Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

Reformed Reckless Entrepreneur

To understand me you’ve got to get to know me. I’m the entrepreneurial type, formerly known amongst friends as a “reckless entrepreneur.” Now reformed (after attending REAA for a couple of years) from the reckless of an entrepreneurial lifestyle, a now wiser and more thoughtful business man and marketer, happily married, and doing what I love for work, I now wish to write about my experiences in life coupled with online and offline marketing, entrepreneurial stories, and relevant advice for those who read my blog.

As a child, I remember my dad bringing home small 3 x 7 brown punch cards, which he said were used to program computers. I was too young to understand what he meant, but being the rebel that I was I rejected the idea that I would grow up to do what my dad did for work (work on a computer). Little did I know how much technology would play a role in my life.

Continue reading the rest of my story, including:

• McGuyver.com – My First Domain Name

• Catching the domain name bug

• Selling my first domain name

• My first online sale

• The Focus of my Blogs: Offline & Online Marketing from the Point of View of a VP/Director of Marketing

I purchased my first domain name in 1995. Those were the days of “register all the domains you want and pay later if you still want them.” “Later” usually meant 30 days out and the first fees I remember for domain names were of $100 each.

Well, my first bright idea was to register McGuyver.com to sell outdoor equipment. Of course, at that time I knew little about copyrights and trademarks. But it really didn’t matter because I later found out that I’d misspelled the name :-(

Even though my first entrepreneurial online experience netted a 100% loss, it began to churn the wheels in my head. My mind raced constantly envisioning the possibilities the online world would provide.

What blew my mind was the thought that the Internet would bring about the democratization of retail prices for all goods and services. How wonderful is that? How excited was I to know that I would be able to be a part of it all. And, how ironic is it that later on in my life I would end up providing consulting services for eBay?

Catching the domain name bug

After my first domain name blunder I was hooked. I spent hours on the computer, day and night, searching for unregistered domain names I thought would be of value sometime in the future. I believe my domain name portfolio reached 450 at one point, but over the years I’ve cut it down to around 200.

Selling my first domain name

When I began registering domain names the really good one-word ones had already been taken like Business.com, House.com, Realestate.com, and others. So, my strategy was to envision what I thought would become hot industries in the future and register names that would fit those niches.

One of those niches was online bill payments. Through Network Solutions’s “WhoIs” I searched for PayMyBills.com and was bummed to find out that it was already taken. I quickly emailed the owner asking if he’d be willing to part with it. He replied saying that he’d already received investor backing and was about to launch a comprehensive bill-pay solution for people online.

3 minutes after receiving his response I purchased PayYourBills.com and replied back to his email with the great news. I believe his response back to me was something like “you bum!” I couldn’t help but laugh, especially since I sold it to him for $15,000 a few years later.

This was the fix I needed to be able to continue my domain name buying habit.

My first online sale

Another one of my ideas was to purchase EmergencyPreparedness.com. My initial reckless idea was to launch it late in 1998 and sell emergency preparedness and one-year food storage supplies, in preparation for Y2K. I worked very hard, and what I learned was invaluable.

I found a hosted shopping cart solution named www.Merchandizer.com, contracted it for roughly $50 a month, and after a lot of headaches learning HTML and the back-then complexities of opening and managing a merchant account, I single-handedly launched my own eCommerce store.

Now remember, at that time the Internet business was considered a hokey business model. The only online store anyone knew of that was making sales was Amazon. It felt as if I’d created a kite, pushed it towards the sky, and with great faith expected that the wind would magically appear to carry it into the heavens.

I remember working until 3 AM, sleeping until 10 AM and locking myself in the basement the entire day to work on this online store. Eating and getting to bed were a bother, but I was driven by dreamed I hoped would come true.

One morning, at roughly 10 AM, after having worked on this project for nearly two months straight, I turned on my computer and received an email confirmation of a $350 purchase. I screamed “I MADE MY FIRST ONLINE SALE!” I jumped for joy and ran around like a maniac, without any regard for containing my emotions. So much effort had gone into this project and finally the eCommerce heavens opened and provided the wind for my kite.

My family thought I’d gone nuts, but I knew better. I was hooked by a digital dream made real, which I knew would reshape global commerce, as well as the rest of my life.

The Focus of my Blogs: Offline & Online Marketing from the Point of View of a VP/Director of Marketing

I hope you enjoy reading my blog. Since my conversion to the online world I’ve had the opportunity to push one website to (at one time) as high as top 154 of most trafficked sites in the world www.WinDaily.com, worked for the largest paid subscriber-based website in the world www.MyFamily.com & www.Ancestry.com, consulted www.eBay.com as a an www.Omniture.com web analytics best practices consultant, beat one of the largest Telcos in the world for the right to use eleven domain names, including www.SeccionAmarilla.com, which is Spanish for "yellow pages" (Read WIPO Resolution), and now direct the marketing operations for www.Alianza.com, a Latin American Voice Over IP (VoIP) telecommunications company, and own one of the most popular online Spanish yellow pages business directories covering mostly US and Mexico www.SeccionAmarilla.com.

The focus of my blog is simple. I write about online and offline marketing techniques, strategies, and usability best practices from my personal experiences, lived in the past and present. And, whenever possible, I snap pictures relevant to my stories for your interest, and as a personal journal.

My belief is that online marketing can not be ignored by marketers at all levels. All offline marketing initiatives should be attached to an online strategy for lead generation, sales, branding, or any other success event that leads to the growth of the company.