My knowledge of business ownership and marketing has been extensive. This has always caused a dilemma in deciding what services to offer. I’ve gone through a journey and I’d like to share with you the experiences I had that have brought me where I am today.

After deciding to cut down on my activity in my tech company, I was drawn to Internet marketing because it contained one of the things I loved the most, building relationships. At first I got very caught up with the Internet Marketing group of gurus who were teaching list building, sales pages, and other (now) questionable techniques for improving sales. One day, I was watching a video made by one of these gurus’s who taught a step by step process for manipulating people into buying your stuff. While watching I started getting a queasy feeling. This guy was coming right out, plain as day, and saying that you can fool the people into buying by following these steps. This made me stop and ask myself if this was the type of business I wanted to help people create. These businesses aren’t lasting, which is why there is such a frantic pace to them. The object is to get in and sell and then move on to the next product fast. Around this time I also started to see that all the guru’s were actually just selling each others products, a nice round circle of money changing hands among the few. Many times I heard from people who bought the products say that it didn’t work for them and many times I heard the guru’s say it didn’t work because basically people are lazy and don’t implement the ideas. So I left the guru’s behind.

I then moved on to the people who were concentrating on giving value. Lot’s of value! You would go to their websites where everything was free. They hoped to either get you on their mailing list to sell to you later, or that you would click on an ad so they could make some money in commissions. Don’t get me wrong, there were a few who were making a good living this way, but they were few and it had taken them years and years to build up to that moment.

Now we had two types of marketers. Those who were going to charge you $4,000 to teach you how to manipulate your audience and those who placed no value on their expertise and gave it all away.

Next I moved on to the experts. These are the people who do online marketing for a living and share their wealth of information with the rest of us. In most cases, their actual clients are large companies and they make a very good living at it. They are teaching on the side (and usually free) for reasons of their own (they may like giving back, they may like the attention, it may help them to convert those big companies to become buyers based on their reputations.) Here I learned some real skills I could put to use in helping my clients achieve success. I took the Inbound Marketing certification program and passed with flying colors.

But still, there was something missing.

The internet is an exciting place to be and it has changed the way we talk to one another. Old school marketing was based on pushing information to your target market. Marketing on the internet is based on building relationships, developing trust and offering value. With tools such as websites and social media we can broaden our market, convert leads to buyers on a higher level, develop on-going relationships with customers and for the non-profits, increase our community and donations.

What is missing was the melding of two disciplines. Traditional marketing (the push your message to the market type marketing) may be old school and internet marketing (go out and give value, build relationships) may be new and shiny, but it is essential to use the basic foundations of traditional marketing when implementing the new online marketing in order to achieve success. Traditional marketers were taught how to build a strategy, how to create an implementation plan and how to measure your efforts against your goal accomplishments. Internet marketing is telling us to jump right in, forget about measurement, and engage in everything. It’s become a free-for-all throwing away the best practices that have built up for years and we know work.

So, why have I chosen to offer the services I offer? After much debate with myself, and looking at what others are offering, I came up with some choices I had to make. I could offer to do your marketing for you. Some are offering themselves out as hired hands (and I’m not in anyway knocking outsourcing!) but I have some fundamental problems with someone else creating something as important as your marketing. The other alternative was to offer to teach you how to use all the tools, but I felt this was setting you up for failure without having the foundation to build on. The services that you will see me offer are those that help you build a strong foundation to work upon. They are services that help you develop your strategy based around your very detailed goals, help you to understand the tools that will meet those goals, guide you in creating a do-able and realistic implementation plan that takes the costs (risk, financial and resources) into consideration and helps you assess your current needs to get to your future success.