For my first post on the Internet Gangsters I wanted to tell the story of how I got my first taste of internet riches/pennies. It started with the epic failure of my “I’ll sell your crap on ebay for you” venture. I thought I had a decent domain, my cousin had his own hosting servers and was able to host it for free so right out of the bag I was only $8 in the hole for the domain, not bad at all. So time to setup the website and honestly I don’t even know why I needed a website, but I thought I’d get customers over the internet. So to start I put up a splash screen saying “Coming Soon, We’ll Sell Your Stuff on eBay!” accompanied by a horrible logo (it was meant to be temporary). Well the internet brought me no clients, but then again the site sat with a “Coming Soon…” banner for the entire time. I did sell a few things for family friends after telling a few people that I was going to try to do this, but that turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than it was worth. So that ventured died out quickly, but the site itself did not.
I still had this great domain just sitting around doing nothing so I started to think about other ways I could make money and that’s when I discovered adsense. Google adsense is a great way to monetize your sites as it views your site context and bases the ads it shows on what you are writing about. That way the ads are relevant to what is being posted on your site and therefore more appealing to viewers. Nobody wants to come to a site about Dogs and be shown ads about the latest perscription pills, they want to be shown ads about Dogs and things related to dogs. So I signed up for adsense, but didn’t really know what to do with it, so I started reading. And looking back at what I did, I do not recommend doing it, yes it can work, but I don’t think google likes it and it’s hard to keep people coming back after they know what you’re doing. So what I found from my searching was a way to make a page that was basically all articles that were taken from free article sites on the web and just reposted on my site. The trick to making the adsense ads work was making the links to these free articles, look like adsense ads. Now it sounded like a good idea at the beginning, but at the time a lot of people were doing the same thing and with the same articles that I got (since I was lazy and just copied another site). So search engine traffic barely existed since all my content was the same as a million other sites out there and by spamming (the only way I could get visits) those people weren’t coming back. I did make a few bucks though, which gave me the itch to do something more with this.
So after that site failed and I kind of knew why, I had the itch but couldn’t really think of anything else to do until that fateful morning around St. Patricks Day. There had been a news story running down in Alabama and all over the internet about these people from Mobile, that claimed to have seen a leprechaun in a tree. The newscast and the people in the newscast were so over the top ridiculous, that I knew people would love it. After hunting around a few forums I started to notice that people were making animated gifs and photochops of this newscast. Some people actually remixed the dialogue in the newscast to create songs. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be great if all of these chops and songs were in one place for people to find, and that’s how www.wherethegoldat.com was born. If you visit the site right now it is still setup the same way it always has been, very shitily (if that’s a word, if not I just made it one). At the time I didn’t care how it looked, I just knew that I wanted to put all the pictures, links and music in one place. It wans’t until after a lot of people started coming to the site did I realize that I could probably make a few bucks off of this. It didn’t really seem like the type of site that people would come to and click ads, but there’s no harm in trying. So I threw an adsense banner at the top and on the two sides surrounding the content, and then one link unit towards the bottom and then just posted the site on forums and message boards around the net. I was pleasantly surprised when I started getting clicks on ads along with thousands of hits a day.
Eventually the leprechaun story died out and the visitors and clicks died out as well. But as you can see the site is still up and it still averages about 30-50 hits a day off search engine results. It doesn’t pull in many ad clicks anymore, but .20 cents to $1 every couple days never hurts anything, especially when I haven’t updated or promoted the site in years. And every St Patrick’s Day hits pick up for a few weeks as a nice little bonus.
After the Mobile Leprechaun site did pretty well came the Spirit of Truth Preacher. He was this preacher that had a cable access show in the early 90’s that would just swear at callers and get extremely pissed off, it was amusing, and the forums thought so too. This spawned www.nincomfuckingpoop.com based on one of the preachers slurs that he referred to a caller as. So since the leprechaun did well I basically just copied the site and put it on a new domain and that was that, another site was born with different content but the same look and little effort. This site didn’t do as well as the leprechaun, but it does still pull in random ad clicks as well.
So that is how I first got into the whole internet marketing and making money with advertising on the web. I have since learned new tactics and gotten involved in other ways of making money, like affiliate sales and stuff like that. Articles that follow will dive more into how I’ve gotten to the point I am at now and where I branch off to next. I will also review different programs to help you decide on how you want to make money using the internet.
