Eric Odom

My post about the internet in 1996 got me thinking and prompted me to take a look at my own websites from five years ago. Until now I didn’t realize how long I’ve been doing this. Sure, many have been doing it for a lot longer, but for me five years of being self employed, at least part time, has been quite a run.

My first website went live in late 2003. It was at Backpackerdeals.com, but for some reason Archive.org has nothing previous to February of 2004 and even then the cache seems to be missing.

Anyway, the site was an affiliate site for student travelers. It was a lot of fun, and the site made a few bucks. More importantly, it helped me learn what NOT to do and opened up a lot of doors for my internet marketing career.

My main mistake with Backpackerdeals.com was that I knew nothing about code when I started it so I used an out of the box solution. Which, at the time, was complete crap. After a few months I began to learn a bit about code and felt backed in to a corner with the site builder.

In the summer of 2004 I launched two more student travel websites. Backpackearth.com and Traveljive.com. I’ve since sold both sites, and it looks like the new owner took the content and parked the domains. But the two sites made me quite a bit of money from 2004 until early 2007.

This is Archive’s cache of TravelJive in the summer of 2004.

As you can see… it’s quite laughable. But in those days it was quite popular. On average, any given day in 2005 would result in about 600 unique visits. Backpackearth.com was doing MUCH better!

In 2004 the main source of revenue was Google Adsense. I was getting decent checks every month and it felt worth the effort. In 2005 Google Adsense started paying so low that it was almost insulting, so I yanked Adsense in favor of the new Yahoo Overture network. Overture paid more per click, but was still somewhat lacking.

This is when I entered the text link market. Yes, I was one of those…

I had an account at Linkworth.com that was paying $300+ per month and I had another five websites that I was spending a lot of time on. I was also running affiliate programs for Lowestfare.com and a few others.

2004 and 2005 were GREAT years to be making money online because the search engines were naive, the markets were easy to tap into, and blogs hadn’t yet started dominating over static content.

In early 2006 I was working in a completely different realm online. I started moving away from money via websites in favor of consulting work through private contracts. I was also heavily involved in politics and in the summer of 2006 I was working in politics as a political and internet consultant.

In 2007 I took a consulting job with a national political organization as “Director of Internet Operations”, which also allowed me to serve as Director for a national politically flavored new media conference.

November of 2007 brought great things as I took a job with Sam Adams Alliance in Chicago as “New Media Coordinator”, where I currently hold employment and work as an internet consultant on the side.

Not bad for a guy in his 20’s who started fiddling with websites while working at Wells Fargo Bank, right? The internet certainly changed my life forever, and it’s been a wonderful ride ever since.