Promotional Strategy When Times Are Tough

by John Eberhard

Years ago I worked for a software company as the VP Marketing. It was policy at that company that each week they would allocate 20% of the gross income for promotional expenses, things like ads, direct mail, trade show expenses, and so on. This was before the Internet and website marketing.

I was in charge of that promotional budget, so each week my staff would prepare the purchase orders and I would sort through them to select what I thought was the best way to spend that money, then I would submit those to the financial planning committee.

There was one time where the company’s income was lower than usual for several weeks. Of course every company goes through this from time to time, and of course it creates a problem for financial planning. Because the question is how do you pay all the bills, make payroll, etc.? I was on the financial planning committee then and I’ve been on it in a number of companies since then, and I can tell you it is always a challenge. But if you are a business owner, you already know that.

The Executive Director of the company at the time had the idea that we would dramatically cut the percentage of gross income going to promo. I objected to this of course, not just because it was my personal fiefdom so to speak, but because I had observed that there was a direct proportion between the money spent and the amount of promo sent out, to the number of leads that came in, and to the sales, and to the income.

Well the ED was undeterred by my objections and we embarked on a period of six weeks where the promo allocation dropped to 6% of the gross income.

What do you think happened?

Do you think we recovered to our previous level of income?

No we did not. In fact, the gross income dropped even lower during that six week period. At the end of that period, the owner of the company stepped in and removed the Executive Director and appointed a new one. The policy of 20% to promo was reinstated, and the company slowly climbed back up to its previous level of income.

What I learned from that experience was that it is vital to maintain a promotional budget, and that it is especially important when the gross income dips below its normal level. Cutting the promo budget is not the solution when the income is down. If anything, it is more important to maintain or increase promo levels when income is down.

Over the years I worked for a number of companies in the capacity as a Director or VP of Marketing. And those companies all had different policies on how much money they put towards promo items. The software company mentioned above allocated 20%, some allocated 14%, some 10%. I’ve seen some smaller companies that put no money towards promo at all, but existed entirely on referrals and repeat business. But even those companies eventually reached a point in their expansion cycle where they had to start promoting and spending some money on promo.

So no matter what percentage of your income you are putting towards promo items, when income dips, it is vital to maintain or even increase the amount of promotional actions you are doing. It’s not easy. I’ve sat on that financial planning committee and I know it’s not easy. But it is the route to survival and expansion.

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Logistics for Re-Designing a Web Site

by John Eberhard

When you decide to have your web site re-designed, there are some logistical considerations that you should be aware of.

Keeping the Same Hosting Company

If you have a web hosting account that you are happy with, then your web designer should create a new sub-folder on your web site and put the newly designed web site there. That way you can view what he is doing by putting in your web address plus the new folder, i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/new.>

In this way your web designer can build the new web site, and upload the files to the sub-folder, and you can look at it on your computer, give him edits or changes, and give him final approval before the new site is live.

Once you have a finalized design and content that you have approved, then your web designer can upload all the new files into the root folder and the new site will become live. He should also, before he uploads all the new files, download all your old files and keep them on his hard disk just in case anything goes wrong.

Switching Hosting Companies

If you are not happy with your hosting company for whatever reason, then the best thing is to have your web designer start a new hosting account and build the new site there. He will be able to give you a preview web address so you can view the new site while he is working on it.

I typically use GoDaddy and Hostgator for setting up new hosting accounts for client web sites. They are inexpensive ($5-8 per month) and I have had a good experience with both. GoDaddy’s basic hosting account is $5 per month and they have a “deluxe” hosting account for $8 per month where you can host multiple web sites for the same price.

While your web designer is working on the new site in the new hosting account, your old web site will still be live. Visitors to the site will still see your old site until you’re ready to make the switch.

