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Excited to be part of ReveNews!
About a year ago, Urban Outfitters featured a green t-shirt emblazoned with a bright orange and yellow circa 1985 computer (think TRS-80 Model III) with the caption “The Internet Is Awesome”. I ordered it immediately. And while the shirt is clearly intended to be a goof — like Napoleon Dynamite’s Unicorn tee and many of the others on Busted Tees — for those of us who make a living thanks to the ol’ Dub-Dub-Dub, the Internet TRULY is AWESOME!
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Entrepreneur. And what better playground for me to satisfy my start-up craze than the online world?
I went to college before the Internet was really alive — although I did have a “umich.edu” email address. After my sophomore year in 1994, I left Ann Arbor to be a part of my first start-up which today is known as CollegeSports.com, or CSTV.com. CSTV is one of the largest college sports destination sites online and was recently acquired by CBS (Viacom) along with the CSTV cable television channel.
We started the company as a CD-ROM publisher in ‘94, but launched the FANSonly network in 1996 in the web’s early infancy. At one point in ”96, I remember speaking with Mark Cuban of Audionet, which later became broadcast.com (acquired by Yahoo! for ~$5B in 1999), about a potential strategic partnership or outright acquisition. Woulda, coulda, shoulda, huh?!
I left FANSonly to join Yahoo! in March of 1997 where I was employee #192. I still get goosebumps describing being 23 years old and working at the coolest company in the hottest industry in the greatest economic boom in the history of the world. I had 4+ phenomenal years at The Hoo — I was responsible for the better part of $100 million in sales during that period — I made an incredible number of friends and business contacts and most importantly met my wonderful wife, Ellen. (I’m such an Internet geek that while I proposed to her traditionally, when you typed her name in Yahoo! on July 14, 2001, this banner ad popped up…)
Since leaving Yahoo! in April 2001, I’ve started several companies. The first, eCreditCards, is a thriving credit card and financial services affiliate marketing network. Success with “ECC” spawned “CashFlowFromCreditCards“, a credit card marketing business opportunity that I launched in Feb ‘05. CFFCC is for people who either lack the technical skills, business contacts, or the time — or some combination of all three — to set up their own credit card affiliate site. I’ve developed a technology platform that “powers” these new sites, tracks all the leads they generate, and let’s people make some basic site customizations — colors, fonts, headlines, etc. Some of our more successful sites include my UMich buddy’s site Rumdog.com, MasterCardPage.com, and CollegeCreditCardCenter.com. My network is now in the hundreds of sites, and we’re sending out tens of thousands of dollars in monthly commission checks. And coming soon: the CashFlowFromCreditCards.com infomercial — expect that to begin airing in April!
I Co-Founded another company called Coreflix in 2002. Coreflix is a Netflix for action sports, featuring more than 500 DVDs across surfing, skateboarding, skiing, snowboarding, motocross, wakeboarding and various other “extreme” sports categories. My partner in the venture, Joe Agliozzo, and I sold the business in 2004, but the acquirer is moving into a new direction and recently sold it back to us. (By the way, the website looks live, but we’re not taking new customers just yet, although it’s fun to see the sign-ups and emails coming in this week after the site had been down for almost 4 months!)
Finally, my most recent start-up is something many of you fellow PPC marketing addicts will be particularly interested in checking out called BetterPPC. Joe observed many of the customer acquisition tactics I was doing for Coreflix and eCreditCards, and noted that my Google AdWords campaigns, while clearly successful, didn’t appear to have any science or “testing” methodologies….So we created BetterPPC, a testing and optimization platform for Search Engine Marketers that helps AdWords advertisers rigorously test lots of variations of ad copy — Headline, Line 1, Line 2 of your PPC ad — to find the optimal creative. BetterPPC is a combination of Taguchi, Multi-Variable Testing and our own twist of Applied Mathematics, and it totally works — 9 out of 10 test yields an improvement (as measured by CTR), and the typical increase is upwards of 40%! Check it out for yourself for free with coupon code FREEBEE.
I have a couple of other investments and entrepreneurial projects in the works, along with some SEO and PPC work I do for a handful of clients and friends, and I’ll be sharing these with you over time, along with other start-up concepts that I dream up. In my blog here, in addition to my random musings about SEM, SEO, search and affiliate marketing, I’ll look at start-up companies and news, deal-flow and trends in early-stage and venture financing for Internet-related ventures.
A quick thank you to David Lewis for encouraging me to be a contributor on Revenews, and to Jim Kukral for giving me the opportunity. Looking forward to this ride!
Hi, Ben…
Nice to see a familiar face. I’m looking forward to reading your entries. Congrats!