For those that don’t know me personally, I’ve been in Internet marketing since 1997. You wouldn’t know it looking around this blog (because, come on man!), but I have.

In late ’97, my then girlfriend called me from a job interview at a dot com startup and asked if I wanted to come down and talk to them. I had shot myself in the hand with a nail gun at work the day before, so of course I said “Yes.”

I had a website at the time, which was enough to get me hired. My job was to learn SEO, and can I just say, the late ’90s were a fantastic time to get into SEO. Infoseek, Webcrawler, Alta Vista, Excite, G.O.D., Inktomi, early Google, it was a helluva time!

After six months on the job, the company stopped making payroll. Eventually we all walked out, and eleven of us started a new company where we failed to make payroll for three years.

During that time, I got good at SEO.

I became Google Forum moderator at SearchEngineForums.com, ran a site called the Spider Knowledgebase, shared all my early experiments with IP specific content delivery (later iterations were called “cloaking,” but that’s not on me), and essentially lived in a world of server logs and search algorithms.

One day I got an email from some dude, we’ll call him “Kevin,” because his name is Kevin. I did not know him at the time, but in the email he invited me to Los Angeles to talk about a job. In my mind I was like, “We haven’t made payroll in three years. Damn-skippy, I’ll fly to L.A.”

Long story short, I took the job and a modest signing bonus, bought a used car and moved to Playa del Rey, CA.

A whole lot has gone down in the mean time, so I’ll bullet point some of the high and low lights:

• Built out a 5,000 domain traffic generation and resale system
• Did some other stuff that was vaguely affiliate marketing related
• Became an indirect subject of a very negative Salon.com article
• Joined a startup and built an affiliate program that hit $100,000,000 in revenue by year 2
• Testified before a federal grand jury
• Worked on several more affiliate networks
• Built a successful ecommerce company
• Bought a warehouse
• Bought a competitor
• Got hacked + cheated by a developer + robbed by a supplier, all same year
• Struggled to recover

I still own the ecommerce business if you ever need a gold pan, but in recent years I also took a job in Corporate Sales Support to help cover bills.

Recently, a friend, we’ll call him “Kevin,” because he’s the same Kevin who emailed me back in 2001 about coming down to L.A., gave me a call and asked if I’d like to get involved with his company, MagCast.

Damn-skippy! I had great coworkers in my side job, but it was pretty low pay, without much opportunity. I gave notice, and started working on MagCast stuff.

It is much more satisfying work. I get to write content like the following page with scary fish:

BTW, before I posted this pic, I used ‘save for the web’ in Photoshop and then ran it through TinyPNG.com to make it nice and lean. Page load speeds matter, folks. You want to rank, keep your page load times fast.

I’ve also been actively recruiting affiliates, working on SEO (did you know that “digital magazine publishing platform” is “platform voor het publiceren van digitale tijdschriften” in Dutch?), and just generally getting my head back into the startup mindset.

It’s been great!

Don’t get me wrong, MagCast is a ten year old SaaS company, so not a startup by any stretch, but the feel is there of making things happen, being agile, adapting quickly.

As far as a plateforme de publication de magazines digitaux (French) goes, MagCast is, IMO, head and shoulders above the rest.

For one, all the competitors (that I’ve looked at anyway), have a ‘call for pricing’ mentality. Does anyone looking at a SaaS solution really want to call for pricing?

MagCast links to their pricing from every page. It’s up front, and entirely transparent. There are also zero additional fees for volume, bandwidth, etc.

They are also super new-publisher-friendly. Like, they make it really easy, and actively help new publishers get off the ground. Every membership includes 90 days access to live Zoom courses on the business of magazine publishing. These are geared towards launching, growing and monetizing new magazines, and they’re taught by fellow publishers. It’s pretty cool.

Magazine apps are published for iOS and Android in the App Store and Google Play, but they also have a store built exclusively for MagCast publishers that lets readers buy magazine apps that they can access on Apple and Google devices, as well as their computers. In other words, readers can make operating system agnostic magazine purchases.

Anyway, if you are looking for a plattform für die Veröffentlichung von digitalen Magazinen (German, and yes, I need to stop with all the languages), check out MagCast.

If you’re a marketer or content creator in the Internet business opportunity and/or content marketing space, and have a ready list of potential publishers, let’s put together a webinar for your audience. Join our affiliate program.

And if you do none of the above, at least wish me luck on this leg of my journey.

Cheers!