Once you preview the new site and approve everything, now the switchover can occur. The way this is done is that you have to know where the web address was registered, i.e. Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Register.com, etc. And you have to have the login information for your account. Your account with one of the domain registrars is separate from your hosting account, though some companies like GoDaddy do both domain registration and hosting.

So once you find the domain registrar login information (I find most clients have to dig to find this) then you log into the account, and switch the DNS (domain name servers). This means that the web address, or domain, will now point to a different computer, the computer at your new hosting company that holds your new web site files.

There is a record, contained in every web server across the planet, that includes every single web address, and what computer the files for that web address are on. Let’s say your old hosting company for your www.mywidgets.com web site was located in New Jersey. That record would point to that specific computer inside the hosting company in New Jersey, and so every time someone would type in www.mywidgets.com, their computer would be directed to that computer in New Jersey and pull up the files from that computer.

So now let’s say your new hosting company is in Arizona. Once you switch the DNS, that record gets updated on every web server across the planet, and it now points to that new computer in Arizona. Now when someone types in your web address, they get directed to that computer in Arizona and the files get pulled from that computer.

When you switch the DNS, it takes about 24 hours for the records to be “propagated,” which means they get updated on every web server across the planet.

Good luck with your web site re-design.

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Understanding Wordpress

by John Eberhard

Wordpress has a number of different applications and uses and I thought I would take this article to explain them.

Turning Your Site into a Wordpress Blog

First of all, Wordpress is a blogging system that you can install on your website to make it into a blog. A blog, for those who don’t know, is a special type of website where you post new content regularly, and as you post new things, the older content moves further down the page. See my client news blog for an example. http://realwebclientnews.com/

So you can install Wordpress on your website and it will become a blog. The Wordpress software system is free, and most hosting companies will set it up for you, either by clicking a few buttons online or by calling them. You can also download the latest version of Wordpress from www.wordpress.org and then upload them to your site, but this is much more time consuming.

Once you install the Wordpress software on your site, you can choose from hundreds of pre-designed Wordpress “themes,” which are basically pre-packaged designs, for your blog. Once you select a theme, you can customize it to your liking, adding your company name and logo. You can also have a web designer create a totally customized design for your blog.

Putting up a blog this way means you will have to have a hosting account and pay a monthly hosting fee.

Using Wordpress as Content Management System (CMS)

Over the last few years it has become more and more popular to use Wordpress as a content management system (CMS). A CMS allows the web site owner, once the site has been designed and set up, to log into an online interface, and make changes to the site themselves, without involving a web designer.

Wordpress was originally designed as a blogging system, but since its interface is relatively simple to use (compared to other CMSes) it has become popular to use it as a CMS.

You will still need a web designer to set up Wordpress and customize it for you. Once again you can select a Wordpress theme and have your designer add customizations, or you can have a web designer create a totally customized design and convert it into a Wordpress format.

Once your site is set up in Wordpress, the types of things you can change on your site are:

1. Changing or adding text on one of the pages
2. Adding pictures to a page
3. Removing or changing a picture on a page
4. Adding or removing pages (of course here you have to be careful not to delete pages that are part of your navigation system)

For more complex changes than the above, you will still need to bring in an experienced web designer.

A lot of people are going in this direction today, using Wordpress as a CMS.

A couple of totally custom web sites that I built recently and then converted into Wordpress format include http://bigtreesupply.com/ and http://www.truax.net/.

Wordpress.com

Wordpress.com is a free blogging site where you can create an account, and set up a free blog. For example, you can see my articles blog: http://realwebmarketingnet.wordpress.com/

As you can see the web address will include your blog title, then …wordpress.com at the end. But the advantage of starting an account on Wordpress.com is that it is free. You don’t have to pay a monthly hosting fee. You can also choose a theme from the large collection of free themes that Wordpress has, and you can customize it somewhat.

There are several free blogging sites where you can set up a free blog, but Wordpress.com is my personal favorite, because it is built on the Wordpress architecture and so it is much easier to customize that any of the others (some of the other free blog sites are almost impossible to customize).

