About Lynn M.

Hiya and welcome! I’m Lynn McCutcheon (or Lynn M., whichever you prefer). Welcome to my little spot on the Web where I talk about my adventures in traffic exchanges including mine (Traffic Pro-X) & many others, various related programs, online marketing in general, tips & tricks and helpful stuff I’ve discovered, and well, who knows what else. OK, life story time (you might wanna grab a cup of coffee first)… *g*

The short version: I hang out pretty much every weekday afternoon (usually 3-4pm EST) with the bunch at Traffic Exchange Live on UStream (hosted by Jon Olson of I Love Hits & SWAT Traffic, Tim Linden of StartXChange, and John Guanzon of ThumbVu), and I post regular updates about who dropped in & what crazy thing or live cooking lesson (and the occasional educational thing, heh) happened there that day, and sometimes there’s educational stuff too. We have a blast every day, come join us all at Traffic Exchange Live!

As well as posting about TE Live, I share and post about the hints and recommendations and tips on products and programs that have helped me along the way, and taken me from what was previously years of chasing money around online with no plan or purpose (or profit) to actually making money online for a change.

The rest of the story…

I was born, raised, and have never lived anywhere else besides in Tennessee, though I’ve traveled relatively extensively throughout the United States. I am originally from Paris, Tennessee (Home of the World’s Biggest Fish Fry) and Camden, Tennessee (20 miles from Paris and where I went to high school), and after spending most of my college-age years in the Murfreesboro/Nashville area with extended stays in Knoxville/Maryville, I returned to the city of my birth, Memphis, in the late Eighties, so I’ve pretty much lived in every end of the state and all three Grand Divisions. I’m planning to relocate again back to the Knoxville area relatively soon, though.

I come from a long background in the health care industry, starting in high school in 1982 when I started working the switchboard and the emergency room desk at the local hospital on up until around 2003-2004, working as a clerical worker and later administrative assistant and manager in various hospitals, clinics, and university-based practices in several cities and towns. My parents were/are both health care professionals, as was much of the rest of my family, and I swore the entire time I was growing up that I would never have anything to do with medicine because it bored me so much listening to all that medical stuff as a kid – so it was more than just a little ironic that that’s exactly the industry I wound up working in for over twenty years.

I always had other stuff going on though – not things I was necessarily professionally trained for, but things I picked up along the way out of other interests and/or was mainly self-taught. My parents bought our first home computer in 1981, back in the days when really no one much had computers at home – we mostly played games on it, yep, but I managed to pick up a fair amount of techy knowledge over the years with each new system we/I picked up. I ran a BBS (i.e., a bulletin board system, otherwise known as what there was before there was an Internet) here in Memphis for several years, and for about seven years now I’ve been one of the chief administrators and partners in a group of vBulletin forums on the ‘Net, working mostly behind the scenes and in the back end doing the techgeekchick type stuff that I’ve always loved.

Another major interest for me practically since birth has been music, and I’m both an admitted music junkie always been somewhat of a walking encyclopedia of rock & roll history and trivia. My father was a musician and a huge music fan with a large record collection, and I turned out to be even worse. Though my own tastes are extremely broad and varied (I’ll pretty much listen to anything but country and rap and hip-hop), I spent a large amount of time in my college years and the Nineties and beyond supporting the indie music scene locally, in the U.S. itself, and even beyond, working with and supporting several Australian artists after the big boon of the Internet made the planet a lot smaller place.

In retrospect, I managed to build myself a career as a bit of an indie music promoter for years and years without having ever bothered to take the advantage of getting PAID for it – that really struck home the day an Aussie rock photographer whose work I had always admired made the comment to me that I was “more famouser” down there than her. Still, pretty much all the time and effort I ever put into helping and supporting the music artists I have over the years has been totally a labor of love because I either liked their music and was a big fan, or they were friends of mine – so none of it was wasted time as far as I was/am concerned. I still continue to help support and publicize bands I’m a fan of and friends with, and even have managed to get paid to write about music on occasion, so it’s all good.

In 2007, with the economy growing more and more bleak, like many I suddenly unexpectedly found myself without a regular job for the first time since I was 16 years old. Part-time freelance work wasn’t helping much with paying the bills, so I started looking around the Internet for ways to offset that deficit. I was not really a stranger to finding ways to make money online, as I’d managed for several years starting around 1997 to make a fairly decent part-time side job as a reseller of vintage Barbie dolls and accessories on eBay – something I’d sort of fast become rather an “expert” on when I’d sold my aunt’s early vintage Barbie collection from the early Sixties, and my own Mod (late Sixties/early Seventies) collection, to pick up some extra cash for Christmas one year. That lasted and was fairly successful on a part-time basis until about the time September 11, 2001 occurred and suddenly no one really seemed to be interested in spending any money on things beyond the absolute necessities for a while. I continued to try and sell the rest of the collectibles inventory I had on hand for about two or three more months before giving up (and even still have some of it now).

In any case, the loss of my job in 2007 is what led me to the GPT/PTC/PTR world or the “get paid to” industry – paid to click, paid to read e-mails, paid to sign up for offers, etc. As my activities increased there, I started a blog reviewing the various programs I was actively working as “Miss Money Hunter”, with Miss Money Hunter’s Guide to Making Money Online – where I still continue to blog about and review sites today, though I am not as directly active in those sites as I once was and generally these days stick mostly to the “biggies” and long-term established sites (ClixSense, WordLinx, MatrixMails, AdPaid, LinkGrand, etc.). Though it’s not my main focus anymore, I certainly got my start there learning how to promote things and in almost two years have built a decent little residual foundation there that will probably just continue to increase as time goes on.

