Initial Internet Marketing Attempts

Kdollar.com was my first domain name and was purchased on 10-11-2004. I bought it after I saw a deal on slickdeals for a year of hosting and a free domain for $7.77. As a slickdeal addict I couldn’t pass up the deal, even though I had relatively no experience making websites and had no idea what type of site I wanted to make.

The first website I did put up was in 2005. WayBack Machine has a screenshot of the site on March 17, 2005.  Like most poker affiliate marketers, it was a free money site. Easiest money in the world…I collect a $150 CPA when someone deposits and I give them back $50 or a DVD player. Well that didn’t last long, after signing up all my friends, the market dried up and no one else was coming to my site. That’s when I decided to post it on slickdeals…it didn’t last long as everyone claimed it wasn’t a good deal and their were more legitimate sites (smart people, hahaha).

So I put up a new and improve poker affiliate page on May 27, 2005. I was a little smarter this time and cut out the free money part…why give them money when you don’t have to. This page lasted until August 2006 when I took the site down as I had already launched a new poker site with an actual poker domain name that was getting search engine traffic. I probably made a couple hundred dollars with my new and improved page…that’s one or two real money players in a year (big time).

I decided that it was time to take kdollar.com to the next level and make it a deals site. I was going to take slickdeals head on and was going to beat them at their own game. Kdollar.com was going to be a cross between slickdeals and digg. Visitors would submit deals and then would be able to vote on deals (1-5 stars) and the deals with the most votes would go to the top. I thought the idea was original enough and slickdeals was just a simple forum at the time, so I figured their users would be stoked with my voting features. I found a php developer from China who took my rough outline of the site and made it a reality.

The kdollar deals site went live on Aug 29, 2006, with a basic design. I got the site re-designed as well as adding a couple features on October 4, 2006. The site in my mind was a success as it was my first php driven site that I took from an initial idea to a working site and it functioned almost exactly how I had planned…though I had no users.

The biggest hurdle for anysite including  kdollar.com was getting users. Right before I launched kdollar.com, slickdeals got revamped and added voting as well as some additional features which in turn made my site a lot less attractive.

So like any one that has a site with no users…you need to fake them. I hired a couple people from DigitalPoint forums to post deals. I had them post deals on the site, just a few deals a day with different screen names. I paid them a meager $15 dollars a week for around 25 deal posts.

The site got a huge traffic boost when SEOmoz listed it on their web 2.0 awards and I started ranking for a lot of the deals that were posted. The problem was the users that came through google didn’t stick around for long and most of the time they were taken to expired deals. So like any good internet marketer I added adsense and made a couple bucks that way.

After awhile I gave up on the kdollar.com deal site and had my posters stop posting deals as I realized I would need to put a ton of work into the site to ever get it going. The only people that ever posted were my paid posters as well as other website owners who posted their sites items…which were crap.

So today I decided I would take the kdollar.com deals site and turn it into my internet marketing blog. That was a long intro….but I figured the blog has to start somewhere. I am currently a poker and casino affiliate who is really lazy. Hopefully I will post every now and then but I wouldn’t expect much.