About
Over the last 15 years, I’ve picked up many skills. My degree is in Graphic Design, but before that, I had aspirations of becoming a computer programmer. I took Pascal I and II, Cobol and Calculus. Though programming didn’t work out for me, it did teach me how to read through and assemble code, a skill I use even today to rearrange html, asp, php, css, and javascript code. The Department of Energy in Livermore CA paid for courses in Windows, Unix, Mac OS X and more.
A little dot com company in Texas, fat with venture capital dollars hired me to build websites for them. Demo websites. I scraped (copied) websites, made them work on a salesman’s laptop and then applied our security software to it.
As was the case with many dot coms that would later bust (Alchemedia was finally purchased by Finjan.com), this one threw money at many high level executives with the hopes that their security software would take hold in the new online world. The software was unbelievable. The early versions prevented people from copying pictures out of a web browser. Later, it prevented images or text from leaving corporate networks, which protected company (trade secrets) content from leaving work. You couldn’t copy, print, email or even screen capture it. They hired CEOs and VPs from Disney, Microsoft, Apple and a few other places you’d recognize. Our VP of Marketing was our Apple Computer connection. I watched and learned marketing from him. One of the greatest things I learned from him was how much it matters how the public views your company. I learned that in general, sales people were focused on the sale, while marketers looked at long term sales and the big picture overall. Some where in there I learned that some view Microsoft as a marketing company instead of a software company, partly because all their decisions run through the marketing department and partly because they understand the impact of perception. A marketer wouldn’t make a sale today if it was going to hurt their image to the public tomorrow. I also learned the concept of “no such thing as bad press”, which is proven out by myspace. (Myspace became a household name after they made news because of an online stalker I believe.) My lack of memory about it is the perfect example. No one remembers why/how myspace got huge overnight, they just are. So while I can’t recommend the approach of creating negative attention, especially when considering short term sales, I believe taking risks online shouldn’t scare you off completely either.
In 2002 after all the dot com failures, I became a one-man marketing department for a security company called Ultrak. Ultrak was a manufacturer of CCTV equipment and supplied Wal-Mart and Sams Wholesale with products to sell and use. I took over a website called securityandmore.com that appeared to be floating in cyberspace. There were 300+ items for sale, but Google had determined that it couldn’t make heads or tails of the content, so it was pushed deep in to the 4-8th page of results. After a little investigation I could see that Google thought all the content was served up by 1 page. SAM was an eCommerce website built from the ground up only to ring up orders, but its 1999 code was never built to attract attention from Google. I rearranged the code, added new meta fields to the database and to each product, inserted new headlines and submitted the site to directories and began requesting links for it. Eventually with enough tinkering, securityandmore.com ranked in the top 5 for its keyword phrases. Traffic went up 4 times higher than anything they had seen before. The number of online orders doubled and new customers were being added to the customer database each month. SAM, a small department of Ultrak took off, but somewhere along the way Ultrak began to struggle. Losing Wal-Mart as a buyer is a devastating blow to your sales numbers. Ultrak was forced to sell off SecurityandMore. Long story – short, Mace (the pepper spray company) purchased SAM in 2003 or 2004. Mace’s approach to business and its corporate policies drove all SAM employees away and today SAM’s ranking, sales and online marketing have all but disappeared.
I’ve had the very same success online working for other companies since then using the same approach. NestFamily had a few websites and together within a year of me working there, they ranked in the top 5 for their keyword phrases and orders from SEO tripled. They also had their two highest sales months ever online during the holidays.
Baseballwarehouse.com is a another example. Today it still ranks at the top of the search engines for terms like “baseball equipment”, or “baseball bats”. Within a year, I had elevated traffic levels to all time highs. Organic traffic increased 80%. There were 80% more referrers and a 20% drop in bounce rate. The 4 main keyword phrases all drew an average of at least 150% more traffic than the year before. The company was sold in March of 2008 and moved to a different state.
Today I work as a consultant online. Some of my projects come from former bosses. I build print catalogs as well as eCommerce websites and do a number of things in between. On my website you will find many articles that will teach you how to do different things. If you have questions about anything online, just leave them in comments to the articles and I’ll answer them there, or you can contact me using the form above.