Around the same time and while still seeking more ways to bring in income online since there were really no jobs to be found elsewhere, I became acquainted with various people and mentors in network and affiliate marketing and starting setting my sights on higher goals than the pennies here and pennies there one normally acquires simply doing PTC and PTR, and have spent quite a bit of the past almost two years exploring various things in that area and have done the usual things people do, mostly starting out in some of the usual MLMs (ugh) and then making my way through other more interesting, non-MLM areas of online marketing – and making a lot of mistakes and listening to probably not all that good advice sometimes, just sort of stumbling my way around and not really getting anywhere.

It was in those early days I discovered the traffic exchanges – like so many new folks, first EasyHits4U and StartXChange – then eventually discovering more as time went on. I’ve always loved surfing – I like seeing what’s out there and what people are doing as well as looking for interesting stuff that might interest me too – I’m just one of those people that even if I had millions of dollars and never had to surf for credits, I’d probably still surf anyway just because I enjoy it.

Many people around me in those early days kept telling me that the traffic exchanges were garbage and wouldn’t work and that I’d never see any decent results, but I kept coming back anyway. Eventually I made my way to Affiliate Funnel, thanks to the advice of my good friend and fellow blogger Phil Ames, and I listened to and read everything I could get my hands on, through Affiliate Funnel and everything and everyone else it led to, for months and months – but still wasn’t getting much of anywhere… until one day the proverbial light bulb finally went on above my head and the message of Affiliate Funnel, and many of those associated with it, FINALLY started to truly sink in. And now I see more and more progress in what I’m doing every day.

What works for me may not work for you, or may not work for the next person, but I’ll be sharing various tips and things that have worked for me here on the blog as time goes on, and hopefully you may find at least one or two tidbits here and there that will be useful and helpful to you too.

Another big part of my blog here, obviously, is my fondness for and appreciation of Traffic Exchange Live on UStream, a project that was initially started by Jon Olson of I Love Hits & SWAT Traffic and Tim Linden of StartXChange mainly as a lark to promote the re-launch of the new and improved TEToolbox, but has in a very short time grown into this wonderful and fun as heck place to network and talk with and brainstorm with like-minded people, as well as just kicking back and socializing and having some laughs. I pretty much live there these days and am there almost anytime the proverbial doors are open – 3 to 5 pm EST weekdays, but more often than not we’re there earlier and until much later – it’s not only a great place to meet others and network and socialize, but it’s pretty great for those of us who work at home and are tied to our computer around the clock most days as well. It’s sort of the water cooler of the traffic exchange world, I guess you could say!

Anyway, I’ll probably keep updating on the various goings-on daily at TE Live as long as TE Live continues to go on. In the meantime, I’m here at the house with my four dogs and four cats (I love both, though I’m really more of a cat person than a dog person), doing my thing, and whatever that thing is on any given day will probably be writing a little something about it.

So, the name thing – I tend to lean more towards the “Lynn M.” moniker, and believe it or not there’s a very good and valid reason for that. If you’ve been around the traffic exchange and Internet marketing industry for very long, you know that one of the key things you hear again and again from the experts and gurus is all about “branding yourself” by using your name while promoting.

That said – well, McCutcheon is the name I was born with, but as it just so happens to turn out, I won’t be Lynn McCutcheon all that much longer because 12-18 months from now, as long as things go as planned, I’m probably getting married… but I’ll still be Lynn M. even then, so there ya go. It just seemed easier that way, really (and hopefully won’t be quite as confusing and difficult of a change when the time comes). I do love my family with all my heart, but nobody can spell or hardly say “McCutcheon” anyway – and even though John Guanzon raised a good point to me not long ago about his own relatively difficult last name (LOL), I’ve always welcome any opportunity to trade the difficult last name for an easier one all the way around anyway… heh. That concept was about to go in the entirely OTHER direction on the occasions years ago when the two most likely marriage candidates for me were both of Polish Catholic descent, but now with my currently betrothed it’s kind of a relief to know that one day I won’t have to repeatedly spell my name or hear the pronunciation slaughtered in any number of ways, you wouldn’t believe how many. I’m certainly NOT just marrying him for his name – but it sure is going to be so much easier!

Anyway – as if this wasn’t enough – if you want to know more about me, you can learn probably far more than anyone would ever want to at my personal blog, The Lynnster Zone, as I’ve been blogging there since February 1997. And, since most of my blogger friends weren’t that interested in music and most of my fellow music junkies weren’t that interested in my random non-music rants and essays, I took the more musically-related pieces from my main blog since 1997 and started writing about music on another blog here, so there’s that too.

There’s probably not much else I haven’t already covered, but you can always e-mail me (I’m slow sometimes but I get to it eventually) and you can certainly almost always find me on weekday afternoons hanging out at Traffic Exchange Live. We talk about traffic exchanges, marketing, cut up and laugh a lot, and depending on what day it is, you might even get a chance to learn how to cook one of Jon Olson’s famous dishes while there too! Drop in for a visit anytime! :)

You can e-mail me here (in proper email format): lynnm [at] lynnm [dot] net

Phone (leave message): (877) 218-5966

See ya around and cheers!