About me - Clarke Duncan

Now...

I live in Glasgow, Scotland and am happily married to my wife Leona who gave me two wonderful sons, Adam, and Fraser. After my family, my interests are playing World of Warcraft, Photography, Music and laughing at the popular cartoon 'The Simpsons' (hence the image on my webpage and besides I doubt the wife would have been happy if it was the Family Guy LOL). One of my many passion is Affiliate Marketing which you will find out more about in my work & business section on this site. I have to admit to being a bit of a workaholic in my time and Leona is, or has been, the classic computer widow and I thank her for her tolerance. Since my kids were born I have made sure I make more time for my family, which is important.

Then...

I was born in Glasgow in 1976 into a world without computers (good ones anyway), mobile phones or Playstations, god knows how people amused themselves in those days. They must have actually had to talk to each other face to face. As I don't remember much about my toddler years I'll fast forward to School, AGGGGGHH! I attended Kelvindale Primary and later on Cleveden Secondary. My 1st computer was the Commodore 64 swiftly followed by the state of the art Commodore Amiga, I caught the computer bug from the off and never looked back. When I left school at 17 I got my first job working for Virgin Mega Stores. Looking back, I got on fairly well there moving in to management by the time I was 21 but, as time went by, I knew I was never really cut out working in a company and in my heart of hearts knew what I really wanted was to, someday, work for myself. But how that was going to be achieved I didn't yet know?

This internet thing

Just before the Internet became main stream I saw the possibilities right away. Website design was a whole new way of thinking and very few people knew where to begin. I saw the opportunity and began to teach myself how to do HTML by hand. One of the best investments of time I have ever made. After a short time I, kind of, knew what I was doing and built my first websites. One of which was a website for Glasgow based boy band 911 (I still own the URL 911.co.uk), managed by a young dynamic Steve Gilmore who ran a promotions company called 'Backlash Music Promotions'. Steve liked what I did and I had the prestige of being able to say that I was the webmaster, *cough*, for a chart topping band. Another perk was that it, or so I thought, made me attractive to the 'burds' (Glasgow slang for girls). That's enough said about that!!! That said I was still skint, doing websites for nothing was not going to keep the wolf from the door.

My first directorship

Another client of Backlash was a small graphic design company called Impact & Image ran by David Campbell and Colin Campbell. To this day I don't which one was Impact and which one was Image. However, I was given their details with a view to hooking up in some way to help them offer a website design service. Something very few companies offered at that time. So I paid them a visit dressed in my finest grey shiny suit. When I walked in I was met by two guys in jeans and Adidas Samba training shoes surrounded by a few Apple Mac computers, both, as yet, knew nothing about the internet. Had I found the right place? It seemed I had, and I actually got on very well with them and, in fact, as it turned out, are both working for me today. After a short time I was a part owner of Impact & Image. I had become the '&'. We won a few good contracts designing a few websites for M8 Magazine, Magnum Power Solutions and Schuh among others. However, after a while I felt I wanted away from the actual designing of websites as I felt there was more money to be made in other areas of the web. Besides, I was still too skint and knew I had to move on and do my own thing.

Adgrafix / Hosting.com

As way to pay the bills, I was doing a bit of Affiliate Marketing for an American company called Adgrafix spending many an evening and weekend working for them. At the time I had no idea Affiliate Marketing was going to be such a huge part of my life, I found that I was good at attracting customers who were looking for web hosting. As this took off I decided to part company with Impact & Image amicably, giving up my shareholding, and joined Adgrafix as part of their customer service department, still based in Scotland, working from home. This was my turning point as I quickly learned about servers and the hosting side of the internet. After a while I eventually made enough money to make the break I'd been waiting for and set up my own company with a 'virtual' friend called Graeme Sandwell whom I had not yet actually met, very few people have, but he does exist. Graeme is a computer whiz-kid who is a self-taught perl programmer. With Graeme's programming skills and my business know-how and ideas, UK Internet Sites was born.

UK Internet Sites

It took about six months hard non-paid work (and running up hefty credit card bills) for us to develop new revenue generating websites. Free UK Stuff, UK Competitions, Free UK Offers are just a few of the ones that we developed around that time. To date Graeme and I have over 25 money making websites under our belt with more on the horizon.

Paid On Results

In 2003 Graeme and I started the UK Affiliate Network 'Paid On Results' along with fellow shareholders Brian Fitzpatrick and Colin Campbell.

The sky is the limit on what we do next! Check out the work & business section for more information.