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!