Accidental Affiliate - Pt 2

byhalinphilly

2.4K followers

Updated 7 years ago

Long before Google came along, there were other search engines. Archie, Turbo Gopher, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com), DogPile and others. I spent an unGodly amount of time poring over these resources to learn more about this new animal called HTML.

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One thing led to another, and the next thing you know, I’m falling down into the HTML rabbit hole. I learned how change the text size, fonts, align paragraphs, and insert graphics. I found some animated GIFs to use. All I needed now was an idea for a website.

It had been only two or three weeks since I got my new Mac, And it seemed like I had learned d a lot and was making all kinds of progress when…

I was nursing a beer at the bar with Anthony when he drops a bomb on me.

“Forget HTML! It’s old news. Ancient history, You have to learn JAVA!”

I’m thinking, “What the f***???!!!!” I went off, “Are you kidding me? What do you mean forget html? What the eff is JAVA??!!”

Anthony, who was a bigger code geek than I’ll ever be went on to explain how this new programming language called Java was the new big thing and in order to stay competitive, I’d have to learn me some Java at least some JavaScript, because this new computer language would be a big part of this new cyber world of web pages and websites and all of the things to follow in the very near future.

Naturally, I searched the web for information about Java, and at first, I was very discouraged, because it was way, way , way over my head. But then, a cool thing happened.

You see, with new technology comes new innovations, and one of those innovations was web page editors. The early ones required you to know how to do a lot of it by hand, one keystroke at a time. But along came WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). With a WYSIWYG site builder like Dreamweaver, and Photoshop, you could create sites that you could format pretty much any way you like! So I started mucking around with a new site I created called Li’l Hank’s Guide For Songwriters. The sole purpose was to teach myself HTML.

Some of my inspiration of this site was also drawn from Benjamin Franklin. You see, as the inventor of the first printing press, he founded a monthly publication called Poor Richard’s Almanac. I figured if Ben Franklin could call himself “Poor Richard”, I could publish a website as “Li’l Hank”.

I chose the name Li’l Hank’s Guide because I had recorded a novelty song called, “I Met Santa On the Internet” by Li’l Hank (the name of the character I created that sang the song, sort of like Alvin of the Chipmunks). A syndicated D.J. named Doctor Demento, who specialized in novelty songs, began to play it in 1995 at Christmas time. BTW.. Dr. D is the guy who gave Weird Al Yankovic his first break.

Some time before Dr. D started playing my song, and shortly before the whole HTML and website phenomena, I had discovered the bulletin boards (aka discussion groups aka forums - on the underweb, which could only be accessed with a Shell account. I had joined a discussion group for Doctor Demento fans. Since I had already been an active participant in the discussions, I was able to promote my new song within the group, not unlike being a member of WA and asking some of the members to like your Facebook page.

As a result, a lot of the group members started calling into the show’s request line to ask Dr. Demento to play my song! One week it even went to #2 of the Funny Five, beaten only by Cheech and Chong. So, this was actually the first lucky accident on my way to becoming an affiliate marketer.

I was now a member of the L.A. songwriting community with a little bit of a track record. But the best was yet to come.

If you haven’t read part 1, here’s the link!
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.co...

Here's Part 3, the final chapter.
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.co...