Despite my overwhelming obsession with broadband campaigning (which has now consumed nearly two decades of my life) I do actually have a real job, one which was the actual cause of me getting involved in broadband in the first place. As one of the first Internet marketers in the world, back in 1995 I was having major problems delivering the services my clients wanted. Not only was I on dial up costing per call (roll on FRIACO), but I also regularly had computers blown up by power surges because of my rural location. and today, little has changed — my productivity is still minimal compared to my capabilities, purely due to the poor quality of my connectivity. I worry less about my connection, though, as the electricity problem has been reduced with surge protectors, UPS, etc., though, and I also no longer want to work every day and night!

Back in ’97, I think, I finally decided to move my site off GeoCities and all the other freebie sites I had created a presence on, and instead get a domain and a single point of presence. One of the discussions in the industry at the time was the importance of having keywords in your domain name. Having had a quite a few clients by that point, though, I already realised that relying on search engines to generate traffic was not the be-all-and-end-all of Internet marketing, and I hated with a vengeance the term “Search engine optimist” and all variants thereof. In fact, just that TLA on its own could set me off. SEO? Pah, don’t you know about webrings, or fora, or bulletin boards, or IRC, or who you can find on ICQ, or how good some of the niche directories are, or.. or…or…

Google, when I began, wasn’t even a gleam in a garage, and there were multiple engines with different ranking algorithms and rules you had to try to satisfy to get decent listings across the many engines to get traffic. I registered WebPR, as I felt that it was all about being open with the public and building relationships. I’m still very happy with my domain, though I no longer use it to get work. (In fact, it is deliberately set up at present to avoid that pain!)