Ok…so you’ve never heard of me…I’m one of those guys that’s run under the radar to a certain degree. Who knows? You may have met me at one of Yanik Silver’s Underground events since I usually talk for 3 days straight 😉 To give you some idea – at Underground 3 I was voted (almost unanimously) by the attendees as “The Secret Agent” due to my extensive domain name knowledge. I won a ton of stuff from Yanik’s stash and a free Underground ticket for the following year. That whole experience was way cool and I’ve only missed 1 year at Underground since then due to a sailing accident.
I got started online when there were 300 baud modems (yes…a LONG time ago), learned to program in assembly during my teen years, took a job that allowed me to see 52+ countries in 5 years, became a network engineer, got involved with domain names in the 90s, started buying a few domains and found I was making money from them. I ramped up quickly and at one point owned over 12,000 domains, but have since trimmed down my portfolio to around 8,000 domains. Recently I started looking back through my sales and found that I’ve sold around $1,000,000 worth of domains over the years.
During my domain phase I got started with internet marketing and have been marketing online full-time since approximately 2005. I’ve been interviewed many times by prominent people in the domain space (Monte Cahn and others) and the internet marketing space (Yanik Silver and Ryan Lee) and feel very fortunate to know many amazing people in these two worlds. In 2012 I added the privilege of presenting several webinars on Ryan Lee’s Inner Circle and contributing training videos to the new FounderFly venture – thanks Ryan! I also spoke at Ryan Lee’s DCX event in late 2012 about a now-defunct PPC engine named 7-Search.
Currently I run many live websites, maintain a large portfolio of domains, broker domains, market digital products I’ve created along with a myriad of other products from a variety of people and companies, physical products, and do lead generation. I’m an expert at WordPress, SEM, domains, lead generation, and plenty of other really geeky stuff. When it comes to buying traffic I use many methods such as PPV (contextual), PPC, banners, media buys, mobile marketing, and much more.
The one thing that’s always stuck with me over the years is my genuine passion for helping people. This is what got me started working at a new start-up every 1-3 years and I work for free (ok..I work for stock options), but it’s fun to join a passionate team and work on some amazing projects. One of the start-ups I was working on was Trufina (based in Maryland) and later came to find out that Anik Singal (was one floor up when he was getting started) had actually met with the team. So at the last Underground (Mar 2012) I talked with him about that for a little…turns out he hired the CFO from Trufina. You never know who you’ll meet…
What’s the take away? Go to events in your industry, talk with as many people as possible, be genuine, be yourself, help others, and take some risks!