Rabbit holes, is just me figuring things out, and the method I choose, is to reverse engineer things I find interesting, and I would like to document the process so I might come back and develop a tutorial of what I actually learn, so that said here is the format.
Pick a site, or topic to rip apart
Document the path taken and resources to get there
Record any lessons learned
Now most, if all the blog sites you will see, have already done this, and then packaged it to sell in some way shape or form... but I think there is value in making mistakes, why? So you don't make the same mistakes, so lets dive in with Rabbit Hole #1
step one, we enter the rabbit hole, but how did we find it? Using bing to look at the weather, as Microsoft so apptly puts it at the bottom of every window, we see this:
Harvard law professor calls for SCOTUS to keep 'astoundingly dangerous' Trump on state ballots (msn.com)
And although if you click on this, you may not see the same thing, Up pops an Ad, on the right hand side, and elswhere in the news feed, for this company, digital- reedom, ok great.
So why am I seeing this ad ? Click the little arrow in the bottom right corner, and it will take you to Microsoft Ad page, and clicking throught a few banners you see:
Microsoft partners with Xandr, a Microsoft company, and third-party providers to display personalized ads on MSN, Outlook.com, and other websites and apps. Microsoft also delivers search ads to Bing and our search syndication partners. To learn more about Microsoft privacy practices, read the Privacy Statement. You can learn more about personalized ads from Yahoo and Xandr in the  Yahoo and Xandr privacy statements.
digging deeper, what the heck is Xandr, and whats the deal with these "Syndicate Partners" so lets have a look at Yahoo, and Xander? down the hole we go...
https://www.advertising.yahooinc.com/ - seems like a good place to start
and the first thing we see is yet another unexplained accroym..
DSP - https://www.adjust.com/glossary/demand-side-platform/ ok its demand side platform, what the heck is that ? The short answer, it helps to create an ad and distribute on multiple platforms. Ok, lets stop here for now, so what is Xandr?
another advertising platform, similar to Yahoo... oh, but this one gets your ads on Netflix? End of the path for now, but lets come back later. Back to the top...
So when you click on the ad, you get a pop up box, called a Call For Action Form, offering you guessed it... "Free Training". This training is all to do with one of our favorite subjects "Affiliate Marketing", but we're not concerned with the product, we just wanna know how to sell it. Save to assume, digital freedom has used one of these ad platforms to promote its product, hense we see it as an ad in Adchoice, or Adsence depending on what browser you are using.
How did we see this pop up? The site is using an email marketer called
And there are lots of these, of which we will have to explore at a later date, but these services take care of email campains, landing pages, and help to create ads, but for the most part, are becoming built in to platforms such as Wix, and Wordpress. I have used getresponse and mailchimp.
So now, lets disect the site. Once you connect, we want to see how it was built, looks kinda cool so first scroll to the bottom of the Home page, you will see "Proudly pwered by Sydney" ok who is Sydney... not a who... a what.
Sydney is a Wordpress Theme, and you can read about it here, so now we know the site has been developed in WP, as many are.
Last but not least, we right click anywhere on the screen and scroll thru the HTML, and what is revealed is a lot of links that have wp-content in the middle, so again this tells us it has been developed using the WP platform, and we can also see a lot of the plug-ins used on this site.
Lessons Learned:
So our next step might be to get a hosting platform that uses WP. Download the Sydney Theme, learn everything there is to managing and building a site with WordPress, and replicated what the author has done.
Then create an Ad campain using one of the 2 plaforms above and see how it works. On to the next Rabbit Hole.
So today we learned:
what is a DSP, and how to use it
what is Sydney
what is Aweber and how is it used
how do we get ads out into Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, and Netflix
one example of what can be created using WP, and the various plug ins
How long did we spend: Total time to reasearch and document 2.5 Hours.
Oh, and the site that we searched on? Complete bullshit. It leads to a common get rich quick training course set up by two buffoon con men, and it isn't free.