I launched my first wrestling news websites in 1997, when I was 12. Google was founded the following year. If people were going to find my sites, it was because I put the sites in front of them myself.
Most of that work happened in chat windows. The rest happened through other site owners. None of it was fast, and almost all of it still applies.
IRC Was My Search Engine
I was in a lot of IRC networks and channels. Some were about wrestling news, which was the obvious place to start. Others were general advertising channels, where people posted their sites and projects. There were channels for buying and selling, gaming chats and private servers people ran on mIRC. I could not tell you the names of most of them now. There were too many, and I was in them constantly.
In each one I did the same thing. I posted my site, I posted the news and I told people what updates were coming. Then I came back and did it again. The audience grew slowly, one channel and one conversation at a time.
That slowness is the part people skip when they tell stories about the early internet. Nobody went viral on IRC. You showed up every day, you were useful in the room and the numbers moved a little at a time. When something worked, it worked because I had been there for weeks before it did.
Promise the Next Update
Posting the news brought people in once. Promising updates brought them back.
Wrestling fans wanted to know what was coming next, so I told them. When I said an update was coming, the readers who cared came back to check. The ones who found it waiting came back again. That is how a one-time visitor turns into a regular reader.
It also kept me honest. If I promised an update and it was not there, the same channel heard about it. A promise in public is a deadline you cannot quietly move.
Trading Traffic With Other Site Owners
The other half of my traffic came from people running sites like mine. We cross-promoted each other. I put their banners up, they put mine up, and our readers moved between sites that covered things they already cared about.
Forums mattered a lot. Other site owners ran message boards, and a banner on an active forum got in front of people who were already reading and posting every day. Some of those forums ran email lists too, which meant a mention could land in someone’s inbox instead of waiting to be seen.
Then there were web rings. A web ring was a group of sites on a shared subject, linked together in a loop. Each member put the ring’s links on its pages, and a visitor could click through to the next site in the ring, and the next. For a small site, joining a ring meant being one click away from every other site in it.
All of this was a trade. I gave other owners space on my sites and they gave me space on theirs, and we grew together.
What It Means Today
The platforms are different now. The tactics underneath them are the same, and I think they are underused because paid ads and search make it easy to forget them.
- Go where the conversation already happens, and post there every day. The channels are group chats, community servers and comment sections now. Consistency still beats a single big post.
- Give people a reason to return. Tell your audience what is coming next, then deliver it when you said you would.
- Partner with people who serve the same audience. Swapping mentions with another creator or site owner is the modern banner exchange, and it still costs nothing but space.
- Build a list you control. Forum email lists taught me that reaching someone directly is worth more than hoping they see a post. Today that means your own email list.
- Expect it to be slow. Early traffic grows one conversation at a time. That is normal, and it is also why the audience you build this way tends to stay.
I relied on that same audience later, when the sites became a business. That part of the story is in how I started making money online as a teenager, and the sites themselves have their own page under wrestling news websites.
