 2023 as if they were new. In my opinion, SEOs complicate SEO more than it really is.
My beginnings were on forobeta, and for a few years I was one of the most active users they had. Besides, I have a drive to help, so most of my answers were meant to help.
Between me being young and the administrator Carlos Arreola not being the friendliest person in the world either (although I have to say that today I understand his behavior better, given what a pain people can be), I ended up requesting the deletion of my account and messages and leaving for foro20, a forum I was building with Jose Marquez (actually, I had a blackhat forum and foro20, and we merged them).
In that era I learned SEO because, honestly, in my opinion it was very easy. I had my 20 websites linked with 50 links in the footer.
My Naruto sites, anime, music, song lyrics, dream meanings, etc. All of them grew and easily got huge traffic. Since then I’ve taken a pile of Google updates that wiped my sites out.
Easily, since I started, I’ve built more than 1000 websites (I’ve bought more domains than I’ve used…). For a while I built websites to sell them; in another era I bought websites to optimize them…
In SEO, what I like and what I focus on is the technical side. Making the site load well, having no errors, and having everything monitored (keywords, etc).
Content writing, keyword research, link building and so on, I usually delegate, because it isn’t something I enjoy.
It’s fine to base yourself on other people’s projects/actions, but you must always add your own touch/differentiation.
A good example was the how-to-hack site by chuiso: 90% of people built “how-to-hack” sites instead of understanding the concept and doing something different.
Marketing
Marketing is one of the things I put the least effort into and the one I should put the most into. I have a website with a huge amount of Google traffic, but even more people come in directly by URL (branding).
What appeals to me most within marketing is email marketing, but I’m quite reluctant to work on it because I think it’s being abused by the rest of humanity… These days having an email account is pure suffering with so many emails.
My liking for email marketing started when a friend let me tinker with the email in his online store, which had an open rate below 10% with more than 10,000 subscribers.
I started using the typical tools like Mailchimp, but I soon realized I needed to program everything myself. The mailing list began turning into 100 sublists until I created “Tags” and started sending emails based on conditions on those tags.
An example: if I sell coffee and I know a bag lasts roughly 1 month for 2 people, at 3 weeks I send an automatic email with a discount (this boosted sales a lot). Then we realized we were also sending it to people who bought 3 bags, and we had to send them the message in 3 months.
From there we went on to create tags for the emails too (what they were about and what they contained) and we even gave experience points to the links (if they click through to the product, the article, etc.), which were added to the user’s tags.
Over time, the open rate was 80%~90% and the click rate always exceeded 70%. Of course, out of those 10,000 we were left with around 1,200. But over time the list kept growing and the percentages held, so the path was set.
BlackHat
Honestly, blackhat defines a lot of what I like most, and it amuses me to see people inventing terms like “gray-hat”. I always say, even if you just put the tip in, it’s in…
I don’t do it the way I used to when I did BlackHat, but I remember the “beginning” with a lot of nostalgia (in quotes, because I was already doing it but didn’t know it was called that).
Only a fool says that BlackHat is illegal. It may go against a company’s terms, but it doesn’t have to be illegal.
During my foro20 years, we had a group where we carried out genuine blackhat actions that generated a lot of money and fun.
For me, the basics of blackhat would be automating content (whether by translating, scraping or with AI), automating link building, buying expired domains and even manipulating CTR or social media interactions.
For example, I recently played a small prank on Rubén Alonso that got out of hand. Simply, when he saved tweets, I sent them a huge number of views (100k or 1M). The thing is that this spread to several influencers and I had to cut the joke to avoid false information.
On the other hand, I’ve always liked automating publishing. I still have very powerful automated Telegram channels that have been running for years (they’re not deal channels!).
I always try to automate or create bots for any new platform: LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. Right now, what’s working really well for me is TikTok.
Blackhat is a term with many subterms; not everything has to be shady techniques like hacking sites to insert links, cookie stuffing, etc.
Would buying links be considered blackhat? For Google, yes…
More About Me
Have you made it this far? Well, now you can fall in love…
I’ll leave you some links so you can follow me on my social networks and we can stay more connected. But remember, follow me only on the Internet.