by Todd Sumrall » Tue Nov 22, 2005 6:11 am
Computer Savvy? ZERO. My skills were in welding and thermal cutting. I had recently quit the blue collar world in favor of a sales job.
1997 -My mother gave me a hand-me-down computer, A Compaq 486. The Pentium had arrived and they got themselves a 333 MHz Compaq.
I bought a book about getting on the Internet. I had heard about the NET and was curious about it. I signed up with Bellsouth and at 14.4 modem speed I was connected. I was addicted instantly too.
I saw a banner one day from a competing company Card Services and about fell out of my chair. Here was a competitor on the Internet. How did they get on the Internet was the big question for me. I set out to find out how they did that.
I got a free web hosting account, built a web site using Netscape's built in editor. Then built it again and again and again. I joined a couple good ezines and 100 bad ones with LED Digest and I-Sales being among the good ones. From them I learned I was not getting any sales from my web site because a green marble background, blinking mail box, assorted color and sizes of text were not acceptable ways of building a business web site. Yea my mom thought it was neat, but in the first 8 months with a web presence I made only one sale. Why I made that sale is unknown to me. But I will never forget the feeling of success it brought. Sales went up when I went from that marble design to black text and white background.
1998- I bought FrontPage 98 and studied SEO and got a #1 position in Excite for the term "Merchant Account" that lasted about 8 weeks, and business took off.
I had no schooling officially for computers, web design, marketing and such. I had a desire, no I was driven to make this net business succeed. This drive forced me to learn the computer, to learn how to FTP, install scripts etc.
Fascination with Internet marketing and desire to make it online, pushed me along. I joined a marketing membership club called the Warriors that taught me probably the single most important thing at the time was getting the email list and sending out a newsletter. I bought and read everything I could about marketing. I learned a little html.
I studied SEO and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked website after website. I sure was glad when GOTO now called Overture arrived on the scene with pay-per-click. I was tired of SEO and about slam wore out with the 8 am to 8 am work hours I was keeping. My sleep is forever screwed up because of those first couple of years.