Hi, I’m Bob.

So I see curiosity got the best of you. Interested who Bob Jones is? Let me tell you all about him.

I was born in 1977, in a small village in The Netherlands.

Back in 1996 I managed to break my Dad’s Win 95 PC with a “format c:/” command. Something I had overheard in computer-class. Who would have guessed it would actually wipe the drive?! Luckily I found the manual and install CD, and after struggling for 6 hours, I managed to get the damn thing running again, minutes before Dad came home. I don’t even think he knows about up to this day.. Anyway, that’s how I got interested in computers and soon after, I discovered the magnificent Internets.

I remember seeing it being used at the place where I worked at the time. Puzzled by the concept, I asked one of the IT guys how it all worked. “Just type something in this Netscape brower, and hit enter.” So the only thing that came to mind was NASA (probably because I associated it with high-tech stuff, like the Internets) and nasa.gov was the first ever site I visited.

Now, I didn’t get into Internet marketing or online sales at all. First came the chat rooms, then there were the free tripod, homestead and lycos homepages. After 1999 it became IRC, warez and FTP pub scanning. I think I even joined an online crackers group. To keep up with all this l33t-ness, I decided to join an IRC network, and run my own IRC server (I had such an awesome slogan for the server too – The Amsterdamned Connection), learned to work with Linux and Unix – even managed to get a job as a *nix engineer at one stage. But eventually I became bored with the scene, and started behaving like a decent netizen.

Making money online had never crossed my mind until the beginning of 2005. I was seeing more and more blogs coming online, and for some reason, I figured that I needed to get one of these blogs for myself too. After some initial test runs on free blog hosts, I finally registered my very first domain (bobmeetsworld.com – not active anymore at this time) and started blogging about all kinds of stuff. It really started out as a personal diary kind of thing.

The person to blame for my wandering into online money making is someone who most of you should know by now – John Chow. At first I was amazed at how easy he was turning written words into a profit, and I wasn’t too familiar with all this blogging stuff. To me, it felt like blogging was something pure and awesome, and that ads and paid reviews were just not done if you wanted to be taken serious as a blogger. I think I’ve even left a comment somewhere, saying that he was going to lose all his readers if he kept this crap up – but boy was I wrong! I just saw him make more money every month, and slowly got into the mindset that this would be the entrepreneurial way of the future. If I wouldn’t do it, the next blogger would!

At first I though I had to do the exact same thing as John. Obviously this didn’t work (as many newbie bloggers find out), and a few months down the track, and I realized that there is only room for one John Chow. We can learn from his experience, but we all need to do our own thing.

So here’s the kicker.

At some stage I joked to someone how funny it would be if somebody would make a blog that would take the piss out of John Chow’s blog. The name John Cow came to mind, and I managed to buy the domain from someone who was just sitting on it. I had to negotiate the asking price down from $800 to $80, and even then I wasn’t sure that would be a good investment! Thank God I did buy it, because I have had so much fun as the John Cow persona. I copycatted his entire blog, but added all the cow elements to it. He had two cars in his header, I had two cows. He was talking about money, I was talking about moooney. You get the drift.

Now as that blog went pretty much viral, I was starting to make more money online then I ever thought possible. This is where i got the bug, and unfortunately – that bug bit me in the ass later.

Drunk with my unexpected success, I got cocky. I got too full of myself, and I was kicking at pretty much everything and everyone I could kick at. My readers loved it, and I loved the fame and fortune. Playing the John Cow persona, I think I might have burned some bridges back then. But what’s done is done, and I can only move forward as myself. Sorry if I was ever a prick to you, I’m really not a bad guy!

After I had sold JohnCow in the beginning of 2008. I used most of the money I made from the sale on traveling, buying gadgets, getting engaged and buying my wife a big fat diamond ring. Things weren’t as hectic anymore, and I didn’t have to answer all that “fanmail” every day. Things were finally getting back in perspective for me. It also came with a rude awakening – a lot of people who I considered to be online friends turned out to be leeches of my JohnCow success. Soon after word of the sale came out, a lot of these ‘friends’ vanished, and only a handful of them remain these days. (You know who you are!)

So, that brings us closer to now. I took a while off from the Internets, and focused more on my real life, which had not gotten the attention it needed during my blogging adventures. I have had several sites running during that time, and they are making me thousands of dollars a month now. They’re not blogs, and they don’t take as much work. I’ve learned a lot about Internet and affiliate marketing, SEO, and social media (at which I still suck donkey balls!), and my goal is to utilize all this knowledge to be able to live the lifestyle of my dreams soon.

I have started blogging again. This is my personal blog, and I will write about everything under the sun. This time around, I’m going for personal branding. My name is Bob Jones, and this is my story.

Feel free to hit me up on one of the following sites. I’m online most of the time. Also, I do a bit of life-streaming these days.

*Even though I’m living in Australia, I’m Dutch. Hence the .NL
*Thanks to Komodo Media for the fab icons!

*Gawd! This is like the longest blog post I have ever written! Thanks if you made reading it this far down. I love you