About Myself

Background
For 14 years I have been servicing office equipment for a local small business office supply and service company. The first 8 years with the help of being a HP Authorized Service Provider we had a steady flow of service leads contributed from the HP service locator's website. The service and sales of office equipment grew at a steady rate and we went from 1 part time printer technician to 4 full time techs. However, 6 years ago the company I originally worked for went out of business due to the rise of big chain office supply dealers like Staples, Office max, and Office depot. So I lost my ASP credentials from HP and the leads dried up. The main focus of the company I work for now is office supplies. They quickly changed phone numbers, change the company name, and relocated the store focusing on the immediate bottom line not thinking about the long term financial effects. Over the first 3 years with the new company, we had lost 90% of our walk in service customers, long term customers thought we went out of business, and new customer leads were nonexistent because we have moved out of city limits, were not affiliated with HP anymore, and the sales representatives were focused on sales, not service.

Present
Before I started working for this company, at my previous company I had spent more and more time in the role of service manager, making management decisions, and fixing equipment that other technicians couldn't figure out. With the new company, I thought some of that responsibility would fall on my new service manager and I could just do what I love to do. Which is fix machines and make customers happy. Unfortunately, I was stuck once again trying to build something out of nothing. 3 years ago with the steady decline in service and sales, financial decisions had to be made. I was told until I could come up with more service I would be cut down to 4 days a week with more cuts being needed if things didn't improve. At that point, with nothing else to loose I decided to start up my own financially funded website to attract more leads. A half year later after creating the site, I was back to full time. Two years after tweaking and advertising the site, I've still maintained my full time status, actually started, once again, making the company some money, and on occasion find myself with more work than I can handle.

Conclusion
On this blog site I'd like to share my experience in starting up a Small Business Web Advertising Campaign. I'm not going to claim to be a pro at this. I'd just like to share some of my experiences through this process and maybe help a few others along the way. When you see advertisements for website building you see two options. First, the mom and pop shop that with a few clicks of the mouse and their business becomes a success overnight and the second were they make it seem so hard that only a trained professional can handle the job. It actually is a little bit of both. Like anything else in life. It's all about how much effort you put into it. If you just build a site and publish it you probably won't see very good results. If you build a site, use a few techniques, and regularly update it with some new content your going to have more success.