About Me
My name is Vince Hofmeister and I am a 19 year old affiliate marketer. Currently I develop and maintain several websites that are used to help generate sales or leads depending on what the particular business demands. I use a variety of methods to drive traffic, but prefer various forms of paid traffic (mostly PPC) due to almost instant scalability once a profitable niche is found, and your budget and/or traffic source is the only limitation to the amount of revenue you can bring in with that niche. My life and the way I think has been radically transformed over the past few years, certainly for the better. Anyone that has been involved in affiliate marketing or anything similar knows that if you don’t have a strong stomach you will quickly sink. This industry is risky, but can be very rewarding at the same time, which is why I am so attracted to it.
Like many of us, I didn’t just jump into affiliate marketing head first. My dad was always involved in technology in one way or another, so naturally very early on I was attracted to anything that had a computer chip in it. I started off trying to design my first website (and failing miserably) around age 11 using one of my dad’s older computers that had a copy of DreamWeaver on it. Needless to say I was barely able to create a hyperlink at the time, but as the years progressed I learned more and more. Things really started to pick up speed when I was almost 15 when I built my own computer. Since I had spent almost a grand and a half of lawn mowing money on this thing, I was not going to let it go to waste. I went to the library and checked out stacks and stacks of books on virtually every programming language they had available thinking I was going to learn them all at the same time. I soon realized this was absolutely pointless, because the only way a 15 year old is going to make any money programming is probably something related to web design. Websites were being bought and sold every day for ~$100, and I didn’t know any big software companies that wanted to hire a 15 year old kid. I picked up a book on Apache, MySQL, and PHP and started reading. I had an idea for a site and I started programming it. I saw how slow things were moving and wanted to speed the process up, and that is when I found out about frameworks. I realized that if I wanted to design a fairly complicated site, a framework such as CakePHP could help me out. From then on I dedicated endless nights and days to mastering CakePHP inside and out. My way of learning has always been by doing, so I developed a new breed of social networking site (which someone actually launched about 6 months later) but never sold it or took it live because of a lack of funds. I came up with another idea, a membership style site and began to code it from the ground up using CakePHP. I spent a little over 600-700 hours on this site, and after little effort on my part to market or advertise it upon completion (though I didn’t think so at the time), I was only generating about $250/month in membership dues. After two and a half months working on the site thinking adding features would somehow magically draw more subscribers, and advertising wouldn’t do anything, I decided to sell the site. I sold it on SitePoint for a measly $1k, meaning I worked for about $1.50 an hour, not quite the best pay in the world. I worked for another company at the time though, making $15/hour developing and maintaining their website, as well as developing software in Python that helped them parse huge sets of data automatically rather than by hand. Because of this stream of money, I did not see the sale of my website for only $1k a loss because that $1k provided me with experience that to this day I believe is invaluable.
When I sold my site on SitePoint I saw other people selling sites I could easily program in about a day being sold for ~$150. I knew I had been wasting my time all along because the money was sitting in front of me the entire time. I went on a spree of churning out websites left and right, sometimes selling two in a single day. Naturally I was introduced to some of the various internet marketing forums when I was selling these sites. I saw I could develop tools for these internet marketers and sell them 100X over to different people versus a website that I could only sell once. I cranked out 3-4 tools that assisted marketers in different aspects of their business in about 5 months, and earned my first significant amount of money in this short period of time. It was quite funny how this worked, because I was developing tools for affiliate marketers, even though I didn’t belong to a single network at the time.
I’m always looking for the next best thing, and talking to some of my customers I realized they were using my tools to help them make in a single day what I made in these 5 months. I decided to become an affiliate marketer, a.k.a. getting paid to generate a sale or a lead. I formed A Digital Orange LLC, a company that specializes in developing razor sharp campaigns dedicated to helping you expand your business. If you are interested in the services we offer, you can visit us at http://adigitalorange.com/. This is pretty much where I am at today. I have worked with almost every single major CPA network in the business to help them generate sales and/or leads for their partners.
People usually ask me how I got started off in all of this, and my answer is always the same… I don’t like to be the same as everyone else because then you end up like everyone else. I’ve always wanted to do my own thing and work for myself. Affiliate marketing is perfect for this, because I am able to be my own boss. That isn’t to say I am not attending college, because I am (it would be fair to say most of that is at the will of certain family members), but I like this better than any 9-5 job a college degree will get me in a few years. I still am halfway bitter about this because by the time noon would roll around my senior year in high school, I had probably already made more money than the teacher’s class I was sitting in would make all day. But that’s beside the point. Bottom line, if you want it you can get it, and this is what the internet has taught me. If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it. Anytime someone tells you that you can’t do something, shut your ears as tight as you can. Now stop reading about me and go get those monies.
