How Did G-Man Get Started in This Biz?

A few of you have wondered exactly how and why I got into black hat search engine optimization.

It all began in August of 2003 when I was declared cancer free having suffered from Hodgkin’s Disease for nearly a year.

Finances were quite tight because the medical bills had piled up.  Credit cards were maxed.  In fact, I was heading towards bankruptcy.

I was working on a book proposal at the time for Software Installation Engineers.  While I was waiting for a publisher to respond, my agent contacted me and told me about an opportunity to write an 80 page course on ASP.NET.

At the time I knew nothing about ASP.NET but figured it’d be a fun opportunity so I sent my resume in and shortly thereafter was accepted to write the course.

Of course, to write the course I needed a web site.  I decided to create a blog where I would market the book and I needed links for the blog…

That’s when I started surfing the SEO forums quite a bit and looking for ways to get more traffic to my blog.

After about a month or two I had managed to get 21 people who were reading my blog regularly.  OMG!  21 people!  I was psyched!

It was at this point that I realized my blog was a huge time sink and likely to make me nada - nothing - zero - nilch.

So I started playing with other sites, gave up ASP.NET for PHP (easier to work with and the hosts usually cost less!), and started cranking out sites that were against the TOS of the search engines…

After about 6 months of studying and earning maybe $500 total in those six months, I managed to score $15,000 in one month.

Yeah, baby, yeah!  I’d scored and pushed it all forward big time.  It continued from there and the rest of it is another story for another time.

Incidentally, when I beat cancer that time I celebrated by going sky-diving (I’ll post the video soon!).

G-Man