So you wanna know about me, huh?
Well read on for the deets…
My Musical Beginnings
As a young lad, I was (and still am) a die-hard musician. I even skipped along, bright eyed and bushy tailed, off to college to study trumpet performance.
It didn’t take long to realize I was down the path towards being a professional starving musician, so I tried to get a ‘real job’ – but there were no opportunities in SmallTown, Texas. I applied everywhere: Wal-Mart, Olive Garden, factories, and other chains. But everyone was full up and nobody was hiring.
This was the first realization that I would need to create my own opportunities and find my way, rather than rely on getting hired by somebody else and relying on someone who’d never seen me, who needed to cut my position to increase their own bonus.
For a couple of years, I DJed in Austin Texas’ clubs, and even got booked a few out of state gigs for warehouse parties and small festivals.
Getting Started In WordPress
During this time I met another entrepreneurial DJ who had a local web development business, and eventually we discussed the possibility of me providing support to his daily operations. This was my first foray into legitimate website work. Through my teen’s I had several small projects in the gaming world, running a couple of servers and forums, so I had experience but nothing professional.
One of many photos of me and my laptop
We worked together for a while and I started to get really comfortable working with WordPress, and my buddy started to pass his extra clients over to me, and it started to grow from there.
Movin’ On Up!
A while later I had another opportunity from a friend in the industry: A big supplement company was looking for SEO & PPC help, and they would pay me while training me how to manage and optimize the accounts.
Sweet!
I took the gig, and my trainer immediately left to a new opportunity, putting me in the driver’s seat of a huge ad account and website network to learn in real time.
I got really good really quickly, working 60-80 weeks to study everything I could find around direct marketing, landing page optimization, copywriting and advertising.
As a numbers guy, I took to it all pretty naturally and weirdly enough fell in love with paid advertising. I’m fascinated with the problem solving involved with the endless moving parts there are to troubleshoot, and optimize, in order to create a winning campaign. But once you nail it, it really is like printing money. Fun, right?
Another one. I wasn’t joking about the laptop photos!
Now We’re Here
If the next few years played out like a video training montage, it would look something like this:
- 00:00 – Blending of clips showing research on Adwords, SEO, Conversion Rate Optimization, and Direct Response Marketing , with a time-lapse indicated by clips of a hanging calendar, dropping off pages month-by-month.
- 00:14 – Cut to clips of me going to various coffee shops, with each of them having my order ready by the time I reach the counter, then off to work at a table.
- 00:28 – Flying, driving & general travel montage, showing the different environments around America and South-East Asia.
- 00:40 – More clips of furious research & studying, surrounded by sticky notes on my table, panning up to sticky notes covering the wall.
- 00:58 – Cut to matrix-esque clip of code filling up the screen, cutting to coffee mug slamming on the table. Time lapse to another coffee mug being added.
- 01:13 – Inception cut to me writing this page.
- Fin.
Oh yeah, I also launched a business, an audience building platform for musicians called Followgate
Chilling In The Hong Kong Airport
These days I’m consulting, emailing my list, writing blog posts, building websites, running traffic generation (PPC & SEO), and creating tech products – alongside new trainings and courses to show entrepreneurs the best of what I’ve learned along the way.
If you want to be sure and keep hearing more from me, hop onto my list to keep up with everything.