I've just learned what little I know from being around so long. I've been using computers since the early 1980s. Back then going online usually just meant dialing in to a BBS computer someone had set up in a back room. It you were really lucky you might know someone that could get you a usenet feed which was the closest anyone not at a university was able to get to what would become the internet. Hypertext was still a pretty new idea, and the www didn't exist yet.
I made my very first website in 1995, (basically just a page with some links for me and my friends to use as a home page). At that time SEO didn't even exist yet. Yahoo was the only real SE and it wasn't much more than just a very successful directory site at that time. Getting indexed in Yahoo was just a matter of submitting your site. By 96 or 97 Yahoo had started using more sophisticated algorithms and the idea of SEO was just starting out. Around 97 or 98 I made my first website geared toward marketing anything. I remember some of the first things recommended to do back then would gaurantee you being sandboxed today. lol.
Back then things like the number of pages on a site would be considered a positive factor, so just creating 1000 duplicate landing pages was a recommended practice. As keywords became more important, keyword stuffing became effective and recommended. SEO had a similar thinking as spam, in that the idea was to get as much traffic as possible so as well as using targetted keywords, it was considered a good idea to include high traffic drawing keywords even if they were unrelated to your site. It got so bad that it was hard to even get any new sites added to Yahoo. Everything back then was completely related to onsite optimizations, offsite factors meant nothing.
A lot has changed since then. Offsite factors became important for SEO. Google came along with a completely new SE model. Marketing became even more competetive, and the SE's work harder and harder to keep their listings from being manipulated.
Over the years I dabbled in IM off and on. Made a little with some affiliate sales back in the early days, and then made a fairly decent amount of money on ebay. Most of the websites I built were made for other people, and businesses that I knew. Overall I was way more involved in my offline job managing an industrial equipment dealership, and then later I was involved in real estate investing.
I had a few major setbacks in the last few years which forced me to start working more seriously at online ventures lately. I have a very good amount of knowledge on all the basic things, and a fairly good understanding of some more advance concepts. I've had to start with virtually no resources, so it's taking a little more time to build what I'm after but it's getting there.
The big thing is that no matter how much you already know, there's always more to learn. On top of that the techniques and strategies used are constantly changing, so you have to always be learning as things change. BHW is a good place to keep up as things change. There are a lot of really smart people at internet marketing on this forum.
