Over the weekend I was reminiscing about some of my earliest efforts to make money online. I tried a lot of strange things, most are long forgotten, but there are a few I remember. As I look back now, some of those ideas were surprisingly ahead of their time. I always had a full time job so these were just things I tried in my spare time for fun.
1997? - The first website I ever built was called The Downhill Scene. I was heavily into downhill mountain bike racing at the time so I learned HTML and made a really crude site. Compressed images, tables with borders, the works… I had no idea that monetizing a website even existed back then, but it was a fun site. I even had web 2.0 style user generated content with an HTML guestbook.
2001- I had an idea to write what is now known as an Ebook and sell it from a website. It was a 5 page PDF guide on how to secure your PC against spyware and viruses. I put the site up and waited around for traffic, and actually sold a few copies. I was an info product marketer without even knowing it. I even used Ebay auctions to sell it as well as drive traffic back the site to make sales there. I think that might have been against the rules.
2002 - I signed up for a weekly email from Dell computers that sent out coupon codes. I would take the coupon codes and buy notebook computers, usually at about 30% off, then sell them on Ebay. This actually worked for a while and I made about $100 profit on each computer. I would buy 10 or so at a time, store them, manage the auctions, deal with shipping, returns - it was a total nightmare. But I was pretty proud of myself to actually make money on my own.
2003 - This was a big breakthrough when I finally realized you didn’t actually have to have a product to make money online. So instead of managing all the headaches of the Ebay stuff I would try affiliate marketing. I made a website with the coupon codes then got in the Dell affiliate program. I even made a form on my site to collect email addresses to notify people when the codes were released. I pasted those email addresses manually into a spreadsheet and did the emailing manually as well in Outlook. I had no idea at the time, but I was a list building marketer! This was going pretty well, until Dell threatened to sue me for copyright infringement.
2005 - I learned about Adsense and started building all kinds of sites for that. Then I learned pay per click, tied it into affiliate marketing and the rest is history. I never really got serious about making my living online until 2005 , but after deciding thats what I wanted to do things really took off.
What crazy things did you try back in the day?
Till then, Jean
Thats pretty funny stuff. Ebay selling does suck.
A few years back, I tried programming a “poker bot” to play on poker stars and party poker. The idea was to make the perfect “poker-playing robot” that would be able to handle a multitude of different situations.
It would perform well against other poker robots, but when i tested it with real people, it totally sucked.
Anyway, that was one crazy idea… lol
They used to sell these scripts on eBay that would “encrypt” your PayPal forms, so people couldn’t just view source & get your confirmation page URL, and steal the info-product being sold. So I sold the next generation script: it would “encrypt” your own, or “decrypt” someone else’s! That was great for a few days… then it was saturated. I started selling the script for $75.00 - in the end, the script + resell rights was going for $2.50. It was good for about $800 one week.
I also bought a lot of 10 DirecTV receivers, then sold them off 1 by one. Didn’t make much on that (maybe broke even) but got strange looks in the office when I had a shipment of 10 receivers delivered to my office!
I’ve sold scripts that encrypt affiliate urls, then put my own affiliate id in it if they forgot to put their own id in.
I’ve done coupon codes, blog monetization, and tons more… but i still feel like these ARE the early days for me.
I must have tried it all at some point but I found affiliate marketing when trying to do ppc arbitrage with adsense back in the day.
A few years back I was unemployed after moving to a new city w/ the wife. Was trying to shift from a bartending lifestyle to something w/ more conducive to a healthier lifestyle & facing how little my college degree was worth without professional connections. Knew nothing about the web.
I actually stuck flyers on windshields at the local golf course to try driving traffic to my website for a related product. Back then I was stuck in a common mindset of trying to do everything for free/cheap. I made a few sales but thankfully started learning principles of time management, 80/20 rule, etc. University tended to grade based on the physical weight of my work product and it was so refreshing to get affirmation what always made sense to me as a youth was actually the right course.
Life is rocking along at a good pace now so hopefully a few people starting out read this thread and get inspired to sharpen focus.
I sold on eBay for a couple of years - but between paypal and ebay headaches (more like nightmares), I left and created my own website. I still sell physical goods via 2 manufacturers (drop shipping) however affiliate marketing has been in a close 2nd place for the past 2 years now. Hopefully I’ll find the missing piece to the puzzle soon and push affiliate marketing into first place and on to the next level.
lol, I remember when I would create web pages using homepage.com, homestead, and geocities. Good times.
The good old days (`2001) included writing free common-sense “dating tips” newsletters, and including affiliate links to buy pheremone cologne from them, that was a great biz for a long time.
My first own internet connection: june 2005.
My first money made online: PPC / adsense arbitrage with ink cartridged themes.
My first big money maker: eBay selling
Now: looking into PPC + Affiliate Marketing
Thanks to your blog, I intend to find the key to PPC+AFF
It’s been 3 years now I’m on the Net. All frustrations + joys + breakthroughs + frustration again. But Im close to the solution.
Good stuff. It’s crazy the things we do when we’re first starting eh?
Hehehe.
I used to make $1,500/mo off a $.03 cpc ask jeeves banner
… On a tony hawk website I made back in 7th grade. Middle school ballin’ was my intro to making money online.
(Sorry for the double post, stupid blackberry.)
No one cares.
Too funny! I tried to do the sell online via eBay thing way back when (Gasp) selling beanie babies! Unfortunately I never bought the popular ones, and the majority of them are still in my attic somewhere. I think I spent more money on shipping than I made.
Oh well, it all worked out as future prep for working at MarketLeverage. Now I know what not to do.
Got you all beat! back in 1995 I put a webpage up with my modem connection for gas scooters. I got a merchant account and actually sold about 20 of those things (60% went overseas lol).
Then I started with viaweb (they later sold out to Yahoo stores) with my first online product businesses, it was fun at first (amazon had just come along) but after 9 years I got real tired of shipping product, customer service etc)
In late 05′ I picked up Jeremy Palmer’s High Performance Aff marketing ebook and never looked back! I still remember when I had my first $500 day of profit, and how I thought I was in heaven…
In 2.5 years I’ve gone from living in my Mother in Law’s basement and 100k in business debt to having our own home, cars and NO debt! I can’t stress enough how good a job AM is if you will just keep at it!
Gary
In 2000, I was one of the first to join SFI. I even was invited to North Carolina to meet with the brass. I was lucky to be handed free advertising on a search engine for a month. It was called epilot.com. I put ads on the search engine and cranked it to the number on spot. I had over sixty affiliates join in a months time. However, the down side is after the free ads were no longer available, my members began to drop out. I got discouraged and bad-mouthed the company to someone via email. They guy sent a copy to the company and they booted me out. I was making $600 a month at the time. I was crushed.
I think the key is advertising. If you don’t spend the money, you won’t make money.
Glenn
Great ebook idea. What we use to do back then.
LOL, I’d been meaning to read this post the last few days and finally got around to it. I think everybody’s tried ebay selling at one point or another. Back in the days, I tried making a variety of different websites, thinking I’d get everyone interested in my web-design services just by coming to the sites that I had made. Of course I was still quite young at the time, and obviously, it never worked out.
I have to say that I tried a year ago some PTC an PTR sites, very frustating and time consuming if you don´t have a huge downline.
Now it´s time to implement the gained knowledge into get real money using affiliate marketing.
Thanks for sharing your stories with us.