Here I am pictured with the team at Capstone Career Solutions, one of my great clients. Thanks Jeff for having us in!
It’s difficult to believe but little more than a decade ago a company could be considered cutting-edge if it simply had an operational website. It probably wasn't much more than a glorified business card, but its mere presence hinted at the company's forward-thinking nature.
Rodney Lover was one of the early adopters, creating a rudimentary website for Lovers atWork Office Furniture, where today he is director of sales and marketing.
"In the mid-90s, the Free Press ran a feature on local businesses at were on the Internet," he recalls, "We had our own site and it was a novelty." That was back when CompuServe was a popular Internet service provider, although no one called it an ISP.
"I remember being in Europe in 1997 and there was a phone number I could call to have my CompuServe email read out loud. There was no way to check it on a computer, but I could hear it," says Lover, 36.
Flash forward 10 years and Lover again is on the cutting edge of the Internet. This time his fascination is with Google, already a far more successful enterprise than CompuServe ever was. In his marketing work for the family business, he was bowled over at the advertising opportunities on the Internet.
He's not talking about email spam touting stock tips and discount Viagra; his interest is in search-related ads, the boxes and banners that appear on the screen and relate directly to the topic being searched on Google. O f course, there are many other search engines out there, all selling ads, but Google is king of the hill-at least for now.
Lover started doing online marketing about five years ago, and by 2005 he decided the concept was good enough to support a separate marketing company. Last year he created Arrowfinger Inc., a business dedicated to helping companies advertise themselves on the Internet. "This is not for every business. Some won't see any return from this kind of advertising," he says candidly. "But for others, especially professional services like lawyers, dentists, travel, private medical, the HR industry, it works really well. Often people are using Google to search for things but don't see how they can make it work for them. I show them how effective it can be."
Unlike traditional advertising, Lover says it's possible to directly track the effectiveness of Google ads. "You can see how many people are clicking your ad, and you can see how they engage your website once they get there. You can understand exactly what it's costing you and what the return is."
Lover recently completed a test to become a qualified Google advertising professional, a designation Google bestows upon people who are proficient at using its Adwords software and who manage a minimum dollar figure of advertising.
"I often ask people, "When was the last time you were on Google?" They'll say yesterday or this morning. So then I ask why they're not advertising there. It's a tremendous tool for many businesses"
Christopher Clark