2009 comes to an end. I hope your 2009 was successful and prosperous. May 2010 bring in many new opportunities and success stories!

How did 2009 treat you?

I just thought I’d wish everyone a Merry Christmas! Thanks to all of you who have read and commented on my blog this year.

Hey everyone. I have recently moved to the Charlotte area.

My first goal here is to network with other real estate investors and professionals.

If anyone here wants to join my wholesale property notification list, please visit my site at:
http://wholesalepropertyinvestments.com

Seeya next time!

Back when I first got online in 1995, I had a friend from Sioux Falls, SD who I met online in the IRC channels on Undernet. We had remained friends for many years and worked on projects together, and even met in real life a few times since we weren’t too far of a drive away from each other.

During my first year of college, he found a way to make money online using pay per click banners. I had heard of this before, but I had never done it in the past. I made a small income online doing this with Kory.

In the spring of 1998, I was pretty busy with school, but I decided to make a web site similar to a Mad Libs™ story. You know, where someone asks you questions like: “Give me the name of a person.. Give me a noun.. Give me a verb.. Give me an adverb.. Give me a color.. Give me a number between 2 and 1000, etc.”

The person who asks you these questions is filling in the blanks in a story as they ask them. After all of the questions are answered, the person reads back the story to you and the end result is a funny story.

So what I did was create a story for the upcoming holiday, St. Patrick’s Day. Because it had a holiday theme, it was MUCH more popular.

All I did was create a simple one page web site on a Lycos free web site owned by Tripod.com. When you came to the page, you were immediately met with a javascript popup with nine questions in a row similar to the ones I gave above. After all of the questions were answered, a very funny story was written to the web browser. It worked very well!

I also used the same psychology those forwarded emails had in them. At the end of the story it read something like this:

“You may not have gotten your wish, but you may still have a chance with (person you admire); (he/she) is the true love of your life you’ve been hoping for! (person you admire) will ask you out in # days or less, but you must show or tell 10 or more people about this website within the next few minutes. The more people you show it to, the sooner (person you admire) will ask you out. If you don’t, you will have bad luck for # years!”

I started sending the link out from a lab computer to a bunch of friends two weeks before St. Patrick’s Day. By the next morning, I sat in the same computer lab and noticed a piece of paper with my web site link on it! haha.. no joke! Then someone sat down and checked her email and loaded the web site of mine!

Pretty silly, huh? It worked! Within two weeks I had over 5 MILLION hits!

I had some banners put on the page, and Lycos was paying out $1.00 per thousand impressions. Unfortunately, they didn’t come up with this payment program until halfway through my campaign.

The COOL part was that a guy from Lycos actually CALLED MY HOUSE back home! He kept leaving messages and actually talked to my mother and asked her to congratulate me on the success and that I should build more sites! LOL

I ended up getting a check for $2,300 or something from Lycos, and a few hundred dollars from the other banner clicks. I think they were paying $.10 or $.15 per click. One of the affiliates was a scam and didn’t pay me much at all. This seemed to be the norm back in those days so I got burnt out and didn’t do it again for a few years.

The following year, the web site wasn’t so cool and the novelty wore out, but I did learn a lot about building traffic and affiliate programs.

The following summer I also was getting people to sign up for an affiliate program online using bots on IRC to message people about it. I was getting a 10% cut of their $.20 per click. Within weeks I realized I was getting scammed AGAIN because they were paying me only a fraction of what I had earned, and lost out on THOUSANDS of dollars in commissions. It was a Canadian company and I didn’t really have much luck coming after them since I was in the USA.

Now it’s too bad I didn’t know what I know now. If I had an opt-in page for jokes, I’d have had a MASSIVE list of maybe a million subscribers. I could have offered a free joke of the week or something if they just put in their name and email.

That could have helped sell the funny t-shirts I wanted to make for my college t-shirt company. *SLAP* Oh well!

There are plenty of other opportunities coming my way, every day!

When I was 14 or so, our family got our first computer in 1993.  Everything changed for me.  I found a new form of entertainment!  I went from a Nintendo junkie to a computer junkie!

Okay, I admit it; I still played my video games, but I spent more time on the computer going forward.  I was so hooked!  I even learned how to upgrade the computer myself – hard drive, memory, floppy drives, etc. As quickly as technology evolved, I was upgrading.  Back then, computers were advancing VERY quickly – so most of my money was well spent there.

