This is a great article by my fellow Canadian David Ledoux who is also the creator of his latest venture http://bigmoneyfreetime.com
An Internet Marketer Turns 12 by David Ledoux
I've been marketing on the internet since 1996. 12 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...."
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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 MLMBlueprint. 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. Davids blog is at http://didyousmellthat.com
His new small business resource site is now live at http://bigmoneyfreetime.com
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