Plugins

Wordpress has hundreds of things called “plugins” that you can add to your site to give it more functionality. For example, you can add plugins that will allow you to add photo galleries, email forms, a feed from Facebook or Twitter, search engine optimization features, or add Google Analytics (web statistics) to your site or blog. Wordpress plugins can add a lot of depth to your site.

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Social Media Marketing Summary

by John Eberhard

I have written several articles recently on social media marketing and this article will summarize the most vital points from those articles.

Adding Friends

Before I summarize the past articles, here is a bit of new. If you want to use social media sites to market your business, you have to have a lot of friends (Facebook), followers (Twitter), and connections (LinkedIn). Because if you want to put out messages promoting your business on social media, you need to have those messages seen by a lot of people, otherwise it won’t do any good.

So you have to develop a strategy of adding friends/followers/connections on a regular basis. It works best to do this a little bit every day, or at least 4-5 days per week, rather than trying to do a whole lot at once. The reason for this is that each of the sites has a concept of what they consider an acceptable level of friending activity, and if you exceed that in a short period of time, they will either shut down your account temporarily or permanently.

Facebook allows a max of 5,000 friends, but there is no limit to the number of fans for a fan page. I use software to add followers for Twitter and have gotten my own account up to near 10,000 and two other accounts over 2,000 followers.

Social Media Outflow Strategy

What type of communications should you put out in your own status updates, i.e. the communications that go out to all your social media connections?

You should set up an account on www.Ping.fm and connect up all your social media accounts to it. That way when you post something on Ping.fm, it goes out to all your social media accounts.

But back to what you should say. Here are some tips.

1. I have had a successful strategy with regard to my business, whereby I post messages saying what I am working on at the time, such as “I am setting up a new Google AdWords account for a client,” or “I am designing a new web site for a veterinarian,” or “I am adding more Twitter followers for a client.” What this does is create good “top of mind awareness.” That’s where when someone thinks of an Internet marketing consultant, I’m one of the guys they think of.

2. Every time you post new content on your blog, you should put out a status update saying “See my new blog post,” then the name of your article, then a link to it. Since the number of characters you get on Twitter (and Ping.fm) is only 140, it makes sense to use a URL shortener for the address of the article, such as www.goo.gl.

3. If your company puts up a new video on YouTube, post an update about it with a link to the video.

4. If you publish a press release on your web site or blog, post an update about this with a link to it.

5. I have one client where I put together client testimonials for him and post them on his web site. Every time one of these goes up, I post a status update about it to his social media accounts.

6. If your company releases any type of special report or white paper related to a topic within your industry, post a link to it.

7. You can post a link to some interesting article or video you found relating to your industry.

8. Whenever you have an event coming up, like a seminar, class, speech, webinar, or appearance at a trade show, post something announcing it.

9. If you are having a sale or special, you should definitely post about it, possibly several times.

10. Avoid making every single status update a pitch for your business. While you should post about all your seminars, classes, speeches, webinars, or trade show appearances, if all you ever post are pitches for your promotional actions, it could cause people to tune you out or even hide your posts or unfriend you. I think it is helpful to throw in some personal stuff, like a trip you’re taking, or a sports event or concert you attended.

It is definitely a good idea to post status updates to your social media accounts frequently. It all comes under the heading of creating top of mind awareness. Using these tips you can increase your posting frequency.

Social Media Engagement

There is another important point that is vital in effectively using social media sites to market. That is your amount of engagement with others on social media sites. By engagement in this case I mean “interacting back and forth with people on the social media sites.”

The idea is that you are not just outflowing information or messages to your friends, followers or connections. You should be viewing what other people are doing or saying and interacting with them about it.

