My Story

Those of you have met me at a conference or picked me up from under a table at a bar have me pegged as a goof – guess what you’re a good judge of character   Here is my Story.

We already know my name is Lyndon Reid – I was born on March 29, 1981 in Winnipeg – a smallish city in central Canada.  I have an older brother and a younger sister – yep I’d be the dreaded middle child.

My parents, who are both amazing, split when I was 3.  I spent most of my time with my mother and honed my golf swing with my dad on the weekends.

My mom battled hard to raise the three of us while working her way up at a local scientific research company.  She started as secretary and currently holds the position of North American Sales Manager.

Back to yours truly, I spent my early years running around the neighborhood in bare feet starting small fires.  I crossed a busy street (Regent Avenue) without permission a few times to check out the Pepsi taste challenge even though my mom would have killed me for risking death by crossing a busy street.  I know she doesn’t want me to die, so she kills, makes no sense.  She also told me that she’d be “so pissed of at me” if I killed myself on a motorcycle she co-signed for when I was 18.  Feel the Love!

As I grew older I became bored with school and interested in partying and strippers – hey I was computer nerd so it was easy enough to make fake ID.  I coasted through high school with a hangover and a 60% average.  It’s worth mentioning I wasn’t “bad” I was just having fun being an idiot and spending all my money partying (I worked full time at a golf course and made decent money for a young high school kid).

After graduating I took a year off and then decided to enroll in a Web development program. It was about 1999ish and I was already following some SEO trends and watching a friend have good success with a subscription site. I launched a community, had it DMOZ listed, and had hundreds of thousands of members until one day I grew bored and let the domain and hosting expire before monetizing it – I had no idea what I had.

I was always a little bit of an entrepreneur – I had my first paper route when I was about 6 years old.  By 8 I was biking about 6 kilometers to a golf course, scavenging golf balls from the bush and selling them to my dad and his friends for $6-$10 a dozen.  The list goes – I started hawking CD’s of short clips of people riding sport bikes which I downloaded on eBay (amongst other things) and had a good little gig going until lawyers got involved because I was selling copyrighted content and threatened to sue me and the university (I was hosting images on their server).  Yep, it was great to have the Dean of the University come pull me out of class to tell me they received a letter.  They were shitten’.

I graduated and took a job with government as Web developer.  I worked there for 3 years while doing client work on a side.  Eventually a client offered me a job paying much more than I was making at the government and offering me all sorts of sexy benefits so I took that job.  It lasted for 3 years until the money dried up (temporarily) and I went back to the government where I am happily and gainfully employed working in an Integration Competency Center.

All is fine and dandy and the Web development industry has been good to me allowing me to live a decent middle-class lifestyle, purchase a house when I was relatively young (23),  and travel a fair amount.

BUT:

My interests and heart has always been in “Website Monetization”.  A few years back I launched a couple of my own sites and had a little bit of success, not enough to quit the day job and begin doing things full time, but enough to get me excited.

I’ve continued to follow the industry and am now working towards building some bigger better sites with a real brand that can provide sustained and increased earnings in hopes being able to become unemployed full-time .

This blog will be a diary of my efforts.  I’ll be concentrating on my sites more than I will be concentrating on blogging here as I need to chase the low-hanging fruit.  As I have success or failures I will blog here.

Got a question or want to get in touch – just contact me.