How I Quit My Job and Made Millions of Dollars Online

Michael Jackness sits down with Kalika Yap on this two-part episode. Michael is a well-established online entrepreneur who first saw success in becoming a power seller on eBay, eventually turned to SEO and affiliate marketing before moving to e-commerce. He shares his journey from starting his first business at 18 years old to the very interesting turn of events about treadmill.com. He also talks about some best practices on how to be better at e-commerce, from changing your perspective on how to sell to finding the product that will practically sell itself. Tune in now!

I started my first business directly out of high school at 18 with nothing but a box of business cards and a pager (remember those). This business, Discount Computer Consultants was my primary business for many years until Lee Technologies hired me full-time in 1998. When I joined Lee Technologies in 1998, they had about 40 employees and no standard technology. I grew along with their business, standardizing their network, expanding technology, building and then later running a 24/7 national operations center, and developing enterprise software packages. When I left Lee Technologies in 2004 as a member of the Sr. Management Team, had grown to over 200 employees. In 2004 I started what is now known as Protos Marketing in my basement with two other business partners. The original goal of the business was to give away a free gift in exchange for signing up through our online poker referral links. This unique marketing strategy was immediately successful and is still the cornerstone of the industry. In 2010 I left poker for more “traditional” marketing areas and started Terran.com where we specialize in building out ultra-premium keyword domains.

Specialties: Search engine marketing, relationships, and adopting change