A lot of really ugly websites

I don't know, I was a porn affiliate marketer before I got into actual affiliate marketing.

I guess it would have seemed like geocities? LOL

What was it like before WordPress? Depends on how far back in Internet history you want to go.

When I first started playing around with IM it was 1995 and the Internet was truly the "Wild West" of promotion.

Most folks who were doing IM, myself included, were affiliate marketing for porn websites. The reason being that back then, the general public, simply didn't trust that new fangled Internet thing with their Credit Cards.

However, if you could get some poor slob horny enough then he'd be the one that reaches for his Credit Card so as to "finish up" with his beloved fantasy girl.

Other than that there really were a lot of ugly websites and I do mean alot. Everyone was using a black background color because they thought that it made all the text and images "pop". I tried to stay away from black backgrounds as they were the amateur thing to do.

The greatest thing about marketing back in the 90s was the conversion ratio. It was not uncommon to have a conversion ratio of 1:100

The companies were shaving and skimming like mad men but even so, everyone made money.

The thing I miss from those days is that if you wanted a website then you had to sit down and learn how to build it yourself. Yes, Netscape had a built in WYSIWYG visual web page builder but you still had to know at least some html in order to add affiliate code or to make the page do or act in ways that Netscape simply didn't cover.

Browser hijacking was HUGE back in the day. With PPC affiliates paying out $0.10 per click it only made sense that if someone came to your web page that there be a little script that opened all your PPC affiliate links in seperate windows at the same time.

I could go on and on as this is a time in Internet history that really resembled the Wild West.

I might add more later but right now it's really late and I need to get to bed.

Oh yes, the good old days when I was building sites with Microsoft FrontPage 97. That was cutting edge back then.

There was a lot less competition with people using actual domains. I think the first site I built was on something called freeyellow.com. Geocities sites were popular. Then I started paying $25 a month to host 1 site. It's not like now with HostGator where you can host unlimited sites with a Reseller account for $25 a month.

You could also call it the golden age of cookie stuffing.

Now I'm off to find a bottle of Crystal Pepsi.

There was a lot less competiton back then and it was easier to get ranked for keywords but there were also a lot less tools making the whole process much more difficult and time consuming. Especially if you were selling digital downloads before there was any software that automated it!

Prior to Frontpage it was Dreamweaver, then "Hot Dog", then Notepad or vi, pico (Unix). SEO tools were similar in that it was about keywords, title tags, meta tags etc...

While it was more simple (no RSS feeds, ping blah etc..) everything was slower. A tradeoff really. :-)

Probably, it was a nicer world: this forum couldn't have been littered with WP-related technical questions.

Although WP started in 2003... the IM world discovered it way later.
In the beginning there were no plugins, no themes, no wysiwyg editor, no widgets, no automatic upgrades...

We had to send emails via carrier pigeon.

Glad that's over now.

ohhh god it was horrible!!! i remember the days of lots of geocites and it was terrifying!

I wasn't really into internet marketing as I know it today, but I was a geo-cities addict back in the late 90s. I was about 13 or 14 and was going hog wild with them. I wish I would have saved screenshots of those "early sites' as they were absolutely atrocious.

Regardless Wordpress has made "website building" more accessible to those who were leery of learning "complicated" html code.

As for internet marketing? I'm sure it was the same as today but most marketers utilized different methods. For example there was no Adsense or Amazon back then. I don't even think clickbank came into being until like 2002.

All I can say is that I wish I could get in my little time machine 3000 and bank it hard with Google Adsense after its inception with the knowledge I have today.

Frontpage and dreamwaver were the norm, and as a web-admin it was a pain to manage and interlink deep websites with tons of pages. That's how WP has helped me the most: site-wide content (header, footer, menu bar, sidebar, etc) management.