If you’ve followed this blog much at all, you know I’m a fan of James Brausch’s work. He builds businesses around blogs, which is what I am doing here.

I believe he does this to build a relationship with his customers. And in doing so, he’s quite open with his personal life. For instance, see this post.

I really don’t talk much about my personal life on this blog, other than an occasional music suggestion and even rarer slip of my Libertarian politics (go Ron Paul!).

Ok, let’s fix that.

I’m born and raised in Washington State. I’m 24, which is young, but I’ve been involved in “Internet Marketing” longer than most. It’s hard to remember if I was 14 or 15 when I first began trying to sell things online. I bet I could figure it out if I wanted, but it makes my head hurt to think about.

In any case, that gives me at least 10 years of observation. The first few years I hardly made a dollar. And that’s interesting, because at the time it was pretty easy to get listed number 1 in the search engines… overnight.

In high school, I began advertising a religious website I ran via Alta Vista. To get traffic to the site, I just paid attention to the news. Whenever a big story hit, I copied and pasted the Associate Press article on to my website (I now realize that’s called stealing) and filled the sidebar with links to my main site.

Alta Vista let you submit your site to their engine, and it was usually listed within 24 hours. So I’d be listed at the top for the hottest searches on the net. This got me a lot of traffic. And while it MAY have helped spread a positive message, I never used it to make cash.

My senior year of high school I started selling a magic trick product online. The rise of David Blaine made this an easy sell, and I made a decent allowance. This helped me make the decision NOT to go to college. A decision I would regret after attending my first college party some years later…

…ok, kidding.

My only copywriting “training” had come from reading sales copy. I’d ran “businesses” since I was about 4. (Really nothing fancy, just selling to family mostly.) But this interest always had me reading sales copy in the back of magazines that usually started with “Make $1200 Per Day Mailing One Simple Letter!”

I must have read a TON of ads a TON of times. In high school, my natural style of writing was much like a copywriter. And really, I think it has more to do with my personality than the copy I read on a daily basis.

I simply wrote in short sentences, short paragraphs, and very conversational. A natural copywriter.

The year after high school is when I really started writing sales copy that got any attention. I had written a decent sales page for my magic trick product and sent it off to some ezine owner for a review… he wrote back it was one of the best he’d ever seen and was more convincing than 99% of the crap he’d seen.

Sound good? Eh, I know now the letter was good for an amateur. But that’s about it. It DID convert decent, but David Blaine helped a lot with that. Sales died down when he wasn’t in the spot light as much.

Some people took notice and I wrote a few pieces of copy (for free) while I was trying to get started selling my “Internet Marketing” products. (Half of which I never released… a failure secret I’ll share with you soon.)

My biggest problem the year after high school was focus. I worked pretty hard, but I never finished a project to completion. I had a lot of ideas but not the discipline or smarts to make the most of them.

I was probably one of the first to use co-registration to build a subscriber list. I don’t know who did it before me. But probably someone. If not, I released a report to thousands sharing how I was doing it. So maybe I did start the whole thing.

In fact, I met one of my best clients and friend, Ryan Deiss, when he pulled in the most subscribers from our first subscription event…

To Be Continued…

Cheers,

Stephen Dean, Copywriter

Offering Incredible Copywriting Services

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