I was talking to a friend about this recently and I could tell he thought it would be a daunting task, i.e. that it would take him too much time. But I think it is important if you want to get much benefit from social media sites, and I don’t think it has to take a lot of time. Here are some examples:

1. On Facebook, click on “Home,” then at the top click on “Most Recent.” This brings up a feed of things that your Facebook friends have posted, including short blurbs about what they are doing, comments on things, links to articles elsewhere on the web, pictures they have uploaded, or links to videos on YouTube. Quickly scroll through this feed to look for things that interest you. If someone has posted a blurb or comment that you agree with, click the “Like” button underneath that post. Or post a short comment on it yourself.

2. On Facebook, in the upper right area of the page is a list of your Facebook friends for whom today is their birthday. Review this list and for anyone who is a real life friend, click through to their page and where it says “Write something,” write a quick “Happy birthday Joe” message.

3. On Facebook there are groups or fan pages you can find about areas of interest or about your industry. Click “like” on some of these groups and follow or join in the discussions that appear on their fan pages.

4. Facebook has its own email system. Read any Facebook email you get and reply to it.

5. On Twitter, you can spend a few minutes following the posts of other people that you are following, then “re-tweet” the ones you like (that means to send that particular post again out to all of your followers).

6. Set up folders in your email program and set up mail rules that will dump all Facebook emails into a folder for Facebook and all Twitter emails into a folder for Twitter. That way they do not clutter up your main inbox and you can handle those emails when you have time.

7. On Twitter, you will receive emails that say “Direct message from Joe Jones.” Unfortunately a lot of these will be automatically generated messages that others send out whenever someone follows them, most saying “Thanks for following me. Look forward to reading your messages.” The auto direct message is an unfortunate thing you have to put up with. But be on the lookout for any direct messages from others who are actually communicating to you. Reply to them.

8. One thing you can do on Twitter is do a search for your company name or brand, and see what people are saying about you. Then respond to them or re-tweet their stuff if it is positive. If it’s negative, it gives you a chance to monitor any problems and respond to them.

The web, and especially social media sites, are all about interaction, a conversation, back and forth. In the days before the web and social media, most companies were used to putting out communications that their public or consumers would receive. The public could write them a letter but most people never did that.

Measuring Your Success

I was recently thinking about how you should measure your success with social media. I found an excellent article on this called “3 Key Metrics To Measure Social Media Success” by Clay McDaniel on SearchEngineWatch.com. I’ll explain and simplify what he is saying, plus add some additional ways of my own to measure social media success. Here are McDaniel’s 3 key metrics:

1. Total Online Community Size: Add up your total Facebook fans of your fan page and/or friends for your profile, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, YouTube channel subscribers, and blog unique users.

In my opinion this is one of the most important metrics in terms of how well you are doing, because it gives the total number of people you can reach with your social media communications.

2. Monthly Referred Traffic to Site: Go into Google Analytics and see how many total people came to your site, referred from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

If you are posting status updates on your social media accounts that link back to your site or mention things you are doing, this should be generating traffic, i.e. people clicking on the link and coming to your site.

3. Social Monthly Impressions: This is the number of times someone mentions your company or brand on social media sites. You can set up a Google Alert to measure this.

Here are some additional ways of my own to measure what is going on with social media:

4. Status Updates Out Monthly: This is a total of how many times you sent out a business related status update to all your social media accounts. I think this should be tracked because it is one of the main things you are doing that will affect how people respond.

5. Blog Posts Monthly: This is the number of posts you are putting out on your blog or blogs. As mentioned in earlier articles the ideal frequency of this is once a week or more.

Good luck with your social media marketing.

 

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Top Social Media Sites

By John Eberhard

In the online world things seem to change, faster than fashion, faster than the weather, faster that yesterday’s clothes. What was the greatest thing last year could be completely washed up this year.

So it is with social media. In this article I will list out some of the current top social media sites. Except for the first couple, I am not claiming to rank these sites.

