I used to run a fairly good sized service business and had a great friend who had a personal website.  He would say wierd things to me in conversation like: “We should google that,” or “I’m going to go home and blog about that.”  Now this was somewhere around 2002, and he would tell me that I was really missing the boat by not having a company website, but it seemed silly to me that a potential customer would go online to search for a local service provider. 

We employed about 40-60 people, spent $1500 bucks a month on yellow pages, and probably $40,000 a year on marketing with door to door hangers, direct mail, and just about anything we could spend money on… But not a website.  We would pull in about 1.5 to 2 million a year depending on the seasons, and… no website.  I was 23 at the time, and most my friends were figuring out what to do after they graduated college.

The ironic thing now is that I basically make my entire living on the web.  We run about 700 websites now, and always looking for more opportunities.  Today is March 6th, 2010, and I am starting a blog for about half fun, and the other half to see how much money I can make with the google ads you see on the right side.  We don’t spend a dime on advertising now.  I mean it… Not one dime.  Don’t do the chamber of commerce, no BBB, no yellow pages, and not even in the white pages because we are cheap and have 9 phone lines for about 140 bucks a month on a voip plan.  Man has business changed!  I don’t really know how we even functioned in the 90’s or even up to about 2003/4.

Let me tell you a little more about my friend who got me into the internet.  He started a personal website before there was godaddy.  Back when domains were $35 – $60.00 a year.  He was in college.  I was also college age, but dropped out because my business had gotten too big to handle both.  I would go to his apartment and he would be hand coding his site.  Looked like the most boring thing I could imagine.  He was one of the first people to embrace google, and would preach about how cool it was.  A couple years later he would talk about ”blogging.”  I would say things like, “You got to get a life man!”  “Who cares!”  A couple years before CNN and Ashton Kutcher started using twitter, he was telling me it was the next big thing.  He was doing podcasts before they got big.  (I still don’t even understand what a podcast is) He tells me he gets most his web traffic off of facebook, but I still won’t get an account, and just can’t find the time to send worthless 140 character tweets out.  I keep asking him what he’s doing on the web to see what the next big trend is…

So, we do things old school.  We don’t tweet, don’t do facebook, don’t do linkedin.  Old SEO techniques.  Solid titles, descriptions, and good content that people like to read.  So I’m starting a blog to join this era about 5 years late, and still hold out hopes of skipping the facebook era.  (Myspace isn’t really hot anymore, so maybe facebook will go away)  I plan on blogging on local businesses that I would like to help promote, and call out local businesses that suck.  Or any real points of interest that I find interesting.  I also might put up some worthless info just to see if someone might click on some ads next to it, and make a little money off my random thoughts.

Thanks for looking and enjoy.