Mark Gilbert

When I was still a young boy at home, my dad was a cookware salesman. I remember him giving me bread knives to sell door to door when I was 12 years old to earn money. I bought them from him for $1 and sold them for $2. I would come home 5 or 6 knives sold in less than an hour, and felt like the richest kid on the block. That was the beginning of my entrepreneurial career. I've been in sales and marketing ever since.

In 1997 I decided to throw in the towel on my distriborship in Northern California to pursue the Internet (whatever that meant at the time). All I knew was that the Internet was going to be the next gold rush. So I loaded up the family and moved to Oregon, spending 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week, studying marketing patterns and business processes on the Internet.

I decided to join a network marketing program and test some marketing processes on the Internet. The next 3 years I built mlm organizations as large as 5,500 in my downline in 120 days or less, and be in and out of over 10 different companies. During that time, I found a common thread between all the companies I had joined: everyone needed fresh qualified prospects. The problem was that there was really no company that had built an online lead system that met the needs of the mlm industry.

So I approached a member of one of my downlines, who was a sharp programmer, to bounce some ideas off of him. We ended up building a system that would drive traffic to one landing page and distribute live inquiries simultaneously to hundreds of campaign participants, while keeping the data exclusive and organized in each participant's password protected backoffice.

This was revolutionary at the time, and soon became the standard for "lead generation" companies who followed our footsteps. We developed online ad campaigns for many verticals, including Legal, Debt, Mortgage, and others, in addition to Business Opportunity seekers. We also went on to develop highly customized ad campaigns.

Today, I am fascinated by the social networking landscape with all the communities, applications, and strategies for building relationships first, and exposing products and services last. I will forever be experimenting with marketing and business processes to exploit the power of the Internet, with its benefits of innovation and automation for making money.

In the mean time, I'm having a blast on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and many other social media apps, meeting new people, developing new relationships, and playing new characters, like Vern Cornfield ;-)