1. Facebook has really jumped into first place and doesn’t look like it will be leaving that spot anytime soon. I took a liking to this site from the beginning and have used it to market my business and make money. You start up a personal profile, can put up a fan page for your business (which has been enhanced in the last year), and can put up a pay per click ad campaign. If you have a fan page, you can now post a button on your regular web site for people to “like” the fan page. Of course the key with Facebook, either when marketing from your personal profile or from a fan page, is to have lots of friends (personal profile) or fans (fan page). You can post a status update with text, pictures or videos, and you can comment on other people’s posts, thus starting threads.

2. Twitter popularized the concept of “micro-blogging,” i.e. posting status updates with a max of 140 characters. You follow people, and others will follow you to see what you have to say. You can post what you’re doing with your business, and post links to your articles or videos or offers. It pays to use a URL shortener like www.goo.gl for any web addresses you include in your post, since the number of characters is so short. In terms of following people, you can target people who have certain keywords or phrases in their bio or in their “tweets.” You can also follow people that follow or are followed by another specific user.

3. LinkedIn is a popular business networking site. Your profile contains data on where you work now and where you’ve worked in the past, and you can connect to other people who have worked where you work or have worked in the past, or who have a lot of connections in common with you, or who are in your industry. You can post status updates just like Facebook or Twitter.

4. Ping.fm is a social media syndication site, which means that you can start up an account on it and then hook up all your other social media sites to it. It gives you a field to write your status updates in, with a limit of 140 characters just like Twitter. Then when you post something on Ping.fm, if you’ve hooked it up right, that post will go out to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other accounts. I like the idea of being able to send messages out to thousands of people at once, so I like this site.

5. MySpace. My how the mighty have fallen. MySpace used to be the top social media site a couple years ago, but has really dropped off. I personally think it is because of the idiotic way they let people customize their profile pages, so that every page you go to, you have to figure out where everything is. While I’m all in favor of originality, many people took it too far, some putting background images behind their page so you could not even read the text. I heard MySpace just got sold this week for $35 million, most of it in stock. That’s a pittance in this field. And I recently was working on adding friends to a client’s MySpace account, and had to struggle to get 50 in a month, because apparently hardly anyone goes on it anymore.

6. Wordpress.com is a free blogging site, where you can sign up and then put up a free blog on the topic of your choice. There are several free blogging sites but I personally like Wordpress.com the best because it is built on the Wordpress architecture, which gives you a lot of features and options. It also has a feature built in to send out a notification (called a “ping”) to all the blog search engines, whenever you post anything.

I’ll explain something about Wordpress that many people don’t understand. Wordpress is a blogging system. You can download files from Wordpress.org, and install them on your hosting account and customize your blog in whatever way you want. Also most hosting companies will help you install Wordpress on your site so you don’t have to do the manual install which despite what Wordpress says, takes 30-45 minutes. Installing Wordpress on your site is free, and you can have your blog have whatever web address you want.

Wordpress.com on the other hand, is a free blogging site, and you start an account and your blog is then hosted on their site, and will have “Wordpress” in the URL (http://yourblogname.wordpress.com).

7. Blogger.com is perhaps the #2 free blogging site. You can start an account and put up a blog of your choice. They have a lot of users and are owned by Google, but I find them a lot harder to customize your page.

8. Posterous.com is another free blogging site. They have one very special feature, which is once you set up an account on Posterous, you can hook up all your other blogs to it. Then you post something on Posterous, and it goes out to all your other blogs automatically. Another great time saver.

9. Blog.com is another free blogging site. Like Wordpress.com, they use the Wordpress architecture which makes it easier to customize and gives you lots of features.

10. Squidoo is a fairly high traffic site where you can put up a page (called a “lens”) about some specific topic. This page can have an article, pictures, videos, and links to your blog or blogs. Your article can contain text links (called “anchor text”) which are the best type of links to have to your site. Squidoo seems to understand that people may want to use their site to market products or services, and they don’t seem to think that’s a crime or anything.

