Hi Again! Click HERE for Part 4 of the story if you missed it.
So out of the mouth of Mr. Burke and into my mind............"build your list first before building someone else's" had me intrigued. So I did some due diligence and found something online called the 10000 hits system. It was a simple page that asked for name and email address, and then you were emailed a page that listed various "traffic" programs. You joined them and then promoted your page which was the same as the one you opted into. The owner made your page for you and the others in the system. He also would show you how you could "host" pages for others. I ran with this for a while but then found if you let the "owner" do the hosting he would then have the ability to sell to your new customer; so I figured it was best for me to break away and do the page making. I built huge downlines with this concept; but never really appreciated the list portion of this as it was a free and very limited form of today's autoresponder.
By 2004 I was toying with the idea of becoming a program owner. In January the primitive 10000 hits for you system was re-branded as 10khit4u.com, my first domain! I forget who I was hosting with, and I also can't recall the autoresponder though it may have been TrafficWave. The picture shown above is that very page, courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Click HERE to see 10khits4u.com back in the day. If this was a revamp, imagine how ugly the original was? LOL You can look at progressions and see the evolution as it did improve visually in the following months. Sorry the original pic image of me is not available but easy enough to find if you'd like or you can wait till next week.
This is the lower portion of the page. Definitely before I learned about having your form above the fold and eventually everything compacted on 1 page for best results. There is a lot to glean off this and what a HIGH for me to find this as I try to recall the stops along the journey. Here are some points of interest:
- The banner at the top is from Moneylegs, courtesy of Affiliate Marketing pioneer and mentor Doug Williams. You'll here more about him later.
- This page was all over the traffic exchanges. The idea as to get the surfer to stop and learn how to make best use of this new and exciting resource.
- Power surfing was done using Crazy Broswer, my first introduction to tabbed surfing meaning surfing 10/12/15 or more at one time by moving from tab to tab as the timers ended. Since it was a manual process, the owners could not stop the usage of it and I was teaching the crap out of it.
- If you built downlines in TEs, you got credit rewards from their surfing. This is how the word viral got linked into traffic exchange and viral mailer jargon. Throw in a couple of income streams and now we had earning potential with all of this.
I got thousands of leads from this in a 6 month period; but the work was getting overwhelming as I had to hand build pages for each member of my team and host the pages for them. It was simple stuff, 10khits4u.com was me; then you'd have 10khits4u.com/joeg; 10khits4u.com/tammye; etc. With the money I was earning from the income streams (believe it or not I did not charge for the build/hosting; you paid by joining programs and upgrading) I was ready to purchase a script and launch the concept on a bigger stage (June 2004). More about that next week...
Rob Gehring – Owner of Trafficleads2incomeVM and Leader of Team Massive Success