Today someone pointed out this page from the Web Archive to me. Man, that brought back a lot of memories. The first was how ugly my site looked back then. The second was how crazy a time the dot com boom was. AllAdvantage was a company that offer to pay you while you surf the internet. How can they afford to do that? While you’re surfing you had to run a viewbar that showed advertising. You get paid $.50 for every hour up to 25 hours/month for your personal surfing. However, the company was set up with a multilevel structure and you could make money off people you referred to AllAdvantage and make money off your referral’s referrals (down 4 levels).

I use that AllAdvantage sales page to sign up over 10,000 people into my surfing network. It was among the easiest money I have ever made on the net. I signed up so many people that the Globe & Mail, Canada’s biggest newspaper did a feature article on me. Then the internet crashed, and AllAdvantage went with it. But before they went under, I took them for quite a bit of cash.

I can only imagine how many people I would have in my network today had AllAdvantage survive the dot com crash. When people ask me how I signed up that many people, I tell it was all done with that sale page. AllAdvantage was the start of what I would later call “Value Added Advertising.” While AllAdvantage recommend putting a banner on your site to get new signed up, I use that sale letter to “pre-sell” the web surfer. I didn’t write the core of that letter but I added heavily to it in order to give it more impact. The difference between that letter and a banner is like night and day. People were blind to banners, but when you explain to them how they can make money while surfing the web, they lined up to sign up.

The TTZ Hot Deals page, which is my most profitable page, is based on lessons learned from the AllAdvantage page. Will there be another AllAdvantage? I highly doubt it. We’re in the Google era now.