Greetings from the Crossroads of America

Hello all. I currently call Indianapolis, Indiana home and wouldn't have it any other way.

How I got here:
I'm here because I'm fascinated with what it takes to capture low value clicks and convert them into clicks that someone else will pay more money for. I first discovered this a while back when I bought my first domain names (primarily b/c I thought their names sounded cool). At the time I naively thought that their value would be realized only when I sold them off at a profit. I then started working for a company that taught me how to launch and manage PPC campaigns. I'm fascinated with how people use language in search engines and what it reveals about who they are, what they want and what the intend to do. I also love working with data, analyzing the numbers and finding the important data points and patterns, so I've very much enjoyed my day job. So much so that I started to run tiny PPC campaigns on my own as a hobby (how geeky is that?) to see what combinations of keywords and ad copy got the best CTR. I sent the paid traffic to my parked domains just to get a rough indication of commercial intent and collect some crude conversion metrics. Imagine my surprise when some of those domains actually started to turn a profit! I subsequently discovered it was a big no-no to send paid traffic to parked domains. Good thing I didn't try to scale it up and incur the wrath of the search engines and parking companies. But the phenomenon of converting low value clicks into higher value clicks continued to fascinate me. While trolling domainer forums looking for a way to legitimately continue my PPC and domain hobbies I can across a reference to this site and affiliate marketing.

Why I'm excited about affiliate marketing:
In short, I think it aligns nicely with my philosophy towards marketing and sales. I enjoy teaching and learning, so for a decade I pursued grad school and teaching as my vocation. During that time I had always held a jaded view of salesmen and marketers. I pretty much saw them as hucksters and con artists that were out to misinform and trick me in order to make a buck. While going through a change of careers a while back, a good frieid and mentor helped me see that my teaching experience had actually positioned me for a career in sales or marketing. He helped me see that the best salesmen are the ones who can educate a consumer so he/she can reach an informed decision and make the purchase that's right for him/herself. I'm excited that by using affiliate marketing techniques I might be able to do just that and maybe turn a profit at the same time.

Also, I always felt kind of slimey making the money I did off of search arbitrage. Even though I rationalized it as smoothing out an inefficiency in the market place, I didn't see it as adding any significant value to the web. Affiliate marketing, however, forces you to add value to the web by developing the domain into a real web property. It's not nearly as scalable as parking a domain and it surely requires a lot more work. However, it seems very do-able and I'm pretty sure that I'll find it much more rewarding and enjoyable