What I want to get good at next
When I first started out in tech, I was basically in sales. Then I moved to business development. Then product marketing. These days, I’ve gotten a bit closer to design and product management/development. Over the years, I’ve worked directly with many large media and infrastructure companies in a direct selling mode. This is the “business development” part. Typically, business development means you’re trying to cut a partnership. Sales means your pushing the same boxes (or software licenses) over and over again. In business development, a typical task might have been “go and figure out how we can work with Sony so that we can leverage their distribution.” In a nutshell, this kind of revenue building exercise is a case-by-case, face-to-face kind of discussion.
These days though, I’ve become very interested in the finer details that have made Google as big as it is. If you have traffic, you make money. A lot of it. Why? Advertising is bigger than almost every other industry. And, if you know how to get traffic you can run just about any online business. Sounds simple enough. How many people understand the basic model that is Marchex? Some. But how many really understand the industry behind the scenes that makes Marchex so much money? I suspect only those who work in the SEO business know it well. I’m a believer that if you know what drives traffic and how to drive traffic more effectively and for less money, you could quit your job and sell just about anything online. I’m not the first one to come up with this notion but I admit I am late to the party. I have never bought any online advertising personally. I have never given Google a dime. I have never participated in an affiliate network. I’ve never used ad tracking software. I have never engaged in “split testing” (heh…you’ll have to look that one up heh?). Bottom line? I’ve worked in the internet space since 1994 and I’ve never had to concern myself with driving traffic to a website. While I understand the basics, I’ve never had to worry about whether my business website contained important ranking elements that appeal to top ranked pages in major search engines nor would I currently know how to significantly improve your rankings as of this moment. This might surprise some people. But, selling RealNetworks Video servers was never about search engines.
I dont believe you can be good at everything and I’m not aiming to become a best selling web marketing author. But, I do think that this knowledge seeking exercise will be healthy. This curious soul is about to go through web marketing boot camp. Should be interesting…
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