Insight From The CEO

Posted on May 18, 2015

Why Blog? Why Now? | Clearwater SEO

My experience in the online marketing world dates back to 1995 when the St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Bay Times) was attempting to figure out how to leverage the Internet to enhance its business.

There was a lot of confusion and curiosity about what other newspapers were doing at the time to exploit this new distribution channel.  Our hardy team of four set out across the country to gather first-hand information about publishing a newspaper online.
Twenty years later, there is still a lot of confusion and curiosity about the Internet.  The difference is this – “it is too late to be early.”  We are now in the adolescence of online marketing, with new and evolving options popping up almost weekly.

A business can take the “whack-a-mole” approach to dealing with these new pop-ups.  Or it can learn from the experience of the past 20 years to make some very targeted decisions about which online media are appropriate and which are of questionable value.

All this while the online marketing industry is searching for revenue models in a scenario that resembles the Old West and there is no sheriff in town.

This blog series will catalog our experiences over the past 20 years and will provide some insights into the role of traditional marketing practices as applied to online media.
We will concentrate on opportunities for small to medium sized businesses.  These are the folks with severely limited resources along with a huge appetite for inexpensive and effective online marketing opportunities.  Our goal is to provide you with some very viable options along with some techniques we have found to be effective over the past two decades.

Hope to earn your confidence as we go along.