11. HubPages is another site similar to Squidoo, where you can put up a page and include an article, pictures, videos, etc. The only problem is that Hubpages does seem to think it’s a crime to market anything using their site, so they limit you to only one link per page, and will sometimes disapprove your article if they determine it is not completely unique, i.e. if the same article is posted anywhere else. So according to them, you’re supposed to write an article and put it up on their site and not anywhere else, and do it out of the philanthropy and goodness of your heart, with no desire to ever (gasp) make money or anything evil like that. Guess you can tell what I think of them.

12. Google Knol is a new site sort of similar to Squidoo and HubPages, where you can post articles. You can include pictures and links to your heart’s content, and since it is owned by Google my guess is it gives pretty good link juice.

Good luck with social media marketing.

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Search Engines: Local, Regional or National?

By John Eberhard

I was recently talking to a guy who was interested in getting a new web site created. One of the questions he asked was “What about SEO (search engine optimization)?”

At that point my first question to him was “Is your business a local business?” Because if it is a local business, that changes the priorities of what you need to do in order to get your business to appear on search engines.

The Local Business

We will define a local business as any business that services customers or clients mainly or only in one city or metro area. Some examples are restaurants, dentists, chiropractors, doctors, or home improvement companies.

Google Maps, also called Google Places, has completely changed the landscape of search engine ranking and appearance for local businesses. Google started Google Maps a bit over a year ago.

Now, for any type of local search where Google can see that it is a local type of listing, it shows Google Maps information. That consists of a map (with red balloons showing where the local businesses in this category appear) which now appears in the right hand column, and individual listings, marked with a red balloon, in the wider left hand column.

Google typically displays 8-10 listings on the first page. This means essentially that for a local type of listing, like “dentist Glendale” or “restaurant Sylmar” (or even just “restaurant,” because Google knows what city you’re in) the Google Maps information completely dominates the first page.

So that really changes the picture of what a local business needs to do to rank well on Google. Instead of trying to rank well on Google’s organic (non-paid) listings for a term like “Italian restaurant,” in which you would be competing with other Italian restaurants worldwide, you now just have to get your restaurant appearing in Google Maps, and you just have to compete with other Italian restaurants in your local city.

So what do you have to do to get a listing on Google Maps and compete effectively with other local businesses in your area?

1. First of all you have to get a listing on Google Maps. Just because you have a Gmail account or Google AdWords or AdSense or Google Analytics account does NOT necessarily mean you automatically have a Google Maps account. If there is one up there (Google put up thousands of listings for businesses) then you have to claim it. There is a procedure for how to do that.
2. Next you have to get a lot of what are called “citations.” These are essentially listings of your business on other sites, like Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, Yelp, Hotfrog, and others. This helps to push your Google Maps listing toward the top. And believe me, in some cities and in some industries, there is a lot of competition.
3. Get lots of online reviews. These are where someone goes to one of the review sites, logs in or signs up for an account there, and writes a review on your business. For example, you have to have a Gmail or AdWords or Analytics or other type of Google account to write a review on Google. For an idea of how many reviews you need to get, look at the businesses that are showing up in your industry and in your area, on page one of Google Maps listings, and see how many reviews they have. We have developed systems to help clients get online reviews.

Regional or National Businesses

For regional or national businesses, the way to get your business to appear high on search engines, is either through:

1. Search engine optimization and link building, or
2. Pay per click advertising

Search engine optimization (SEO) is something you do once, or every three years or so. First you do research on potential keywords, and find ones that have decent amount of people searching for them, but a low number of sites competing for them. This usually ends up being what we call “long tail keywords,” meaning more detailed keyword phrases of more than one word. In most cases, single word keywords will have very high competition and you just won’t be able to compete or rank well for them.

Next you select the best keywords to work on, and put those into appropriate places on the pages of your web site, including into the titles and descriptions that appear on Google when your organic listing comes up.

