How the Internet changed my life and can change yours too!

My name is Steve Dawson and this is my first post on steemit..

I’ve been considering getting started here for quite a while and kept putting it off because I still don’t understand it fully, but todays the day, and the first of many posts which I hope you’ll enjoy and get value from.

I don’t like to do things by half so I thought I’d start with a summary of the last 19 years of my life, there’s much more than this to tell of course including what happened prior to 1998 but this story summarises my online journey so far.

Let’s get the formalities out of the way first…

I was born and live in the UK, I’m only 23 years old but have been taken hostage in the body of a person born in 1958,  as a result I’ve acquired the experience and knowledge of a person much older than my years.

As soon as I saw the internet I knew it would change the world, I had no idea how in those early days but I was so confident that it would that I quit a high profile well paid job as a Radio presenter to start an internet company in 1998, since then I’ve earned millions online. 

My first income from the internet was from the hard grind of selling websites to local businesses when most people didn’t even know what the internet was, and most business could not see how it could possibly benefit them. It was hard grind for low reward but I saw the bigger picture so I never gave in.

As time progressed by the year 2000 I’d moved the business into a small 2 storey office with 1,000 square feet and by 2002 had a staff of 18 in various roles such as sales, website development and I.T. support, so when broadband became available in the UK we were perfectly positioned to take advantage of the new technology and as a result my company became the number one installer of Broadband in the area supplying, installing and configuring thousands of broadband access into thousands of business premises. 

At the same time as my business was experiencing explosive growth in the local markets I was also starting to have some small successes with websites promoting other people’s products through affiliate marketing, one such site was promoting travel exclusively to the UK Market, at this time I still wasn’t seeing the bigger global opportunity of the internet despite being an early adopter. Then everything changed!

It was late December 2005 just a few days before Christmas and I was in the office alone after all the staff had gone home, I’d recently received a substantial offer from a much larger company to buy my company and I was undecided as to what to do. All my staff’s jobs would be safe and they would simply be relocated to new offices less than half a mile from my office so I had no concerns about their futures, but what would I do?

Financially I’d be in a very good position so had no concerns about that, but doing nothing was never going to be an option for me as I get bored easily lying on a beach. I figured that if I could just make some of my 100+ websites make money rather than them cost me money then I could work from home on my own with none of the responsibilities of staff or physical offices.

Of the 100+ sites that I had online at the time the most successful was a travel site, it was making a consistent £35 per day (about $50), just over £1,000 per month like clockwork. Strangely enough I’d been very happy and excited to be making this level of income from a single website.  Looking back, I think my mind was probably holding me back from recognising the true potential of what might be possible, a self-fulfilling limiting belief is a powerful thing. As I sat in my office for the final few hours work of 2005 I concluded that if I could make this website produce £1,000 per month then surely it must be possible to make it produce £5,000 per month?

It was around 7pm by the time these thoughts had run through my brain and I could feel the excitement building up inside me, I called my wife and told her that despite it being December 23rd I’d be working late.

The office was totally silent as I started coding some changes to the site and as I frantically added more affiliate codes and offers into the thousands of pages, I wrote script to import globally offers onto the pages based on destinations and I coded a new search facility that was a very crude version of retargeting, as people searched I dropped cookies so as they browsed the site more it would retarget them with what I called reminder ads which I was hoping would increase the sales conversions.

It was past 1 a.m. on December 24th, 2005 when I finally walked out of my office turned out the lights and set off home. I’d done all I could in the time available, I hoped that my changes might possibly double the income being produced by the site but had no way of knowing, I just had to wait and see. For now, it was Christmas Eve and I had a wife and 9 year old twins waiting to catch a flight to Australia for 3 weeks of winter sunshine. 

As we boarded the plane a few hours later, I recounted to my wife the reasons I had been late home, I told her of my decision to sell the business and promised her I’d do no work at all while we were away. I’d never been particularly good at leaving my work in the office when going on vacations but with the decision to sell made and with the staff more than capable of running things in my absence I promised myself that this time I would do no work at all. It was the first time in my life when a vacation was 100% vacation, I did no work at all for 3 weeks, and I loved it!

Landing back into a surprisingly warm UK on January 20th, 2006 my mind turned to work and how I’d be speaking to the staff on Monday about my decision to sell the business. After the usual chaos of arriving home from a long flight vacation I left my wife to unpack and sort the kids while I headed to the office to check on everything and plan my Monday meeting. In the back of my mind I was also wondering if my little last minute experimental code changes to my travel site had made any worthwhile difference to the income it was producing.

I sat at my desk to a pile of unopened mail and flicked the mouse on my computer, as it sprang into life I saw the usual 1000+ unread emails and right at the top was an email from Commission Junction, it was this that prompted me to login to my CJ account and take a look at the earnings produced before doing anything else that day.

As I opened the CJ interface and navigated to the commissions section for the specific site I was shocked to see the number on the screen in front of me showed commission for 2006 so far was $4673 and some change, I grabbed my calculator and quickly converted to GBP, it was more than £2,650 in just 20 days!

I sank back into my chair staring at the calculator and then back at the screen thinking that somehow I’d calculated the exchange incorrectly, my eyes bounced between the calculator and the sheet of paper with my workings out and the CJ interface, something was wrong, and that’s when I saw it.

I stared in disbelief at what I was seeing, in my haste I’d misread the CJ report it didn’t say $4673 at all it was $46,730, I’d earned £26,500 in 20 days from a single website that was only selling to people in the UK.

By March of 2006 the transition of my I.T and web business was complete and I was now working full time at home focusing on affiliate and network marketing, my travel site went on to earn £1.9 million and I won the Exceptional Performance in affiliate marketing award for Europe from Commission Junction in 2007, shortly after I sold the site to an American travel company.

Today I continue to promote other companies products and services through internet and network marketing and here on steemit I plan to share my knowledge with you on how you can use the internet to free yourself and live the life you deserve.  

I’m an entrepreneur, libertarian, freedom fighter and bitcoin and crypto currency evangelist having been an early adopter of Bitcoin thanks to Jeff Berwick @dollarvigilante

I'm really looking forward to having fun and connecting with everyone here in the steemit community so let the freedom begin.

Steve