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What was IM like pre-Wordpress?

by doorkicker13
17 replies
For those of you who were doing this before Wordpress and the like.. what was it like back then? Was there less competition? I would imagine there would be less competition because a little more skill would be required to create a website, etc.. Now pretty much anyone who can read instructions and click some buttons can create a website in minutes.
#prewordpress
  • Profile picture of the author christopher jon
    A lot of really ugly websites
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  • Profile picture of the author CyberSorcerer
    I don't know, I was a porn affiliate marketer before I got into actual affiliate marketing.

    I guess it would have seemed like geocities? LOL
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  • Profile picture of the author No1here
    Originally Posted by doorkicker13 View Post

    For those of you who were doing this before Wordpress and the like.. what was it like back then? Was there less competition? I would imagine there would be less competition because a little more skill would be required to create a website, etc.. Now pretty much anyone who can read instructions and click some buttons can create a website in minutes.
    What was it like before WordPress? Depends on how far back in Internet history you want to go.

    When I first started playing around with IM it was 1995 and the Internet was truly the "Wild West" of promotion.

    Most folks who were doing IM, myself included, were affiliate marketing for porn websites. The reason being that back then, the general public, simply didn't trust that new fangled Internet thing with their Credit Cards.

    However, if you could get some poor slob horny enough then he'd be the one that reaches for his Credit Card so as to "finish up" with his beloved fantasy girl.

    Other than that there really were a lot of ugly websites and I do mean alot. Everyone was using a black background color because they thought that it made all the text and images "pop". I tried to stay away from black backgrounds as they were the amateur thing to do.

    The greatest thing about marketing back in the 90s was the conversion ratio. It was not uncommon to have a conversion ratio of 1:100

    The companies were shaving and skimming like mad men but even so, everyone made money.

    The thing I miss from those days is that if you wanted a website then you had to sit down and learn how to build it yourself. Yes, Netscape had a built in WYSIWYG visual web page builder but you still had to know at least some html in order to add affiliate code or to make the page do or act in ways that Netscape simply didn't cover.

    Browser hijacking was HUGE back in the day. With PPC affiliates paying out $0.10 per click it only made sense that if someone came to your web page that there be a little script that opened all your PPC affiliate links in seperate windows at the same time.

    I could go on and on as this is a time in Internet history that really resembled the Wild West.

    I might add more later but right now it's really late and I need to get to bed.
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  • Profile picture of the author AceOfShirts
    Oh yes, the good old days when I was building sites with Microsoft FrontPage 97. That was cutting edge back then.

    There was a lot less competition with people using actual domains. I think the first site I built was on something called freeyellow.com. Geocities sites were popular. Then I started paying $25 a month to host 1 site. It's not like now with HostGator where you can host unlimited sites with a Reseller account for $25 a month.

    You could also call it the golden age of cookie stuffing.

    Now I'm off to find a bottle of Crystal Pepsi.
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  • Profile picture of the author cashcow
    There was a lot less competiton back then and it was easier to get ranked for keywords but there were also a lot less tools making the whole process much more difficult and time consuming. Especially if you were selling digital downloads before there was any software that automated it!
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    Gone Fishing
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  • Profile picture of the author Simon Johnson
    Prior to Frontpage it was Dreamweaver, then "Hot Dog", then Notepad or vi, pico (Unix). SEO tools were similar in that it was about keywords, title tags, meta tags etc...

    While it was more simple (no RSS feeds, ping blah etc..) everything was slower. A tradeoff really. :-)
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  • Profile picture of the author Istvan Horvath
    Probably, it was a nicer world: this forum couldn't have been littered with WP-related technical questions.

    Although WP started in 2003... the IM world discovered it way later.
    In the beginning there were no plugins, no themes, no wysiwyg editor, no widgets, no automatic upgrades...
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    • Profile picture of the author Michael Shook
      Lots of sites using 16 websafe colors with all centered text. And snow or stars falling down. And a lot less ads everywhere.
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      • Profile picture of the author doorkicker13
        I wish I would have got into IM back when I first got into the internet. I made my first website with notepad and paint in 1999 for a Counter-Strike Clan when I was 14 (ha..those days...).
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      • Profile picture of the author Dan C. Rinnert
        Originally Posted by doorkicker13 View Post

        For those of you who were doing this before Wordpress and the like.. what was it like back then? Was there less competition? I would imagine there would be less competition because a little more skill would be required to create a website, etc.. Now pretty much anyone who can read instructions and click some buttons can create a website in minutes.
        Well, I think there was less hacking back then. "Powered by WordPress" is pretty much the equivalent of putting up a sign that says "Hack My Website!"

        Originally Posted by JMichaelZ View Post

        And snow or stars falling down.
        Falling snowflakes are still awesome.
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        • Profile picture of the author Michael Shook
          Originally Posted by Dan C. Rinnert View Post

          Falling snowflakes are still awesome.
          True enough. And that little airplane that dragged the banner.

          What I really like now is the dancing mortgage bankers on AOL or the ladies jogging back to school because the president wants to give them a grant.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael Meaney
    We had to send emails via carrier pigeon.

    Glad that's over now.
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  • Profile picture of the author brendan9971
    ohhh god it was horrible!!! i remember the days of lots of geocites and it was terrifying!
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  • Profile picture of the author BloggingPro
    I wasn't really into internet marketing as I know it today, but I was a geo-cities addict back in the late 90s. I was about 13 or 14 and was going hog wild with them. I wish I would have saved screenshots of those "early sites' as they were absolutely atrocious.

    Regardless Wordpress has made "website building" more accessible to those who were leery of learning "complicated" html code.

    As for internet marketing? I'm sure it was the same as today but most marketers utilized different methods. For example there was no Adsense or Amazon back then. I don't even think clickbank came into being until like 2002.

    All I can say is that I wish I could get in my little time machine 3000 and bank it hard with Google Adsense after its inception with the knowledge I have today.
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    You're going to fail. If you're afraid of failure then you do not belong in the Internet Marketing Business. Period.
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  • Profile picture of the author Anonymous Affiliate
    Frontpage and dreamwaver were the norm, and as a web-admin it was a pain to manage and interlink deep websites with tons of pages. That's how WP has helped me the most: site-wide content (header, footer, menu bar, sidebar, etc) management.
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