Peter Fuller MBA CA

In the first part of the story I told about how I put together a Bulletin Board System (BBS) called All Sports back in 1994.

That was my first “online” business where I made money.

Well it turns out my memory was a bit bad, it was actually called Online Sports.

However, the moral of the story was that it was hard to setup. 

The content source was difficult to create.  It took a lot of technical know how and patience.

I shut down the BBS when my content provider wanted to quadruple the cost which made my model non-profitable.

I did not blame them because they were looking to provide their content to large companies who wanted to establish a presence on this new thing called the world wide web.

Today it is so easy to setup a website with up-to-date sports scores and news feeds, back then it was very hard.

But do you know what was easy back then to do?

Getting Traffic.

A client of mine could not pay me and instead we struck a deal where I took over ownership of their website.

I was excited because I knew nothing about the WWW.  Today everyone says the internet, but it was the creation of the world wide web and browsers to access the hypertext documents that made things happen on the internet.

I also knew nothing about the niche content the website was based on.

I did some research, bought a book on HTML coding, found someone who knew everything about the niche content, and then formed a partnership with them.

I did not have PHP or MySQL to help me.

I did not have a WYSIWYG webpage editor.

I did not have WordPress.

I did not even have Google.

What I did have was easy access to customers.

Back then the primary source of generating traffic was trading reciprocal links, the type of links no one seems to care about today.

But those links brought us huge traffic.

Link pages were huge back then, not something you hid on one of your back pages.

So much traffic we did not care about conversion rates or what type of font to use for the heading.

It was simple, so simple.

Well, except the part where I had to write a Perl Program to interface with the credit card processor to automate the membership site.

Today I can setup a PayPal button and have it on my webpage in 34 seconds.

People came to our site because they saw a link that interested them.

When they arrived at our site they found exactly what we promised in the description they read before clicking the link.

We provided great content that people were willing to pay money for.

But again, the content took time and effort to create.  It became our passion and it was not something we just would contract out to someone else because it was our ideas.

We got so good at it we were accepted to a small elite group of webmasters who shared ideas and concepts on how to build really good sites.

So, content was hard and traffic was easy.  But content was also fun.

My partner decided to move to Florida and I was starting to get burned out creating html pages.

So we sold the site for a very good price.

I find it interesting how things have changed since then.

Now I can create a website in thirty seconds, install WordPress in just a few more minutes and have it populated with some good content in just a few days.  Of course it is not my content but it is content.

However, getting sufficient traffic to the site suddenly requires rocket science.

Not only do I have to worry about getting traffic, but now I have to get “targeted” traffic.

I have to tweak the heading to just the right colour and font because it will increase conversions by 2%.  That 2% may be the difference between failure and success.

Back then we created desire by just having good content.  Now I have to have just the perfect copy to convince people we have good content because now it takes more convincing.

All of these things are important, but it all starts with the the customer walking through your front door.

Most if not all businesses that fail do so because they did not have enough customers.

Knowing how to get customers, paying customers, is the single most important skill you need to develop.

Squeezing them will come later.

Related posts:

1. The old days were a lot harder and easier – Part I
2. The # 1 Internet Marketing Skill needed for 2011
3. You Are All Just a Figment of My Imagination
4. How has my business grown since I started my blog?