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Read First: This is a 2,500 word autobiography about what led up to my internet marketing career. It’s really just a [true] story for entertainment purposes. There aren’t any great tips in here, just some insight into what indirectly affected what I do on the internet today. I don’t talk about any other aspects of my life (social, sports, school, etc) but rest-assured, they do exist. I tried to be as accurate as possible, but I surely left some stuff out, remembered some stuff wrong, and got some dates slightly off. Please forgive me

When I first started this blog, I decided not to talk about my “upbringing” as an internet entrepreneur. I called that story “boring” on my about page and skipped right over it. However, I have realized that I love reading stories, and I’m sure you do too, so I have decided to tell you my tale. Hopefully you can get a better idea of who I am and how I got where I am today as well as take away some tips and/or motivation from it.

Ages 6 to 12, 1992 to 1998: Discovering Computers

From the day my dad brought home our first computer (DOS menu as the main OS, Windows 3.1 as the experimental OS, dot matrix printer, and no CD-ROM drive) I was hooked on it. I was only about 6 years old, but I would quietly spend hours late at night figuring out how to do all kinds of things on my own. Most of my interests were in video games at that time though (mostly consoles), so I didn’t really do anything too productive.

Then came our 56k modem and a slew of internet service providers (yes, including AOL). At this point, still being into video games, but mostly just liking the challenge and satisfaction of figuring things out, I got involved with downloading *stuff*. As anyone who has done this can relate to, download emulators and old school video games (Playstation and N64 were the new game systems at this time) for the first time is extremely fun. I used to get enjoyment just looking through the Sears Christmas catalog at video game box art, but now I could download any game I had wanted to play but never got a chance to.

I also bought HTML for Dummies somewhere around this time, but it was all too new to me and I couldn’t comprehend exactly what was going on (I was probably 8 or 9 years old). I did experiment with creating some simple websites on GeoCities though. I can’t really remember too much from this aspect of my web development progress, probably because it was too on and off to really piece it together anymore.

After that came broadband, and with broadband came the power to download a lot more data. Instead of playing outside all day while waiting for a 10MB demo to download, I could now download full CD-Rom games and Movies instead. I would get all this stuff from private “FXP forums” which were kind of like the private Bittorrent trackers of today. The members of these forums would basically “hi-jack” public FTP servers that allowed anonymous access and upload lots of goodies to them. Then they would post the contents and connection details in the forum. The other members would then look through the threads and download what they wanted before the files were deleted.

I decided that I wanted to be the leader of one of these sites, so I set out to figure out how.

Age 13, 1999: Trying To Build Websites

Having dabbled in graphics editing, 3D modeling, HTML, and websites for a while now, I felt that I could create a website with a purpose. Because I didn’t remember much from reading HTML books as a 9 year old, and since WYSIWYG editors were popular at the time, I did some research and purchased one from Staples. (I tried to find the name of it, but it’s long gone from my memory)

Anyways, WYSIWYG editors didn’t offer a whole lot of control, and being a slight perfectionist, I couldn’t stand working with them. I went back and forth trying to learn HTML and trying to come to terms with my visual editor before I finally found the answer to all my problems: Macromedia (Dreamweaver and Fireworks).

With these programs, and the desire to create emulator/rom download sites and FXP community sites, I began understanding how everything fit together. How custom graphics were made, sliced into separate images, and coded into HTML templates. I also found out that you can make money from the internet.

Ages 14 to 15, ‘00 to Summer ‘01: Ah-Ha Moments & First Online Successes

This time period was my first experiment with making money online through CPA and CPC. I only ever saw about $200 of my commissions, because some of the networks I worked with allowed incentivized clicks and ended up going out of business.

