I should probably begin by introducing myself. I’m a 29 year old internet marketer and web designer originally from.. well pretty much a few places, I moved around several times during my childhood. I have lived in Stephenville, Texas which I consider my hometown by most respects. I went to high school and junior high in Iraan, Texas. And I went to elementary and intermediate school in Comanche, Texas. Currently I reside in Montgomery, Texas and work in Houston, Texas for hostgator.com as my day job and I specialize in customer retention.
I make 100% of my income from internet based companies of some sort. A lot of internet marketers will tell you how easy it was to get there, and how they made their success overnight. That’s not the case here, and I would never delude you into thinking that anything about internet marketing was easily achieved or overnight in any way shape or form. But in 2004 after my little sister passed away in a car wreck during a cross country road trip coming back from Missouri, I had set my mind toward changing my life.
I, like many was just as lost as everyone else. I stumbled along the way, and I got myself into some pretty ugly situations to say the least and all for the sake of experiencing the most out of the time I’ve been given on this earth. Every moment that a person worries about dying is another moment that person might as well already be dead. I live my life to the fullest and I am thankful for every day that I am given to grow, learn, experience, and most importantly share.
During this time I went to college at ITT Technical University however shortly into my education circumstances would no longer allow me to continue driving the 2 hours to school 3 times a week. So I dropped out. You would expect this to be the beginning of some dark story where my life went downhill… okay that might be partially true, but that actually had nothing to do with dropping out of college and was rather me finding the bottom of a very deep hole that I had dug for myself over the years.
But I believe very strongly that you can’t rise to the top, until you’ve reached the bottom. Without going into exceptional detail about it all, you could say that I did a few things that I’m not particularly proud of. And that I realized that I needed to change, I wanted to change. But the analogy also holds true that people don’t change. It is a process, not something that normally just happens, albeit not impossible.
I’d been building websites for a hobby and I decided it was time to get serious. I’d been building websites for several years by that point but didn’t have any exceptional design skills. In my opinion really I still don’t, rather it is a process of learning the steps to creating something through simple means, and I feel there are many designers and developers with much more skill than myself. The point is, it’s not about your technical skill, it’s about your desire to achieve.
When I had just turned 18 I purchased an online game that my best friend Justin had brought to my attention for sale on ebay. FinalChaos.com was an online MMORPG that you played online with your web browser. It was a basic text based gangster style game with a 2d theoretical map that you used to move around the city and find items that you could use to attack or steal from other players.
FinalChaos.com was originally programmed by a brilliant Australian named Dan Breese. At 13 years old Dan had programmed the game in his spare time, and was being forced to sell it because his mother didn’t really like the content of the game. The game was already made a bit more PG by removing the usual whores that were put into such gang type of games with hackers that robbed bank accounts. I’m sure it was a pretty pressing position to be in after putting so much time into programming the game. But he made a good $3000 off of me during the .com bubble. Yep, it was during that period. Shut up, I’m not old.
The game was programmed in ASP (Active Server Pages) which is a Microsoft product, and thus required Windows based hosting. I knew absolutely nothing about ASP and looking back at some of my original questions, I can imagine that Dan was like.. what did I get myself into… the site stayed online for a bit with mild success but eventually I lost the source code that was working and only had a broken copy of the source code with no database. I’m fairly certain a copy is laying around on a hard drive somewhere and hopefully I will find it sometime later in the year when I have time to go through all of my old drives and will be able to resurrect the original game. For now, it is a dead project that I have replaced with a different PHP game which is fairly similar in scope.
It was several years before my best friend and I decided to begin trying to make our living online. We tried to get into the adult genre, with laughable success. We barely understood how the tools worked, and at least one of the steps in the “simple” process, COMPLETELY alluded me. So we never got anywhere with our proposed TGP empire. But we did learn a lot along the way about marketing and the way the internet worked, even though the project was a complete failure.
Several years later, my friend began another website. TV Links were huge at the time, so he created a rather large website of TV Links and started promoting his links… it was an overnight success. Literally, it was the kind of success many webmasters only dream of. He was able to reach the top 10,000 websites on the internet. The traffic was stellar, so was the income. Even just Google Adsense was making the website thousands of dollars a month.
Things we pretty exciting during those times. We gained a nice surge of traffic after one of our main competitors had his door kicked in by the British Police… apparently a TV Link Site was considered illegal in Britain. Sucks to be him. I fully believe that this website with the proper marketing could have made $10,000-100,000 during the short time it was in operation by Justin. However, Google Adsense remained on the site until eventually traffic began going down because the TV links are very difficult to maintain. They go bad very often, and after a year or so, many of the links on the website were dead. And without a proper script to dynamically identify videos that had gone bad. We were pretty much out of luck.
He eventually sold the website for $5000 and moved to New Jersey. I’ve never seen him since. Okay, that was a little dramatic but true. We are still great friends and have been since the 3rd grade. But unfortunately I haven’t seen him since the move although we do stay in touch.
My best friend Justin, was the motivation that got me to take building websites seriously. I had only built them for fun in the past, and would politely refuse any offers of monetary gain, and make the website for free. I did a website for the Global Brotherhood of Light among others. And met some really interesting people along the way. So I began with a TV Link website, without success and many many hours of work put into that one website. I began other monetization methods and made a few dollars, I even got a few payouts here and there. But overall, I’d say I didn’t get anywhere, but I kept trying, nonstop, for about 5 or more years. And anyone that truly knows me will attest to this, I literally would fall asleep at the keyboard and wake up in the morning only to go at it again. I read everything I could find, and expanded my knowledge and built websites with the hope I’d eventually have over 10,000 pages in my network.
My reasoning was that with so many pages, there was no way that I wasn’t going to get traffic. This method is probably the thing that slowed me down the most in the beginning. I had to feel like I had some sort of legitimacy, or authority on the subject. Without something to show for my effort, that was difficult to do. And I didn’t really see the value in landing pages at the time. So over those years, I tried different methods, and built a lot of crappy sites, and a few decent websites. And even made a few that could be considered a bit spammy, although I took great care to never use horrible autogenerated text, I created whole blogs of rehashed videos. And still do sometimes to be quite honest. And they did establish me a network that I can use to get indexed quite rapidly anytime I want, but cost me about 5 years of learning and trying things that I knew were more difficult than just doing it.
But I also knew that I needed to appease my own mental needs in feeling like I had some sort of authority on the topic. And without experience, I didn’t feel like I had authority, and I’m not one to lie, so faking it wasn’t much of an option for me. I kept on in these patterns with varying success and skipped from job to job. I did construction and maintenance for Moody National Bank and Barry Shaneyfelt Construction, I worked for the City of Kemah at the Museum which was also the Kemah Visitors Center. I even worked for Double Dave’s Pizza, but this was all at the same time. During this period I was also a security officer, fast food cook, cleaned milk tankers, washed big rig semi trucks, and probably a few other things that I’d rather block from my memory under “rather crappy jobs”.
While working at Sonic Drive Thru in Stephenville, Texas, I had a moment of reflection where I asked myself… if I were able to change anything about my life, what would it be? After much thought, I concluded I was very happy with my life. It was simple, but my bills were paid, at least most of them. I liked where I lived, I walked everywhere and needed nothing from anyone. It was rather freeing. I concluded that, since I wanted to start a website hosting company, I’d like to work for one of the best.
I applied to Hostgator.com that week and to my surprise I got the job. Apparently my 10 years of working with websites and cPanel/WHM had gotten me in the door. ITT Tech probably didn’t hurt much either. (This is an ongoing article and is still in progress. Check back soon.)
