In Part 1 of this post, I described my numerous online successes that quickly turned to failures. After the fall of the online poker world, I decided that I had enough of online marketing and stuck to creating websites for small businesses. I used my cookie cutter templates and was able to sustain a living off of charging $100 to $500 per website.
To supplement my income during this period, I started a few niche blogs and sold links and reviews. This supplement started to turn lucrative and soon this was my full time job. I stopped building websites for others altogether and just created and maintained my blogs. This was time consuming, but fun.
Although I was paying the bills, this was not the business that was going to get me rich, so I kept my ears to the ground looking for my next major income opportunity. It cam where I least expected it.
For months a friend of mine was asking me to talk to a buddy of his. His buddy ran a "widget" manufacturing plant about an hour away. I kept putting it off because a) I had no interest in widgets and b) I had given up creating websites for others.
Finally one day I gave in and took the drive to the widget plant. After a 30 minute conversation about widgets, I realized that this was an industry that had potential on the Internet. They wanted to hire me to create their website so they could start selling widgets online, but I was interested in becoming more involved than just being their webmaster.
I held several meetings with them and we came to a handshake agreement. After that, I spilled the beans on my master marketing plan for thir... err our new online company. I could see the scheming in their eyes as I laid out the plans and then, not to my surprise, they told me the next day that they had decided to go it alone.
Thinking that this might occur, I purposely left out key elements of my marketing plan and they failed before they even got started. I was still interested in widgets.
I sought out their competition and made deals with other manufacturers. Within a week I had a product line. I'll get into how I started selling widgets online in my next post.
To be continued...
Sunday, September 13, 2009
How It All Began
I started marketing online in 1998. Back then, I was creating turnkey websites and selling them on eBay. I was one of the first to do this, so the money was good. I mainly was selling hotel reservation sites. These cookie cutter sites took me about fifteen minutes to create and I was selling them for anywhere between $99 and $500 each.
This was very lucrative for about six months. After that, sites like mine were a dime a dozen, as hundreds of people like me started emerging. The turnkey website category of eBay went from a few dozen sites to hundreds almost overnight. My competition was selling similar sites for as little as $1 each and it was clear that I had to move on.
After the "fall of the turnkey websites" I found a company that was providing a backend solution for online auction sites. Back then, this was a big deal, as there were very few solutions like it. This solution was costing around $2500. I would customize the look and feel of these sites and resell them for upwards of $30,000 each. Ahh the 90's were good!
The success of eBay made many a company feel that they too could create the next big auction site and I was happy to help them with this pipe dream!
After selling four of these customized auction sites new turnkey auction solutions started emerging. Pretty soon, you could get an auction site script for free and I was once again out of business.
What was I to do next? To make ends meet and keep the cashflow coming, I purchased a classified script and customized it so that it was a exclusively for Realtors to list their properties. I designed it as a local real estate site for my hometown. The script cost me $250, which I had to borrow from my girlfriend. The customization took about two hours and I was ready to go.
I then started calling and emailing all of the local Realtors. I charged a monthly fee of $25 to them and allowed them to list unlimited properties. My girlfriend was paid back in two days and within a week I had generated over $1000 in revenues.
Over the next four or five months, I was making steady money with new Realtors and the residual fees from the ones that had already signed up. Then, of course, bigger and better solutions started becoming available to Realtors by the truckload and I was once again out of business.
Now, it's around 2001 and the online gambling business was booming. I took a particular interest in poker. I started an online poker magazine. It was one of the first of its kind, so I got a lot of traffic. I recruited some of the big name players in the game to host their own forums on the site and traffic was booming.
At first, I elected to sell banner advertising, rather then join affiliate programs. I had three main sponsors that were paying about $2500 a month for banner ads. My income was good and I didn't have to do much work, which is always a plus.
Each month, one of my sponsors would send me a report on how many new players were recruited. He would tell me how much money I was losing by not becoming an affiliate. For about three months in a row I was sending about 100 players a month to Party Poker. They argued that if I been an affiliate, I would have been making tens of thousands of dollars instead of teh $2500 a month that they were paying. Finally, I gave in and switched to their affiliate program.
