affiliatenation.co.uk

Back in 1980 I came across my first computer, the Commodore Pet, and despite it having a green screen, no storage devices (although a tape drive eventually turned up) and a ridiculously small amount of memory, I knew I had found something to keep  my interest.

My first computer

The first computer I bought was a ZX Spectrum, followed by the 48k rampak.  Eventually the keyboard started to come off due to the heat it generated melting the glue that held it place and so I progressed on to an Atari ST. I hated the thing! Thankfully it wasn’t long before I was a proud owner of an Elonex PC with mono screen and 5.25″ floppy drive. Once I had earned enough money, the first of many upgrades to this PC was to add a 40Mb hard drive for the princely sum of £400… arrh, those were the days!

University

University life gave me my first glimpse of the internet - and it was good. Hand crafting email routes in elm, copying files from Nasa via ucl, living in the land of usenet and generally not doing any of the stuff I was supposed to be doing.

After obtaining a degree in Applied Statistics and Computing, the first thing on my agenda was to get access to the Internet from home. Being a relatively new thing, not many companies offered this service but thankfully one company that did was Demon Internet. Life was good, slow and positively text based.

My first BIG mistake

Eventually someone had the bright idea to make the www. world into a reality. That was when I made my first big mistake. I sold the domain designer.com to Corel for what I can only describe as an absolutely stupid amount of money (I mean stupidly low amount of money rather than a retirement fund amount of money) and Corel immediately went on to release a software package called Corel Designer - a package that helped you make web pages.

The world wide web

Well when www arrived I decided I should start try out making a website of my own.  I setup a competitions website which attracted what seemed like an amazing amount of visitors. After a while I noticed others creating competiton websites too… loquax was one of them and then came my second big mistake.

My second mistake

… I missed the boat. Loquax found affiliate marketing. I didn’t. Loquax went on to make a good business out of it all. I didn’t.

What I did find though is love and before long I was happily married and spending a lot less time in front on the computer.

Now after several years just pottering, I’ve decided to take it all seriously again and hopefully this time I won’t make some big mistakes!

ps. just in case you’re unsure, getting married wasn’t the big mistake, not getting into affiliate marketing was the mistake!!!