Next you have to build up links to your web site on other web sites. Google says the number of links to your web site from other sites is the most important criteria for how well your site will rank for any given keywords. This does not mean writing to webmasters and offering to trade links. That is called reciprocal link building and Google discounted the value of it over three years ago. Amazingly some consultants still recommend it and do it.

The best ways we have found to do link building are:

1. Writing articles on your topic and submitting them to article directories. We have ways of making each one count as more than one link.
2. Writing press releases about your company and submitting them to online PR sites and putting them on blogs
3. Setting up accounts on free blogs and posting your articles and press releases on all of them, including several keywords in each article or release that are linked back to your site

So the first thing you have to do is determine if your business is local, regional or national. That will then define your direction for search engines.

 

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My Marketing Story

by John Eberhard

I have been reading a couple of books lately that say that to create what they call “remarkable content,” you have to tell a story. So at the risk of boring everyone to tears I am going to tell the story of how I got involved in marketing and what it hopefully has taught me.

I didn’t sit in my room when I was a kid, dreaming of becoming a marketing consultant. I know that will shock everyone. I was into the arts as a kid. I drew, I painted, I did photography, I built things (I built my own toys), and I played music. After I saw Buddy Rich play when I was about 12, I decided I wanted to be a drummer, and to become rich and famous. I excelled at music in high school and ended up going to Berklee College of Music in Boston for two years and excelled there too.

After college I stayed in Boston and started playing music, but I also decided to work during the day for my church doing public relations. I started writing press releases, going out and doing “press runs” to the media, holding events, holding press conferences, appearing as a guest on TV and radio shows, and even hosting my own talk show on a cable TV station in Worcester, MA.

I really dug the fact of being able to communicate to thousands of people at one time. That was a kick.

Then I met my future wife, played music full time for a few years, and moved to Los Angeles. Unfortunately the music thing did not work out well for me in LA. But somehow I fell into marketing. I still remembered that thing about how I liked communicating to thousands of people, but I had not really liked the media people, who by and large are kind of slimey (i.e. you can’t trust them as far as you can throw them).

I saw an ad in the paper for a Marketing Director. I thought about it and decided “yeah, I could do that.” I worked as a marketing director for a year at a market research company and then moved to a medium-sized software company. I was the market research manager there and then was promoted to be in charge of marketing for North America. This was real on-the-job-training stuff, and I did a large course in marketing at the company’s training facility.

I soon learned that what I loved about marketing was twofold: a) I loved the fact that I could communicate to thousands of people, send out something to them and get them to respond (without dealing with the skeevy media people), and b) there are a lot of creative elements in marketing. There is copywriting, which is fun and creative, and design is of course very creative. And it was fun coming up with a campaign and planning it out and causing a big effect, i.e. lots of leads coming in and sales being made.

So I continued doing that for a number of years, working for a number of companies as Marketing Director or VP Marketing. I learned early on that you have to be aggressive in marketing and willing to communicate on a grand scale. And sometimes you have to fight for money to keep the promo going out, because some people will want to cut the funds for it when things get tight. And that is exactly when you should not cut the funds.

After working at those companies and being on the finance and management committees, I figured I’d learned enough about business to start my own. I started my own marketing consulting company part time while still working full time as an employee.

Then three years ago this month, I got laid off from my full time job. In some of the months prior to that, I had made almost as much money from the part time business as I had from my full time job. My wife and I looked at it, and decided to take the plunge. The company that I had been working for full time hired us out of the gate to do some of their marketing, and Real Web Marketing Inc. was born.

There have been ups and downs, and challenging periods when the economy seemed to be kicking our butts. But I remembered the lessons I had learned many years ago, that you have to keep promoting, and be aggressive, and not be afraid to communicate on a grand scale. As a result we have started to really expand our operations lately. And since I really enjoy it, especially the creative aspects, it’s been fun. And especially that being your own boss thing.

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