Who the Heck is Frank Bauer anyway?

I can’t believe it’s just 1 1/2 years ago that I started my journey from a “one-man band” to freedom. 🙂

Still remember how I send the first issue of my email newsletter on July 1st 1996, how I registered Add2it.com in March 2000, how I worked the last day in a full-time job as a hardware & software computer support guy on November 30th 2001, how I registered my business as a sole trader on April 1st 2002, how I moved with my family to Australia in January 2005, how I met the first time Aurelius Tjin (more on him later) in person in March 2006 after an offline seminar and how I registered on October 1st 2008 Add2it.com Marketing Pty Ltd.

Wow… covered 12 years in one paragraph. 😉

A little before that, on October 26th 2007, my business partner Colin Klinkert and I launched our very first joint project… ViralURL.com

The site grew awesome… we even reach an Alexa rank of around 5,000 at one point and have now, less then 2 years later still a traffic rank of 10,682 (at the time of writing this).

The advantage of partnering up with Colin was of course that we could both compliment our strength & weaknesses and share the work load and time needed to setup a mammoth project like ViralURL.com.

But still, with a successful site like that… the amount of “daily grind-work” grew more and more, to the point where it seriously hindered the business growth. There was no time left to improve the sites I had, launch new sites or spend a serious amount on marketing tasks.

On March 27th 2008 I finally hired my first full-time Virtual Assistant, Marie…

It was actually Aurelius Tjin, a good friend and also fellow Internet Marketer, that helped me find Marie. He had already one Virtual Assistant himself and pointed me in the right direction.

After a week of training Marie I could see my work load drop and I was able to work on business growth again. Over the next few month I mainly concentrated on adding many additional cool features to our ViralURL.com site and growing it’s membership base every single day.

Then on March 19th 2009 the next site was launched together with another business partner of mine, Sal Vannutini… RapidFireBlogTraffic .com and just a few days later, on April 1st 2009, Colin and I announced on our ViralURLs.com blog our next joint project… ViralFollowers.com

It was again time to get more help on board and so I hired end of April 2009 my second full-time Virtual Assistant, Julie…

All the first level support was now taken care of most of the time with Marie & Julie working an two shifts, covering together 6 days a week. But second level support was still done by myself only and so was the daily dealing with the payment processors.

Colin & I still had at that point many more project ideas in mind that just waited for the implementation. Also I myself had many improvement ideas for my existing Add2it.com Marketing Pty Ltd business.

To be able to grow faster and move all these projects ahead faster, I hired middle of May 2009 my first full-time programmer, Michael…

This time I didn’t go the same way about finding him as I did with Marie & Julie, but instead posted a job description at GetAFreelancer.com. It wasn’t as smooth of a process then with Marie & Julie, but in the end we worked everything out. 🙂

On May 28th 2009 Colin and I launched our next site, a new tool for ViralURL.com members, called ViralPlugin.com and then, end of June 2009, Aurelius Tjin & I launched after less then a weeks work, using each of our unique strengths & overcoming our weaknesses, something to make the live of many other Internet Marketeers “one-man bands” a lot easier… TimeToOutsource .com

And yes, those Virtual Assistants that are are provided through TimeToOutsource.com are in the same office as Marie, Julie & Aurelius his own Virtual Assistant are. 🙂

On August 21st 2009 Colin and I then pre-launched our latest and like ViralURL.com, huge project… ViralHosts.com

And finally… on September 1st 2009, the last step of the conversion process from the former “one-man band” was done… Aurelius Tjin became the C.O.O. (Chief of operations) for Add2it.com Marketing Pty Ltd.

I hope this step-by-step description of my journey from a “one-man band” to freedom motivates you to take similar action in your Internet Marketing life. Please share in the comments below where you are on your own journey.

‘Whatever the mind can conceive and believe… it can achieve.’
Napoleon Hill, Think & Grow Rich

To your success,

Frank Bauer

Director of Add2it.com Marketing Pty Ltd
Co-founder of ViralURL.com & ViralHosts.com