Making Millions in Alabama: SlimWare Utilities CEO Chris Cope (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Where you actually making money on the affiliate programs?

Chris Cope: Yes, I was making money. I am not sure the companies were doing all that well in the end. Back then you got paid just for sending traffic. A registered user might be worth a dollar.

Another thing I did back then was to take advantage of the short supply of cable modem installers in my town. They were being sold like crazy but the installers that would come into the house and do the installs had trouble because a lot of computers did not have network cards. Sometimes they would hook up network cards via USB drives and they had to install the drivers. The local cable companies that were selling this broadband service in our city did not have qualified engineers to install the network cards and configure the computers. I started doing that type of work as well.

Sramana Mitra: You stayed very busy. Were you making a lot of money doing all of these different jobs?

Chris Cope: I made quite a bit. At the time it did not seem like I needed to finish college. I did not have enough time to take the classes. I saw what was possible and things were exploding. Not long after I left college the affiliate markets changed to revenue focused models but pay-per-click search engines came into play. I started analyzing what people searched for and how they searched. Back in the day it was pretty easy to see what terms people were searching for. I would use that data to try and find relevant affiliate programs and mix and match those business models.

Around 2003 I began analyzing the links that advertisers would use to advertise on the pay-per-click search engines. I could then spot if they were an affiliate or if they were a merchant trying to build a brand. That was important because if Coke was advertising on Overture then they were not worried about making money, they were just doing brand advertising.

An affiliate link was a valuable piece of information on a search term because it meant that advertiser buying that search term had to turn a profit. It meant there was a margin there. I started working with a lot of my friends who were programmers and we started looking at how we could parse out the affiliate links and the search terms people were looking for. We built a pretty popular tool at the time called Click Ad Equalizer. An individual could enter a keyword into the tool and it would return the highest searched relevant keywords. If you entered ‘books’ then it would return ‘buy books’, and ‘order books, in the order of the most searches done a month. We would then cross reference that data with the ads that were being served on each one of those words and we looked for those indicators. We used a few different indicators to determine which products were doing the best on which search terms. By looking at that data for long periods of time we were able to tell which products were doing well on the Internet and which products were not.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Making Millions in Alabama: SlimWare Utilities CEO Chris Cope
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