How did you get into online marketing?

[Justin]

I think we may have done a thread like this before, but we have a bunch of new members now so it will be interesting to see some new stories.

I'll start with mine. When I was a sophomore in college, I was really big into sports betting. I was actually pretty good at it, but I had a very tough run and ended up losing about $2k. In the grand scheme of things it wasn't THAT much. However I was pretty broke at the time, so it was a struggle to pay it off.

I started a handicapping site with a friend that sold picks to bettors for college football college basketball. We didn't make much money, maybe a few hundred dollars but from that point on I was hooked. The next year, I left my partner and went on my own. I actually paid for a good design this time, and did better. I think I made around a $1000 that year.

I believe some time around then, I was looking through forums and came across CAP. I remember being shocked that all these people were doing similar stuff to me, and making some good money. I remember thinking it was so cool that they had flashing banners on their websites. I thought it looked so cool. I had no idea that they actually made money off those.

Sometime around then I clicked through Jeremy's signature on CAP and found the PAW forums. I was baffled. I couldn't believe people were making so much money off of a website. Up to this point, I knew nothing about business, marketing, customer service etc... If you had asked me how television stations made their money, I wouldn't have known. I had zero business sense. When I started my first poker site, I remember buying traffic and buying ads on websites that weren't even targeted traffic. It was a huge drain on my funds. I knew nothing about SEO, link building or optimization.

After my poker site was up, I mulled around a made a few hundred dollars a month for about a year. I never really took the site seriously. When I was about to graduate college this past March, I was going to take a job at college sports website and work in their online marketing dept. I let my site kinda die figuring I wouldn't need it anymore. My job offer ended up falling through, and I really had nothing else going for me.

At this time, I started talking to Hoursurf on here. He helped me out and motivated me to get back into poker affiliating. Just hearing some of his stories and ideas made me start working 8 hours everyday writing articles and link building. I PM'ed Dave on here as well and he helped me out by pointing me in the direction of some great affiliate ebooks to check out, so I could understand more about search marketing.

The past few months have been great for me. It's been a little shaky at times, but there's no way I would trade this for any "real job" that occupies 80 hours of my week. I set a new goal to be at $515 daily income by November 18th. I'm no where near it now, but I'm still gunning for it.

Let's hear some more stories about how you got into online marketing...

[PFO]

How I got started:

When I was in college as a junior in 2002, my friends and I starting playing a bunch of online poker. I think I ran across one of party poker affiliate links showing the potential of making big money just by recruiting people. All of my friends were hooked on online poker with Pokerstars, Party Poker, and poker room at the time so I though it would be cool to try and develop a site and see what would happen.

A year later I messed around with a poker site just out of curiosity. I began learning how to program and design websites and it has become a great hobby of mine. I eventually starting seeing some people actually signup and deposit through my site to my disbelief, which got me very excited. I then starting to work harder on one of my sites and have continued on a part time basis since then. I wish I would have found other people doing it back when I started and found this website sooner.

I have now expanded to other markets besides poker affiliating and someday hope to do it fulltime, as I am currently working fulltime as Engineer.

[bahh]

Interesting post!

I got my interest in online marketing when I worked for Virgin Radio. We builded up our website from scratch and it was fascinating to so how we got more and more visitors every month. We went from 0 to 40000 uniques /day wich was great. We advertised both from radio and tv on the other hand..

After that I started to play poker for fun. I earned some money and started to play poker for a living for about a year.

A friend of mine just started out as an affiliate and I was amazed how much money he earned just from getting new pokerplayers to Party Poker. I thought I'd give it a shot and started out small with just promoting Titan Poker. Had a great aff manager and hosted tournaments every now and then. I remember the feeling of getting my first RMP, it was sweeeet. I also started a poker league for students in a city and earned alot from it. Students in Sweden like poker as hell so I got alot of RMPs from offline marketing.

I sold all my previous poker related sites and now Im about to start from scratch again. Hopefullt my new site will go live before the end of this month..

[TheDonk]

Since I was about 7 years old I was completely fascinated with Italian sportscars. I started drawing them and did that for about 8-10 hours a day until I was out of high school. I went to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena to become a Transportation Designer (designing cars/motorcycles etc.). After a couple years there, I had what I can only describe as a 'writers block'. I'd drawn every design I could, was tapped out. Later I got into drawing comic books and started a sign company. My specialty became custom paintings of athletes and comic heroes on windows/wall etc.. Eventually I moved to Denver and started a custom home painting business, built it up then sold it. After that I started a wood finish/refinish company working alone. This was in 2003 during the poker boom. I got really into poker and wanted to be as involved as I could.

Backing up a bit, in 1990 (I was 19) I met a guy who was absolutely stinking rich and got talking with him. I asked him how he got so rich and if he had any advice for me. His name was Brent Unger and he owned 'The Brentwood Funnies Company'. His company owned the rights to zillions of comic strips that we all read in the paper. His comics are translated into lots of different languages and printed all over the world. The company also sells all the novelty items that go with the comic strip characters. He told me something I never, ever forgot - and it was the most important thing I've ever learned. He said that if you want to get rich, not wealthy, but rich - you have to be making just as much money while you're sleeping as you do while you're working. Then the last 8 hours of the day while you're goofing around, you have to be making that much money again. Basically the topic was about globalization, doing business worldwide.

So, I always remembered that and figured that if someday I could find something that included my abilities graphically, and was a global business that would be my ticket. So, I fell in love with poker, and you know the rest from there.

TheDonk

[mftpg]

Will post a 2 minute synopsis... just want to add the disclaimer that I do not really feel I have 'become' an internet marketer just yet! Still have the learner plates on and plan on using this year to build content / drive traffic / learn more and forumlate a long term plan!

Back 2 years... after 9 years with a big blue chip ('Big Blue' might be familliar to some?) working 12+ hours a day I'd found myself in a senior management position, 'number 2' in a 1000 person sub-organisation in Budapest, Hungary.

One day I woke up and decided to 'live life' instead - handed in my resignation (even though they offered me 'the world' to stay!) and spent the next year travelling the world with my Fiance... absolutely fantastic!

Thats the background. The afilliate part was more by accident, started a poker blog (for pleasure rather than money) and found I really enjoyed writing, saw others had adverts and looked into it - finding affiliate programs.... found PAW / Warrior Forum and saw that some people were making a lot of $$$ in this field (and just as many making none!).

Have spent the last 6 months learning and building content - my plan is to have a long term success via the SEO and content model (though I'm researching the PCC / 'Bonus Code' ways as well with a view to targeting Eastern Europe with these later).

After the summer I will probably go back to work , already in negotiation with a large US banking group who need someone to head up their outsourcing division here in Eastern Europe... plan is to do a few more years of the corporate bull**** - retiring before 40 with a nice income from my poker afilliate business (thus the long term plan!!!).

So far been a pleasure working with all of the PAWers and hope this will be a long term aspect of building my business.

Cheers, Mark