-
-
-
-
-
Sponsored Ads
-
Recent Readers
Internet Marketer Turns 11
I’ve been marketing on the internet since 1996. 11 long human years, and it feels like a century in web years. That means I’m old…real old. I can pull my green checkered pants up high on my chest, tighten my white leather belt, adjust my bifocals and yell at you kids to get off my lawn!
Back in 1996, we didn’t have Adobe Acrobat. In my opinion the ability to create a digital product that no one could mess with changed the game forever. Before we had Adobe, we would email rich text files to people. Or Microsoft 2.0 Word Files. Or Old Wordperfect files.
And screw jobs would edit them, steal them and mess with them. Piracy was rampant. People would steal your ebooks along with the dancing baby and spinning earth widgets on your website!
Everyone zoomed along with 2800 baud modems. But a few of us had vision. I remember in early 1996 I interviewed several millionaires on the telephone on a huge conference call. I had the audio cassettes transcribed by a local girl (there was no Elance in those days!) and then given away on one of my earliest sites. More than 12,000 people downloaded that transcript in ‘96. Those were record numbers back then!
And then I broke new ground. A young upstart company called Real Audio had a program to convert a sound file into an audio file that could be streamed over the “information super highway”. That’s what we called the Interweb back in my day.
We had skinny little tubes that pushed data into people’s computers. And Rob Glazer had figured out a way to do it with sound. By the middle of ‘97 I had several hours of streaming audio on my site. I was a pioneer!
It was easy to rank high on Alta Vista. That’s what we used to call Google back in the day. Then that Wang kid started Yahoo. I phoned him in early ‘96 I think to get my site listed.
When a 14 year old John Reese invented the “automatic emailer program” back in ‘96 we used it to send email newsletters to our friends. This autoresponder-thingy gained steam when my friend Tom launched Aweber. I was one of their first 99 customers. I’ve been getting royalty checks from them for a decade!
The cool thing about email back in ‘96 was everyone read your stuff. People got so few emails back them, we’d get like a 99% open and read rate. People would actually thank you for emailing them! Maybe it was the steady diet of awesome TV like Friends, Seinfeld and The Simpsons.
Ah, the good old days. Internet marketing was simpler back then. We walked to school 3 miles each way, barefoot uphill in snow, and we liked it! None of this fancy flash stuff, no YouTube, no wireless, no highspeed, voice-over-Magnum-PI, pay-per-tick, mumbo-jumbo. We made our money the old fashioned way online. We made 3 page static websites and sold them for five grand a pop….
Like any goldrush, the web back in 1996 was insane. There was a lot of money to be made selling donkeys, rope, pans, eggs, picks and shovels. Back then we’d sell the map to the gold mine and hungry marketers would pay us top dollar. Today these lazy Red Bull drinking kids want the map for free, the shovel for free, and someone to dig up the gold for them for free while they sit on their ever-widening behind playing Donkey Kong on their Wii!
You young interweb whipper-snappers listen up! Anytime you feel like complaining, remember this old coots words…”You ain’t got no clue how easy it is getting rich on the internet today! Now get off my lawn….”
David Ledoux is a lifelong entrepreneur, author, speaker and trainer. He is the author of the best-selling books The Road To Gold, How I Went From Welfare To Millionaire Without Winning The Lottery, and The Ultimate MLM Blueprint. His popular training programs include How To Make A Whole Lot More Than $100,000 Per Year On The Internet, BigMoneyFreeTime, A Dream Come True, and Million Dollar Secrets.
He has been featured on video, radio and has traveled globally speaking to tens of thousands of entrepreneurs on the merits of the Free Enterprise System. He was named the #1 Trainer In The World in 2000 by MLMInsider Magazine.
David retired in 2005 at the age of 37 with his wife Falia to pursue adventures in mixed martial arts, travel, writing and coaching other entrepreneurs. His new blog is now live at DidYouSmellThat
comments
Maybe You Missed These Posts:
- 50 Ways to Get Traffic For Your Blog
- Market Associate gets Determined
- Internet More Popular Than TV?
- A Dot Com Mogul Half Breed
- Make Money Review My Blog – 100 Reviews
- Million Dollar Homepage Our Small Slice of Internet History
- Turn Reader Questions into Content
5 Responses to “Internet Marketer Turns 11”
Leave a Reply
David Ledoux is the second person I’ve invited to be a guest on my site and as you can see he has been on the net awhile much longer than myself and many others.
When you get a chance go check out his site http://didyousmellthat.com and find great articles in categories such as; brain food, cashflow, gadgets and much more.
Brings back memories! Just wish I’d started selling the picks, shovels and maps in ‘96 rather than getting a job doing so!
Jason, I nominated you and your blog as one of the Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs of 2007.
You can read more about the contest and your nomination here:
Top
10 Blogs Contest
Thanks for the guest article spot!
This rings true. I was there then, but got diverted. I bet this guy has lots of good stories.
I was thinking about some people I knew that were involved in a company called IXL in the late 90s based in Atlanta…anybody remember them?
Thank you for the nomination David and my gift to you an approved backlink in your comment.