It was my brother’s birthday on Sunday. Which is nice and all, and not really relevant to Affiliate Marketing. Except that 1st August isn’t just the day my brother was born, it was also the day that my career in Affiliate Marketing was born (albeit there’s a bit of an age gap between the two!!) – yup, 1st August 2000 was the very day that I decided to try and make some money out of “this Internet thing”, so as I’ve somehow managed to notch up ten years of doing this game, I thought I’d document some of my personal journey over the last decade, as well as looking at some of the changes in the Industry as a whole.

To help bring the memories flooding back, I’ve created a playlist to listen to whilst I write this post (you can listen too if you like!), which was almost as much fun as putting this post together. Before anyone complains about any of the choices, I’ve knocked it up really quickly using a simple “two songs from each year, no artist repeated”, and these are the songs that bring back the memories for me, rather than a “best of” collection!

Part One: 2000 – 2002. Getting started and going Full time
To put this into perspective, on the 1st August 2000, I was a 22 year-old Civil Servant, who had left school at 16 and with ZERO knowledge of web design or marketing. I simply hated my job with a passion, and knew I wanted out – the press was full of the dot.com boom, and all these guys my age were becoming billionaires just by having an idea for a website! So I scraped together enough dosh for a crappy computer, got online with my brand new “unlimited” dialup connection with Freeserve, and did a search on Yahoo (Google? What was that?) for “make money online”.

Which of course meant that I learnt all about Get paid to surf companies, get paid to read email, get paid to browse sites etc. All of which paid total peanuts unless you referred others to do the same. I found other companies that would pay me to get people to enter competitions, so I cobbled all of these “get paid to..” links together on a crappy little 3-page Geocities site that looked truly awful and thankfully can’t be found anymore!

Surprisingly, this crappy little site actually got a few people to signup for the various schemes, (mainly thanks to my spamming of various forums and newsgroups!), and before long I stumbled across this thing called “affiliate marketing” – It was just like the “get paid to enter competitions” stuff I was already doing, but less spammy. So I signed up to such awesome networks as YourCheque, Magic Button and UK Affiliates (Whatever happened to them?), and soon started earning (literally) a few pence here and there. Enough for me to invest in my first domain name, which I used on the site (kingjohn.co.uk.. chosen as I was working under the name “John King” at the call centre rather than some lofty claim to be 78th in line to throne!).

I soon started working with more of these “networks” as one from Europe called “Tradedoubler” entered the UK, and one called “Affiliate Window” (‘sounds like a double glazing company’ my dad said at the time.. more on him later), who one Thursday sent out a newsletter telling all their affiliates about some bloke called “Matt” who had created a forum where we could all chat about affiliate marketing.. What? There’s other people doing this? and we can all meet up on a fantastic website and chat to each other, swapping tips and tricks until our eyes bled from the (very) blue design? wow!

KingJohn.co.uk was starting to get a little busy now with traffic coming from a lot of directories (when people actually USED directories and it wasn’t just for SEO purposes!), and with a lot of people interested in not just the competitions, but also from freebies that we had listed. The freebies were so popular that I decided to take the site down this road.. which meant a change of name.. KingJohn was ousted, and in its place came “2001 Freebies”, the idea being: 1. The coming year was 2001, and 2. Having 2001 at the start of the site name/domain meant we’d be near the very top of the directory listings (which worked, and increased traffic ten-fold!)

2001 was the year it all happened for me in AM, and it was a pretty life changing year for me personally too. I got married in the April, and whilst checking my stats from an Internet cafe in the Seychelles during my honeymoon, I discovered that I’d earnt enough to earn my first cheque from Affiliate Window – for £13.51! That was it – I’d finally made money out of the Internet! All I had to do now was increase the amount – and I now really had the determination to do so. I’d spent two weeks cruising around the Indian Ocean, during which time I’d made regular sales from my website and was starting to earn a trickle of pennies now.

So upon my return I really cracked down, working 20 to 30 hours a week on top of the Day Job doing stuff to get more traffic into the site, sending newsletters out to my members, etc. Then one day there was a “free sim card” offer on Commission Junction. I can’t remember exactly what they paid, but I think it was something like $13 per sim. I sent out a newsletter and earned £3,000 in one day. That was around 4 months wages at the Day Job! so I went part time, allowing me to work on my AM business for around 40 to 50 hours a week, and doing 25 hours at the Day Job to cover the bills.

That didn’t last long – the more I worked on my AM business, the more money I made. So it started to cost the business money for me to go to the Day Job, and less than 3 months after going part time, I’d handed my notice in, and was going to become a full time affiliate! After having the security of a regular paycheck ever since I was 16, and having only recently taken on a mortgage and wife (who wasn’t working at the time as she was at Uni) this was a scary prospect. Then out of the blue one Wednesday morning, I got a call to say that my sister had died. One of the last conversations I had with her was about me leaving the Day Job, and she was worried I was making a mistake. Losing her so suddenly really left me with a “life’s too short” attitude, and I actually became ever more determined to make a success of the AM business. I completed my last day at the day Job just before Christmas 2001, and was excited about why lie ahead for 2001freebies.

What I forgot however was that after 2001 comes 2002. Some other bugger registered 2002freebies.co.uk the day after I launched 2001freebies, and whilst 2001 was a fab year, by early 2002, traffic had dropped off, and I kept getting asked why we were still called 2001freebies. Faced with the choice of changing the name every year, or ditching 2001freebies, I chose the latter, opting instead for a generic name that we could really build a brand out of. And that’s how “Net Free Stuff” was born!

I wasn’t sure about changing the site name again for the third time in 18 months, but bit the bullet and got a professional logo for NFS designed, and switched the site over to the new look on 1st March 2002 (I think!) – the response from members was really really positive, and they all told me how much they hated the old site! With a slightly better looking (but still designed by yours truly on a crappy WYSIWYG editor on Geocities, then uploaded to decent hosting) site, NFS started to attract press interest, and then came the biggie.. the launch of Google Adwords.

I’d been doing some PPC advertising on goto (soon to become Overture, then later Yahoo Search Marketing), but they never really had the volume at the right price to really make an impact. I started using Google Adwords on the day they launched, and almost overnight trebled my traffic for VERY relevant terms, which I was able to buy very, very cheaply – for every £1 I spent on Adwords, I earned around £2, and retained the membership data to market future offers to – it was a no brainer! The only question now seemed to be how much better could it get?

Coming up in Part Two: Expansion, Incorporation, Losing the Midas touch, Contraction, Un-corporating, Walking Away.

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