Sock Money: SEO ThinkTank Event Contest

I just dropped by Shoemoney.com and found out Jeremy is having a contest for folks to submit entries stating how they could add value to this event by attending. The winner gets an all expense paid trip to the conference. Pretty cool.

So being the competitor I am, and having spent my last 8 years in seclusion, I thought this might be something worth going after. So here is my submission:

What Can I Offer The Attendees Of 2008 ThinkTank

I feel it is only proper to start off by sharing a little background about myself. I built my first website in 1993 when I was in college. By 1995 I was building dynamic web applications that would pull data from a database. Back then we were all about Netscape and O'Reilly's Web Server. Microsoft Internet Explorer was just entering the game back then. The good old days.

After college, I joined the corporate world. I think I knew all along I was an entrepreneur at heart. I was never quite satisfied with the corporate way of life. My first year on the "Job" I started my own side web development business. I must have drafted hundreds of letters and went door to door deliverying my sales pitch to every local business I could find. This was in 1997. The internet had not taken over the world. No one wanted a website. I got one nibble from a Florist shop. I drafted up a killer site for them, demoed it and that was it. They were not interested. They did not see the value of having a website. So I went back and focused my energy at work, building web applications whenever I got a chance in my corporate world.

Around 1999 I got an idea for my own website. I saw a need and thought I could fill it. There was some tough competition already jumping in, but I went for it anyway. I setup a Linux server in my apartment with Apache and MySQL. Never used either before, but from what I had read they were the way to go for building and hosting a site affordably. I taught myself Perl and ran with it. I launched my site by the end of year running off my home server.

Flash to 2 years later. My site had grown... but I was not making any money. I started shopping around to sell it. Had a few offers up to $15k. I pretty much sold it to a guy for that price, but he couldn't pay it all at once, so I backed out. Then I got an idea...

I decided to turn my site into a community run and managed site. Before it would require a lot of my time and energy to run. Hence why I wanted to sell it. But if I could re-design it to be managed mostly by the community of users, then I could just leave it to run wild and grow organically. That was my big turning point.

With my site on community auto-pilot, I pretty much refocused on other things... Until Adsense popped on to the scene in 2003. Adsense changed everything. My site went from making zero to pulling in $500 a month. I started realizing the potential of organic traffic and focused on making my site more accessible for search engines. From that point on my website income would continue to double each year reaching 5-figures a month by 2008.

Over the years I've learned a lot about what it takes to manage and build up an online community. Managing an online community can be a fulltime job for many webmasters. I have found ways to make it self-managed and self-policed. I've done many things wrong over the years... and have seen it all... From death threats from users (one user actually said they wished my family was on the 9/11 airplanes so they would die a horrible death)... to being slandered on blogs... threatened by lawyers... You name it... I've been through it.

My experiences handling all of these situations are my best asset that I can bring to the table... along with some pretty entertaining stories... ;-)