My name is Andreas Horch. During my college time, I registered my first website http://www.webfresh.com on October 27. 1998 (view whois records, I still own it ).

In relation, google was still a prototype on http://google.stanford.edu back then.

Fascinated by the potential of this new, exciting medium, I experimented with Perl, at that time practically the only mainstram scripting language for web applications.

Being a proud website owner, I quickly found out that other fellow webmasters including myself are in a real need of promoting their website and getting their site known to others.

With google being literally non-relevant that time and the ONLY somewhat efficient directory being yahoo.com, I created a Free For All Link Directory (web archive from April 17. 1999: http://web.archive.org/web/19990417140743/http://www.webfresh.com/) with my modest perl skills pretty quickly and had people submit their sites with absolutely no promotion efforts on my part at all.

At that time, with google being in BETA, they didnt mind FFA link pages at all, on the contrary, they were actually HAPPY for each link they could get into their index, so basically this is my share of google’s success (lol) and nowadays they penalize sites which initially helped them grow (don’t get me wrong, we all profit from quality search results, its just funny how things turn out in life).

Even though I didnt make a dime from this FFA page I was really excited about other people interacting with me through this site and using my service. Unfortunately a couple of weeks later, my hosting provider shot me down because I was using too much server resources.

With shared hosting prices being much higher than today and dedicated server resources completely out of my humble amateur budget, combined with my modest perl skill knowledge and probably admittingly also a lack of foresight, I abandoned this project and experimented with other ideas.

The next project I setup was a combined FFA and Bookmark Manager and went live with it April 28 1999 (http://web.archive.org/web/19990428094545/http://www.webfresh.com/) (yes, 4 years before the mother of all social bookmarking and web 2.0 http://del.icio.us went into service!). Unfortunately also this site got plugged off by the hosting company pretty quickly and I was focusing on services that actually could earn me some money in a short-term period.

In late 1999 I was publishing some perl scripts I created (news, knowledge base, guestbook and a guestbook with mysql backend (which was one of the first of its kind back then, which means I learned from my past experiences with hosting providers who shut me down because of the flat-text-based database which caused huge load on servers ) for free and sold them on a shareware basis for commercial and business purposes.

At that time I was receiving several requests from fellow webmasters who wanted me to install these perl applications on their websites and I started to offer a cgi script installation service at webfresh.com at first for my own scripts, then also offered installation of 3rd party scripts. That was the first time I actually earned money online, which I immediately partially spent on my first pay-per-click marketing campaigns to attract more targeted customers. Since google adwords was probably still on some drawing board at that time, the only solution back then was goto.com (if you are interested, goto.com became overture later and overture became Yahoo search marketing). Over the years I have used pay-per-click marketing campaigns for all my products and services, using goto.com, overture.com, yahoo search marketing, google adwords, microsoft adcenter and have experience with various web-based ppc scripts that allow you to run your own ppc search engine)

Also I started to create and sell web templates and interfaces but stopped short later due to a lack of time, interest and again foresight (in 2003 ready-made web templates became a million dollar business) and instead focused on cgi script installations and script development.

In May 2001 I created a free viral marketing website http://www.adsplit.com which I have visually and functionally redesigned in June 02 2003 (I don’t know why but I still like this setup and design today , here is a screenshot from June 2003 http://web.archive.org/web/20030606063543/http://www.adsplit.com/ ) which grew to over 20,000 members. However due to my other projects I began in 2001 I neglected adsplit.com and didn’t pay much attention to it, which resulted me in loosing this domain name in 2005 or 2006 (heck, I don’t even know when I lost the domain, thats quite embarrasing and yes, quite franky, pretty stupid. Starting from 2003 I registered all my domains through godaddy because the domain registrar I registered previously with was much more expensive while providing much less service, they inconsistently sent me renewal notifications and at a point I must have forgotten to transfer this domain to my godaddy account somewhere along the way).

The free scripts created at webfresh.com have been downloaded several thousand times and I have installed scripts on several hundreds of servers.

In 2001 a client requested an exit exchange script similar to exitexchange.com and I started to custom develop an exit exchange script together with a partner. We were the first website to offer off-shelf commercial traffic exchange scripts on http://www.ascripts.com in September 2001 and quickly sold dozens of copies with the first months (screenshot of March 2002 http://web.archive.org/web/20020331053626/www.ascripts.com/)

In 2002 we customised the script and added startpage exchange, autosurf and popunder exchange scripts to our product portfolio. In 2002 other traffic exchange scripts and services popped up on the market like mushrooms in a humid forest. At the same time microsoft IE 6 became popular with its built-in popup blocker which completely wiped off the exit-exchange marketing from one day to the other and we focused only on startpage and autosurf exchanges.

We also started our own traffic exchange service http://www.trafficrun.com (archive 2002: http://web.archive.org/web/20020527043101/http://www.trafficrun.com/), which rapidly grew to over 4000 members in 2003 (view this review http://www.netmarketingforum.com/hitnewsissue21.html of trafficrun.com in the hit-exchange news from November 20, 2003, still an active traffic exchange news publication to date).

Also in late 2002 we acquired http://www.mojoscripts.com with its dating and personals classifieds script written in Perl which allowed us to focus on a broader market than the traffic exchange scripts. We customized and re-built the whole application, added mysql backends to all scripts along with new features and functionalities of standard classifieds scripts at that time and offered a suite of classified products for different markets (general classifieds, real estate classifieds, automobile classifieds, jobs classifieds and personals classifieds).

In 2004, we decided to sell ascripts.com and trafficrun.com to focus on our classifieds software site.

In 2005 I created http://www.telalinks.com, an automatic link exchange service which quickly grew to over 25,000 members. However due to google webmaster guidelines, mass-link exchanges with other unrelated websites is no longer effective. Based on the experience I gained and from listening to all member wishes and requests I gained over the past 4 years, I developed http://www.Linknami.com, which is the most comprehensive, targeted link exchange and article marketing service to date which focuses more on delivering quality targeted traffic to your website rather than just on search engine optimisation.

As of 2009, I am no longer part of mojoscripts.com to concentrate all my efforts solely on Linknami.com.