I first got online in 1995.  I believe it was CompuServe, and then AOL, paying for a second phone line since my mother didn’t like me being on the phone all the time, and also $.10/minute because the dialup server was long distance!  Soon, local Internet access was available.  But it was still a few towns away from us, so I still was paying long distance.  I was paying over $100 a month for dialup.  Good thing I had a job!

Back then you got a certain number of minutes for a monthly fee, and then it was like $.25/minute after that.  It was kind of like cell phones today.  I remember I had a cell phone back then, too (ugly big bag phone for the car only).  But I only used that for emergencies.

I was an addict – learning all I could about computers online; I also discovered Internet Relay Chat.  I met up with people all around the world in chat rooms on computers and programming.  This is how I learned it all so quickly!

I built my first Web site within my first year online, and also hosted my own virtual server back in 1997.  It had all the bells and whistles, UNIX, Apache, and some form of SQL if I remember correctly.

I even had a shell account and had the ability to add user accounts and run my own scripts and applications.  I also compiled my own IRC server linked to another network (I think it was called Gamma Network).

I also gave away free hosting to some of my friends online.  This was when being on the Web was EXPENSIVE and difficult!  And if you knew how to get online and have a Web presence, you were super cool!

Back then, getting traffic was SUPER easy!  Any beginner could get hundreds or thousands of hits a day with a little bit of work using some dirty little tricks (like keyword stuffing, etc.).

I never did figure out how to take credit cards online – back then, you had to be a rocket scientist to do so.  I just never bothered because it was so difficult, and I had other interesting things to do.  Eventually I found another way to monetize that traffic.  It’s called: Affiliate Marketing

Stay tuned for my next post about how I generated my first income online!

What I’ve discovered is that I need to filter my leads automatically using my voice mail.

One thing I can do is mention that I’m not looking to buy at retail prices, and that not many other people are because of the state of our real estate market.  I could probably let people know that I do have a good real estate agent I can refer them to if they’re interested, and to mention that on their message to me.

If I do this, it will do two things:

1. It will reduce the number of messages I receive. My prospects will automatically disqualify themselves.

2. There will be less response, and less leads to refer out to real estate agents.

On my next mailing to sellers, I will definitely change my message on my voicemail.  I don’t think that my message on my postcard needs to change much.  It’s pulling VERY well, and I’m STILL getting calls today!

Until next time,

Ryan Thompson

I just did a test mail drop to a zip code I’m farming and I got a WHOPPING 25% call back response!  I’m going to be busy this week!  I was originally going to send out a whole list I developed, but I’m glad I split it into two for ‘split testing’… I won’t be able to do the 2nd half of the mailing for at least a week!

I’ll keep you all posted!

Court lasted from Tuesday morning on July 14th through Friday at the end of the day.  This was a LONG trial!  It was actually kind of close, and the slippery defendant got the arson charge dismissed almost right away!

He was charged with second degree arson, second degree burglary, felonious larceny, and felonious possession of stolen goods.  He got off on everything except felonious possession of stolen goods!

The defendant was a habitual felon and almost got off on it being habitual, too.  He was facing about 11-22 months (non-habitual), or if it was habitual, 6.5+ years.

When it came to the sentencing part,the judge said it was ‘confusing’ keeping up with his record.

The judge was surprised with his 20+ convictions over three counties, 8+ of which were for possession of stolen goods, and 11 or so felony convictions.  In the end, the he had little sympathy for him, even after he and his attorney tried to talk him into being easy on him. The defendant booked 133 months minimum (11 yrs, 1 month), or 169 maximum (14 yrs, 1 month), with no bond.

I did not get restitution, nor did my roommate – even though he did get most of the things that were stolen back.  I think the pawn shop got the most for restitution, around $248 or something I believe! haha

Needless to say, many people were satisfied with this sentencing.  Now it’s on with life for me!

Most of my visitors here are unaware of my experience from last year.

On the evening of September 11th, 2008, someone robbed my residence and set fire to the place.  This happened late at night and the fire was extinguished sometime in the early a.m. the next morning.

I lost years and years of work, personal items, actual cash, and and even things that were not mine.  The suspect stole computer hardware of mine, the backups, and also a business partner’s equipment — all worth thousands of dollars.

My roommate also had excessive damages and losses.  Fortunately for him, he did recover some electronics that were stolen and sold to a pawn shop in a nearby town.

The suspect was captured about a month later, and he is now in trial this week.  I have faith that justice will be served.  I just hope that he changes his ways.

I’ll keep you posted!