About Me

Describing who I am and where I’ve been is a difficult task, despite priding myself on being a storyteller. All stories have to start somewhere, though I’m unsure where to begin this one.

What color my sneakers were when I was put into our classroom closet for being “opinionated” in 7th-grade catholic school is probably not what you need to know about me (as funny and ridiculous as that story is.)

You came here to find out if I was any good at being an SEO, or how good my digital marketing chops are. I can’t tell you the WHOLE story, but I can entertainingly summarize it for you.

My professional background is rooted in creative design and traditional marketing.

I was a total graphic design nerd, spending most of my time behind a low-resolution computer screen getting QuarkExpress to do things it wasn’t supposed to do. And if it didn’t do what I asked, I used every tool I could find to get what I wanted. Yes, even MS Paint. (Adobe…anything usually took care of the rest)

I don’t think I was called to marketing as much as marketing was called to me. Being creative, I was often tasked with finding innovative ways of reaching the audience. It made me realize that I love storytelling, the customer’s journey to buy our product or sign up for our service. I got good at it.

Even won a few awards…

As I learned more about marketing, I learned about its history, and found two voices that would become my guides, the opposites of David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach who only agreed on one thing:

“Advertising isn’t a science, it’s an art”

Ogilvy was a champion of research. He wanted to know everything about his product, and everything about his audience. He wanted to write and create in the voice of the audience, to know their vocabulary.

From Bill Bernbach, I learned that nothing replaces creativity. He bet that with good writing, and good artwork, you had good selling.

And that’s how I see marketing.

Draw them in with the right art..
Convince them with the right words.
Be where they will find you.

As simple as this concept sounds, (though there are a lot of steps between them) it works.

They work no matter what order you put them in. They work when everything else doesn’t.

And then the internet became a thing.

It was a remarkable discovery, sitting in my college computer lab hearing the “beep” of a 56k modem connecting me to the rest of the world. I was in love with it immediately. I spent many of those first few months surfing the web for interesting things. Words, pictures, and artwork from all over the world, and I was there clicking on links to the next page to see where else it would take me.

And I wanted to be a part of it.

So I started designing websites with Microsoft FrontPage (stop laughing, it wasn’t that bad)—big, small, and “artsy” sites with Macromedia Flash. I moved on to better tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver and got my hands dirty with Vim.

My customers and employers loved the sites I created because I used all of the skills from my graphic design experience to make very professional-looking sites.

But then they wanted people to find them, visit them, and click on the buttons.

Oh…

The internet at the time was a Wild West of promotion. No real rules or methods. There were a lot of directories, and there were a lot of young search engines vying for a piece of the online world. For a long time, you had to physically tell them you were there, one by one. You had to submit to so many because they all had very similar linear search rules. In 1998, Lycos was the most popular site online.

But three of them did things a bit different.

MSN Search (Now Bing)
Yahoo
Google

Whether it was branding or the actual service they provided, these three search engines changed the landscape of the web. Collectively, they provided the best search results. Collectively, they all withstood the dot-com bubble. They were the search engines that you had to be on.

And they had rules.

And you had to learn those rules to be found in their search results.

So I started learning everything I could about search. I was a member of every web search forum and magazine you could find. The search engines told you a little bit of what they wanted from you, and you had to figure out the rest. So you asked, and read, and experimented, and failed, then tried again.

And during all of this craziness, Google, with its superior results and catchy name, came out on top, and searching online became Google’s game.

I’ve seen search evolve from wild methods of promotion to something exactly like the traditional marketing I learned when I was younger. Data, research, creativity, long-form content, calls to action, KPIs, and MQLs; terms that were around before, are now all the rage…again.

And I’m still pretty good at it.

In both marketing and digital marketing, you learn something brand new every day.

And if you love everything about it as I do (it’s a love/hate thing) you remember what’s most important:

Draw them in with the right art.
Convince them with the right words.
Be where they will find you.