This is How I got Started
I moved house earlier this year and was alarmed to see how much stuff I’d accumulated over the years. The sensible thing to do when you move house is to get rid of as much accumulated junk as you can before you move but I decided not to. I thought it could be useful to re-visit some of this history of my time online and see if I could use any of it.
How I Got Started
Now that I’m settled in to my new house I’ve started to look through what is a whole room full of archive material and that got me thinking about when I got started.
I started online way back in 1996. I can’t believe where the time has gone and how things have changed in that time. Those were pioneering days on the Internet. We didn’t have much of the things we take for granted now and of course there were a lot fewer people using the Internet.
Certain elements of working online were easier then but it was also a lot harder in many ways. For example, getting people to optin to your email list was really easy. Email was new to a lot of people and being able to have someone writing to them was a real novelty. People were really pleased to receive your emails. That’s a lot different now.
Internet speeds were much slower so we couldn’t send audio or video and even PDF’s would take forever to download. A lot of stuff was sold online but sent out in the mail. I remember I was operating on a 56K modem dial-up connection which seemed like lightening speed compared to what I first tried to get online with. I can’t remember now what I was using initially but it would usually time out several times before it finally made a connection to the internet.
Trying to do anything online was very frustrating indeed.
I worked for several years sending program updates to client sites as a technician with very slow speeds but it wasn’t until we got to 56K speeds that things did get easier. That was when I consider I started online. The more general use of browsers to access web pages had started to grow and I could see the potential and was really hooked.
Back then the main people doing anything at all successfully online included Marlon Sanders, Terry Dean, Declan Dunn, Yanik Silver and Bill Myers.
There were very few other people around but one of the real Internet Marketing pioneers that became my first coach was the late Corey Rudl. Cory was way ahead of his time and responsible for a lot of what we take for granted now. His company, The Internet Marketing Center, is still going today and it was that company that became the first one that I promoted as an affiliate. Corey may well have been the first to offer an affiliate program, him or Marlon, but was certainly the first one for me.
In fact, I made my first affiliate commission with them in 1997. I still remember getting that check for $7 and the exhilarating feeling I got.
One of the landmark coaching programs on the web came from Corey, entitled ‘Corey Rudl’s “Insider Secrets” to marketing Your Business On The Internet’. This was the program that I bought to get me started on the right track and was also responsible for several other people’s start online. This was a two volume, hard bound training program that got shipped out in the mail. The two volumes together ran to close on 1000 pages and covered everything you needed to know.
The first release came out in the late 1990’s. Then in 2005 Corey published an updated version and I bought that one too. I still have it and refer to it from time to time even now.
As I mentioned, The Internet Marketing Center is still going having been headed up by Derek Gehl following Corey’s death. I just learned that they have decided to launch a completely updated version of the program again but this time they are putting everything online and will be keeping it updated on a continuous basis as things change online.
I think that’s really great news since this piece of work has been responsible for so many success stories over the years. I think it’s one of those things that every online marketer should have in their library, it’s that valuable.
If your interested in what they’ve done with this course you can check out the updated online Insider Secrets at the link below.
http://www.trevor-greenfield.com/imc/