The first domain I ever purchased, the first site I ever designed and built from scratch, and the first site that I ever got traffic to was FreeDreamcast.net (that link is the final version of FDC.net, it’s all that Archive.org has). The Sega Dreamcast was new at the time and was extremely easy to “hack”. You could essentially download a CD image (ISO) of a retail game, burn it, and play it. There was virtually no copy protection. The first version of this website set out to capitalize on just that. I would get the FTP details from those private forums I spoke about earlier and post them on my website for the general public. I wasn’t really doing anything illegal because I was just posting text instructions, no links and no hosted files.

On this page, I also posted a few different sweepstakes CPA offers from ComissionJunction that allowed incentives. They ony paid about $0.35 per signup, but that was good for the infant online-CPA industry. I simply asked my visitors to sign up for these offers if they liked my website… and many people did. A couple months later, I got a check from CJ for about $200 and thought it was the coolest thing ever.

For one reason or another, this model didn’t work out, and I decided to recreate my website. I did some research and ended up using my commissions to purchase UltimateBulletinBoard which was hugely popular at the time. I made a few friendships through this website and we quickly attracted about 1,000 active members. Not a lot by today’s standards, but it seemed like a lot to me at the time. On this message board, all of the members contributed the FTP server details from around the web (as opposed to just me posting them). We built quite a close-knit community, then the Dreamcast died (Sega stopped production).

We were faced with the decision of staying with our current domain name, or becoming a universal, invite-only file sharing forum. We chose the latter and out of that came IsoManiakz.com (no Archive.org available) in the Summer of 2001. We even decided to become early adopters of the current forum champion, vBulletin. However, by this time, I was getting tired of the shady “Warez” and “Roms” markets, so I was really nothing more than a webmaster. I did the design and coding for the vBulletin skin and let the moderators handle everything else.

Ages 15 to 17, Summer ‘01 to Christmas ‘03: The Turning Point, Learning Programming

In July of this summer, my family planned a trip to Myrtle Beach, SC, but being a typical computer-interested teenager, I didn’t really want to play on the beach with them. I spent my time on the lobby internet computer checking on IsoManiakz, playing my GameBoy Color to beat the current Zelda game, and sitting by the pool reading Sam’s Teach Yourself C++ In 21 Days.

I wanted to learn C++ so that I could do my own game programming, but I didn’t have any previous programming experience, so making games was way out of reach. I think it was actually quite helpful for me to jump right into C++ (an industry standard language for professionals) though, because it forced me to learn difficult concepts like memory stacks and object oriented programming. This made other programming languages like HTML (especially), PHP, ASP, and JavaScript an absolute breeze.

After getting a grasp on basic computer programming fundamentals, I decided to form a partnership with my real-world friend to start a custom computer company… just like AlienWare. We were really into computer parts at the time and loved to read about them, go to small trade shows, and just plain experiment with them. I knew we needed to have a parts database (MS Access was all I knew about), but I didn’t know how to do database programming, so I bought a book that was perfectly suited for the job: Sam’s Teach Yourself eCommerce Programming With ASP In 21 Days.

I also wanted a dynamic (Ajax) computer configuration form that was pretty much unheard of any other computer site other than AlienWare; I don’t even think Dell had such a user-friendly system at the time. To accomplish this, I bought yet aother Sam’s book, Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours, and spend countless hours figuring out how to get everything to work properly. This was way before the big Ajax movement, but used many of the founding DHTML principles that make up the Ajax concept.

We pretty much spent the next two years working on this company, but we were too young, too limited, and too inexperienced to ever complete it. We would stay up all night adding products, prices, and product sources to our database and spend entire weekends making custom case mods for product photos. We even made some money doing custom orders for people that we knew personally. It wasn’t all a waste though because I gained a ton of valuable web development experience.

Age 18, 2004: Time To Take This Serious

After working on our custom computer business for over 2 years, we both realized that we were going in different directions and decided to give it up. It was at this time that I discovered SitePoint and the business of website publishing. I realized that ASP/Access was not the best choice, so I purchased Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP and MySQL from SitePoint’s brand new publishing division.