Well, what do you know... now that I was an affiliate, the number of new players that I was sending to them dropped from 100+ a month to about five players a month. My contact told me that I needed to give them more exposure. Instead, I removed their banners from the site all together. You would think that they wouldn't mind, as I was no longer sending them an exuberent amount of players, but they freaked out. They wanted to get back on the site so badly that they offerred to go back to paying the $2500 a month for the banner ads. Hmmm, why would they want to pay $2500 a month if I was only giving them five players a month now? I told them that they could come back, but now it would cost them $3500 a month, which they gladly paid.
The poker business was good to me for the next few years... until the Unlawful Internet Gaming Act was signed in 2006. Once again, I was out of business.
To be continues...
This was very lucrative for about six months. After that, sites like mine were a dime a dozen, as hundreds of people like me started emerging. The turnkey website category of eBay went from a few dozen sites to hundreds almost overnight. My competition was selling similar sites for as little as $1 each and it was clear that I had to move on.
After the "fall of the turnkey websites" I found a company that was providing a backend solution for online auction sites. Back then, this was a big deal, as there were very few solutions like it. This solution was costing around $2500. I would customize the look and feel of these sites and resell them for upwards of $30,000 each. Ahh the 90's were good!
The success of eBay made many a company feel that they too could create the next big auction site and I was happy to help them with this pipe dream!
After selling four of these customized auction sites new turnkey auction solutions started emerging. Pretty soon, you could get an auction site script for free and I was once again out of business.
What was I to do next? To make ends meet and keep the cashflow coming, I purchased a classified script and customized it so that it was a exclusively for Realtors to list their properties. I designed it as a local real estate site for my hometown. The script cost me $250, which I had to borrow from my girlfriend. The customization took about two hours and I was ready to go.
I then started calling and emailing all of the local Realtors. I charged a monthly fee of $25 to them and allowed them to list unlimited properties. My girlfriend was paid back in two days and within a week I had generated over $1000 in revenues.
Over the next four or five months, I was making steady money with new Realtors and the residual fees from the ones that had already signed up. Then, of course, bigger and better solutions started becoming available to Realtors by the truckload and I was once again out of business.
Now, it's around 2001 and the online gambling business was booming. I took a particular interest in poker. I started an online poker magazine. It was one of the first of its kind, so I got a lot of traffic. I recruited some of the big name players in the game to host their own forums on the site and traffic was booming.
At first, I elected to sell banner advertising, rather then join affiliate programs. I had three main sponsors that were paying about $2500 a month for banner ads. My income was good and I didn't have to do much work, which is always a plus.
Each month, one of my sponsors would send me a report on how many new players were recruited. He would tell me how much money I was losing by not becoming an affiliate. For about three months in a row I was sending about 100 players a month to Party Poker. They argued that if I been an affiliate, I would have been making tens of thousands of dollars instead of teh $2500 a month that they were paying. Finally, I gave in and switched to their affiliate program.
Well, what do you know... now that I was an affiliate, the number of new players that I was sending to them dropped from 100+ a month to about five players a month. My contact told me that I needed to give them more exposure. Instead, I removed their banners from the site all together. You would think that they wouldn't mind, as I was no longer sending them an exuberent amount of players, but they freaked out. They wanted to get back on the site so badly that they offerred to go back to paying the $2500 a month for the banner ads. Hmmm, why would they want to pay $2500 a month if I was only giving them five players a month now? I told them that they could come back, but now it would cost them $3500 a month, which they gladly paid.
The poker business was good to me for the next few years... until the Unlawful Internet Gaming Act was signed in 2006. Once again, I was out of business.
To be continues...
Why I Started this Blog
I have decided to start this blog to archive my lessons learned as an Internet Marketer.... and man have I learned some lessons! Hopefully, you will be able to learn a thing or two from my mistakes and my accomplishments.
Currently, I am selling my own products via a shopping cart. I will post all of the details of the tools that I use and the methods that I advertise, but I will not share any personal details or my actual website. I will refer to the products that I sell as "widgets".
Enjoy!
Currently, I am selling my own products via a shopping cart. I will post all of the details of the tools that I use and the methods that I advertise, but I will not share any personal details or my actual website. I will refer to the products that I sell as "widgets".
Enjoy!
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