During a long and uneventful career in biotechnology and medical diagnostics marketing, I had launched my first website in 1995 for Digene – and we won a Biomedical Marketing Award of Excellence. That was cool.
Although a transition from biomedical to technical may seem odd, I decided NOT to move to Boston when the company I then worked for was acquired and moved.
Dotcom start up it was! As the 5th person hired on at WebSurveyor, and tasked with “get leads for sales, Oh and there is virtually no budget” – I began to play around with new, inexpensive marketing techniques like pay per click advertising (GoTo) and CPM advertising (Google search). In addition, I negotiated a number of deals with different sites to run our “Cover your ass…umptions” banner ads.
While searching for additional ways to get “free” publicity, I stumbled upon “search engine optimization.” I started reading forums, playing around with the way I programmed the company’s site and we started getting boatloads of traffic from natural search. Very cool!
That was in early 2000.
The world has definitely changed since the turn of the century!
No longer at the start up (which I am really proud to say did NOT fold in the bubble burst, but has grown and allowed some really good friends to “not really have to work.”), I moved on to do some consulting. That’s where the name “e-buzz-master” came from. It’s about creating buzz and success online (you would be amazed at some of the ways people HAVE viewed that name, though!!)
I helped clients for about 2 years, but (due to circumstances beyond my control – like rent) decided that a stable work environment would be more interesting.
In 2004, I joined Network Solutions to handle online advertising (banners and keywords) as well as the search engine optimization for two or three sites that the company ran. I coordinated efforts with an advertising agency.
Give it another four years – and were two internal teams, with seven people working on those efforts, lots of banner advertising, PPC and 10 sites (and growing FAST) to optimize.
Today, I am on the cusp of a new adventure. On Tuesday, I will start at PRWeb, managing banners, keywords, natural search and anything else I can help with.
The transition to PRWeb came about in a very odd way. A headhunter called me for a position opening at another company – unlike most of the other cold-calls I had received, I decided to talk to the guy and learn more. He sent me a job description and I figured what the heck! I’ll talk with them – at least I could get some good information out of another company about how they manage acquisitions and ecommerce.
Next step: Oh, dear…. No resume and no references! Better fix that quick! So I updated my resume and called around to several contacts with whom I had worked to request references. Oddly, one of my contacts said that there was a new position opening at PRWeb in the ecommerce team that she was building. Oh, BOY, I said to myself – working for PRWeb would be WAY cool!
In short, I went from a very happy Network Solutions person – with no reason to want to leave, a lot of friends, and a great team to someone who had to decide between three plum opportunities: stay, pursue option A, or pursue PRWeb.
So I am off to the new gig. Hopefully, I will have more time to update the blog.
