Jeremy

I feel like telling a story today! I remember the first online forum I ever ran was a forum back in 2004/2005 for a penny stock I invested in. The penny stock was actually one of the most popular stocks on the pink sheet market at the time. I invested in this company because I thought the idea of PriseWise.com at the time was brilliant.

So of course being a noob and an idiot, I registered Prisewise.net and ran with it. Luckily for me I had a moderate position in the company (in penny stock terms) and the owners thought the forum was great. I even went out to Vegas to meet them.

The stock did well for a few months and actually went from .03 to .24 or something in a very short period. Myself, as well as many in the community were VERY happy. But as you can imagine, if you know anything about the OTCBB or the pink sheet market, all the PR's and bullshit didn't deliver. And the stock soon took a nose dive, eventually the whole thing unraveled.

It really sucked running a forum and seeing all the members including myself take a bath for thousands of dollars as well.

During the good times however I opened up a sister site that I promoted on Prizewise and bought paid ads for on other sites. PokerBulls was an ugly site, but in 2004/2005 it worked. I had tables set up at party named just for traders. It converted great at the time since poker was still just starting to boom. And people dumb enough to buy penny stocks were surely a good target for this new craze of online poker.

Once the stock tanked I realized the existing forum was going to die since it revolved around one small niche. Initially I had no intentions to build a poker affiliate forum. Instead I was going to open up a stock trading forum. But then after a little research I realized that the poker affiliate market had no affiliate forum. There were a few gambling affiliate forums (CAP,GPWA), but none just for poker.

So I wrote this ebook named PartyRiches about how to promote online poker. I also had a cheesy video made. The intention of this book was always to build a database from sales, and then open up a community forum. You have to realize, in 2004 & 2005 it was web 0.72...... no where close to 2.0. You didn't need pretty sites or content to make money.

Anyhow, I finished the book once and it accidentally got erased from my hard drive. I was so pissed at that point that I almost went back to the stock forum idea. Luckily I re-wrote the thing and moved forward. The rest is pretty much history.

People often ask me for a copy of PartyRiches, and trust me it sucks. 3-4 years ago, sure it made sense for new poker affiliates. Now days though it would be worthless reading, especially because I used a lot of outdated examples and referenced older sites that are not online anymore. Anyhow that is the cliff not version of how the entire poker affiliate community I founded started.