David A. Cobb

The beginning for me was sometime back in 2006. I’d had computers since about 1999, and was fairly good at fixing the ones I had broken by now.

I had read a bit about internet marketing at this stage, but still didn’t know much about the internet, especially websites etc.

So, one day my best friend, Brad rings me up and says, “I’m producing a DVD!” It turns out he’s been treated for cancer at a Cancer Rehabilitation Clinic at Box Hill in Melbournes’ Eastern suburbs, and part of his treatment is this Chinese Massage system that you can do at home, by yourself. It worked for him and so he wanted to tell the world about it. He figured the best way to get it to the masses was on a DVD.

So, anyhoo, my response was, “So why are you telling me this?”

He said, “I want you to build me a website…” I asked, “Why me?”

His response nearly bowled me over, he said, “You’re the only person I know, that knows anything about computers.”

What could I say, but OK? I went online and Googled, “Free Web Hosting”. I was amazed at the number of options I had. I chose a couple and went to work. First I started building in WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). Problem was every time I published the page to the internet, it was WRONG! The text would overlap the pictures or the pictures were in a totally different part of the page or it just didn’t look right. I decided to learn HTML. I taught myself by creating the page in WYSIWYG and then hitting the HTML tab at the top of the page and editing it all there.

Brad came to my house and we went online and bought a domain name. I built the website based on the information about the DVD and the Chinese professor that had treated Brad. I started studying online marketing techniques from anywhere I could. That website is still around today and we are still selling the DVD from it. It has changed a lot over the past four years and if you had seen it then and came back now, you would not recognise it as the same site.

It’s funny, I am as proud of that site as I am of any of my own. It was my first real website. I designed it in Microsoft Word, and thought I was so clever. It was so full of junk coding, every time we wanted to add something new, we had to remove something that Word had automatically done, that was stopping the new code or script from working.

Eventually, I downloaded Dreamweaver. The website still has a lot of MS Word coding in it and one day I will totally rebuild it, I still currently use the original template that I built, but at least Dreamweaver only adds what you tell it to.

That website is the Meridian Health website.

The next obstacle, how to market it without spending any money… Well I looked all over the internet. I went to every free seminar I could get to. Everyone seemed to talk in the same direction, “Go to Ezine Articles, write some articles and drive traffic”. I thought, How hard can it be? I sat down at my PC, hands poised above the keyboard, waiting for inspiration. None came…

One day I attended a Geekversity seminar, and this young bloke Shaun Stenning was talking about article marketing. His advice, read three articles about your chosen subject, one after the other, and then write your own article. So that’s what I did. These days, if you Google any term that relates to Qi Gong and Meridians or Health, you will find the Meridians For Health website on the first two pages at least once each. You will also most likely see some of my articles about the site or the DVD as well.

Obviously, along the way, I had to learn a little about SEO as well, and then implement what I’d learned. It’s not as hard as you might think.

Anyhoo, that should give you something to think about for now, make sure you bookmark this site and come back regularly. Next up, I’m going to tell you how I stopped procrastinating and got down to business.

Until Next Time…

I Am Where I Am, And That’s OK!

66 Responses to “In The Beginning…”