From January to May of 2004, I built about 10-15 websites. Some of the sites I can remember (I don’t own any of them and the active ones don’t look like the original versions) are men’s advice (manmindset.com), Photoshop tutorials (tutorialcollection.com), lyrics (vastlyrics.com), poker cheating (pokerexploit.com), flash games (anytimearcade.com), and the following…

My first stint as a PPC marketer was with a simple little web shop that I had set up to sell some customized consumer electronics. It was a three page site with a few hard coded PayPal “buy now” buttons. At this time, most of my efforts were focused on building websites that received organic traffic and collected revenue from CPM banner ads, popups, and AdSense. To my surprise, my web shop started producing an instant profit while my content sites were making pennies. That site would never work in today’s markets, but PPC advertising back then was 100x easier than it is today.

Anyways, after a couple months in business, I became very frustrated with product fulfilment (the custom orders, packaging, shipping, etc) and decided to give up on my first (and only) successful ecommerce solution. At the same time, I was also becoming frustrated with my organic sites. I had good, unique content, but I was not getting the traffic deserved (looking back at them now, I only needed a little promotion and some perseverance). Then I got the the first of two “great” ideas that led me to my affiliate marketing career.

Keep in mind, everything I was doing at this point was complete experimentation. I was completely unaware of “make money online” ebooks and internet marketing principles. Instead, I relied solely on Barnes & Nobles Books and SitePoint Forums.

So while studying search engine optimization for 2004, and having discovered my first real CPA network (other than CJ and ClickBank), I started doing some calculations. I realized that this one offer was in a market that had very high search volume. If I could only rank on the first page of Google for this keyword, that keyword, and that keyword, I could get this much traffic and make this much money. Wow!

I told some of my computer savvy friends about my idea, but they all just laughed at me. They didn’t think it was possible, and they were right… to an extent. I didn’t have the skills or the resources to rank for those terms, but what I did have was a pretty good landing site at a time when everyone else was doing direct-t0-merchant ala GoogleCash. I recalled my past experiences with my previous PPC campaign and thought that maybe it could work for this site too. If only I could buy traffic for less money than what I got paid… revolutionary!

So I set up my little PPC campaign, pointed traffic to my landing site, and started checking my stats. To my amazement, I generated one lead. Then another, and another, and another. By the end of the day, I had made about $20 profit, which, with the projection of $600 per month, was more than I had made from any of my other sites at the time. Over the next couple days, however, my profits climbed to $50 per day and I began realizing that I could make some serious money here. I sold all of my other sites, spent the next 3-4 months working almost exclusively on this one campaign, learning everything I could, and ended up making about $12,000 profit in December. (I would show you the stats, but AzoogleAds doesn’t have them for that far back anymore).

I also started college at this time and spent a lot of time reading business books and programming other affiliate/content hybrid sites, many of which my roommate and I marketed “door to door” in the dorms. All of those sites are also gone by now, but that first PPC affiliate marketing campaign of mine is STILL making money to this day. It peaked at about $29,000 profit in a single month (lead prices got higher and traffic was cheap) and is now coasting at about $2000 profit per month.

(Note: This was with a couple different offers and payouts have all been changed, so calculating the cost per lead won’t help you figure out what offer it was)

Ages 19 to 21, 2005 to 2007: Can’t Imagine Doing Anything Else

I have done so many different projects over the past three years that this post would probably be three times as long if I chronicled the past three years. And anyways, this post is about how I became a professional affiliate marketer, not what I am doing as one. If I get a welcome response from this post, even if it just provided entertainment for you, I might write a follow up about my other successes and failures.

Basically, I have gone on to create a ton of different niche websites, some for organic traffic and some for PPC marketing. I also did end up learning how to program my own games (even if only in flash). Other than that, I’m just constantly learning new skills that can be applied to internet marketing.

I hope you enjoyed this long “autobiography” and feel that you know me a little better now. I’d love to hear your comments and any similar stories where you can relate to what I have written.

Sponsor: Vijay, teach me to make money online