Since 1998 I have dabbled a bit in affiliate marketing and have been a consultant to assist affiliates with their marketing strategies. Don't believe me? Well, just hop in the Wayback Machine and take a look at this page from December of 2000.

Sorry about the eyebleed caused by my daring sense of style but the important thing to note is the fact in this iteration of the website, I had links to eight genre themed virtual stores. Don't worry, this is not one of those "OMG I made $86,000 in a day doing affiliate marketing!!!!1!" sort of posts that is clogging the Internet. Quite the opposite - I hardly made much money on the stores and the other affiliate programs that I was involved with, but rather I had them as a method of adding content to my website. Regardless of the level of financial success, I was getting a lot of people coming to the site since I was ranking pretty high in the search engines for some valuable keywords. I learned a lot about SEO as a result, and the benefits of that education have definitely outweighed any immediate financial gain.

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