In 1988 I joined the Marine Corps and was fortunate enough to serve with some great Marines in Operation Desert Storm. After my enlistment in 1992, I joined the Navy and became a parachute rigger and did two sixth months long west PAC’s where I was able to travel the world. Being the only person that really knew how to type in my shop, I was usually on the computer filling out anything that needed to be filled out. This got me to playing around on the computer which wasn’t something as popular as it is today. That got me fooling around with a very generic graphics program on the shops computer running Windows 95 just before I got out in 1997. In 1999, after working some odd jobs here and there, I got really serious about what I wanted to do in life and that equated to computers, graphics, and of course the internet. I signed up to go to school in Orlando, Florida at a pretty well-known school for digital media and other information technology courses. After completing school, I had several jobs doing such things as computer graphics, web design, logo design, and everything in between. It was a pretty good job, but not a career.

Then the words “affiliate marketing” were whispered in my ear. My whole way of thinking about what I could do on the internet changed. After doing some research, I really wanted to get into affiliate marketing, but I just didn’t want to throw out some irrelevant material and make a quick buck. I wanted to build a site or sites that contained great products that I was truly interested in. Several keywords immediately came to mind. Handmade, Handcrafted, Homemade, were a few of them. My father being a home builder, cabinet builder, and pretty much a person that could build anything, I think it got me to really appreciate the qualities that these types of products and people brought to the world. That brings us to my first affiliate site, We Heart Handmade Boots.