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Whilst we are all waiting with baited breath for the new December Rockettheme template (I'm really hoping it's going to be a good one for the new gambling site!) I thought I'd entertain you with a story from the Property Mentor Christmas Party.
But before we get to that let's have a bit of background so you know how I came to be there in the first place.
Back in 2004 I was working my ass off for keywordmarketing.com writing all the content and generally building an internet marketing strategy site when I was unexpectedly told that the company had run out of money. This was a recurring theme in those days. (Oh those heady days!).
I'd gone through about four or five internet companies by this stage and they all went the same way running out of cash before they got a chance to become profitable. It was incredibly frustrating as the potential was there for all to see.
Pikky shows - Matthew, Yvonne, Myself, Cheryl.
Ah yes, as an example of all the money being chucked at new startups....
I was working for Oneview.net back in 2000 with the grandly titled job description of "corporate webmaster". This was a company that was going to make websites for small to medium sized companies on a budget. The general idea being to have the customer pay a monthly fee for the upkeep and hosting of their site.
It was my job to look after the company website, keep it updated and troubleshoot some of the customers problems. I was in absolute heaven, this was a job I loved, the money was good and as a (small) shareholder I would get to see some of the profit if the company went public as planned. I was just getting to grips with some basic programming techniques and learning SEO so it was a fantastic opportunity.
The company grew fast. Way too quickly in fact and the growing pains manifested themselves one disastrous sunny summer Monday morning.
I arrived at the office about 8am. I always liked to arrive early simply to avoid the crazy traffic on the rabbit run between Telford and Dudley. There must have been about thirty people in the west wing. The company had grown so fast that it had taken over the entire top floor of the office block and by this stage we were nearly five hundred strong counting all the sales people and those that worked from home.
It was incredible that a company could go from 50 too 500 employees in about six months but people were throwing money at internet start up's like no tomorrow so if it seems surreal now it was normal for the time.
It was a hell of a sight to see nearly 80 or so graphic designers all packed like sardines into a small office area in the east wing.
As the staff filtered in to start the week I heard a small soft "pop" from the far corner and a little puff of smoke appeared above the desk. The same thing happened at the desk behind it. Then another, then another. As fast as the computers were being turned on they were spiking the electric mains and it was retaliating by taking out the fuses in the computer power supply. We ran around like headless chickens turning everything off before we had a major fire on our hands.
The office block had been built in about 1974. In those days if there were fifty people sitting upstairs they would all have had type writers and probably the only electric appliance would have been a radio or vacuum cleaner! It certainly wasn't built with a mains supply to power a new generation of computer users armed with all the peripherals that are attatched to them.
And so it was that we decamped to the local pub for two days whilst they figured out how to pipe in a decent power supply and get a generator installed temporarily.
The company eventually ended when they were taken over by freecom.net and as I'd only been there a couple of months I wasn't entitled to any payoff. They did pay me a couple of months redundancy though which was better than a kick in the arse.
The takeover is detailed here if you're interested.
So after being made redundant and then having yet another spectacular failure at keyword marketing I was looking around for something to do (as you do) when I spied an 'ad on Jobserve that was right up my street.
Property Mentor were a fledgling internet startup based in Milton Keynes and they needed someone to sort out their Internet Marketing.
I applied, was accepted, and set about the job at hand.
The PPC was out of control and it took a lot of work to get it performing properly. We were spending a lot of money every month but it's easier to make performance improvements with a bigger spend because even tiny improvements mean a big saving on the bottom line. Unfortunately with PPC if you are spending small sums you will never get the bigger picture because you don't have the budget to offset improvements against experimentation.
If you are going to run a PPC campaign don't expect anyone to do miracles with your £500 per month budget. You need to invest six times that to begin with and eliminate the keywords that don't work. That is the key point with PPC. It's getting rid of the keywords that don't perform that is so expensive. That, and having a website that will convert of course.
Many times I've run PPC campaigns with "obvious generic" keywords that never convert. Just because your competitors run with them doesn't mean that those keywords are producing for them.
Sheep never win the big money in PPC. You need to be prepared to go at it with a lot of ammunition to be successful and be very creative. For those that are successful at it the rewards make it all worthwhile.
When I left in 2008 we gave the marketing job to Moreniche who have done a fantastic job and it was great to see how far the company has come. If you are looking at developing a second income or want to escape the day job then Property Mentor is where you should go if you are not into the internet thing.
At the party I met a couple of guys from moreniche and we we chewed the fat over ahem! the "male enhancement products" as we put it, but the girls all work with this stuff every day anyway so they are not at all embarrassed by it!
One of the big things that you get out of going to these type of bashes is motivation. You get to see what everyone else has been up to for the past year and you can see how far you have progressed so it's definitely worth while making the effort to get out of the office/bedroom and get meeting these people.
At the party itself we raised over £500 for the help for heroes charity and I can't thank Matthew enough for inviting me back. Fantastic fun!