The first direct response sales letter I created was for a product I was hired to write on a freelance basis back in 2003. The project was called Traffic Hurricane. I wrote the sales page, FAQ and instructions for use of the project. Jeremy was the initial owner and developer behind the software before I purchased it from him.

Understand this was way before AI. Everything I did had to be crafted “by hand”. There was very little “automated-button-pushing” in those days.

Below is a series of links that go to an archival service called the Wayback Machine. This service takes snapshots of what website pages looked like… pretty close. Meaning, sometimes the formatting is a little off or an image is missing. But the general concept of that archived page is there.

Hurricane essentially helped online marketers of all experience levels create keyword focused pages that would rank well with the search engines. A search engine just starting out called Backrub had changed its name to Google a few years prior. Each generated page included Google Adsense ( which had just launched a couple years before), affiliate links, RSS feeds and more. It would generate content from the internet based on keyword research the program would reveal for each page and create many pages very quickly. After watching the metrics behind the project, I made Jeremy an offer and purchased it from him in 2004 and then continued upgrading and advancing it for the next several years, learning and honing in my copywriting and online marketing skills. It grew my email list to well over 100,000 people very quickly. And these were legitimate, double opt-ins who waited patiently for my next email to arrive. A good list of that size is very valuable hence the old saying, “the gold is in the list!”. Most email lists today are either highly underused or obnoxiously overused and leave far more money on the table than most business owners can understand.

I created the email sequences including the on-boarding/welcome, ongoing education/nurturing, up-sells, down-sells, cart abandonment, etc., for that growing list which included education about how to use it, how to market online and sold many of my own and affiliate products through it.

On April 13th 2024 Jeremy placed the initial sales page online and a snapshot was taken of it as shown to the left. This is the first of only a few snapshots of the direct response sales letter I was hired to write back in 2003/2004: Click the image to be taken to the web.archive.org site

As mentioned above, after the initial launch of the project and seeing the metrics and mechanics behind how it worked, I purchased Traffic Hurricane from Jeremy. Here we see my name show up the first time on 19 October 2004 during the transition period. Click image:

On November 19th, 2004 I took full control of the project and that is when I removed his name and continued to run the Traffic Hurricane system for the next several years. Click Image:

December 7th, 2004 I started A/B testing some of the Traffic Hurricane landing pages. Here is a screen shot of one of the test pages:

Here is a great read!
With many comments about how much people liked my writing and with testimonials flooding in, I’ve placed a link to the testimonials page. This link can also be found on the prior December 11th, 2004 page. Click Image:

Traffic Hurricane continued to grow and evolve. I surveyed the growing list and after tabulating the responses from the survey, I used the results to create several other companies including an Online Marketing Training Academy which I ran for many years, a hosting company which I later sold and others which made millions in revenue. Later in life, after growing with, learning about and participating with the initial growth of the world wide web, I am very happy and humbled to be called an online marketing pioneer.

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