Protactix

I got a new assignment to run a company that had been in business over twenty years. In that twenty years, management had added not one, zero, no – new customers except customers that had been referred by a sister company.

This company’s market was not only nationwide, it was world wide, and the budget allowed for no salespeople besides me.

Begin to cold call? Who? Where?

And if you do cold call, who runs operations while you are cold calling?

As luck would have it ( and I mean luck ) I ran across an old friend and former business associate who had been very successful in our former business.

Both of us had gone separate business directions, and as often is the case with business associates, once the business meetings are over the personal relationship drifts. We stayed in touch, but we talked personal stuff, not business.

In setting up for the new assignment, which was near my friends home, I ran into him and we did the usual “what are you doing now?” He told me a bit about his current business, which included a slice of internet marketing.

I listened to what he was doing but virtually instantly ignored the mention of internet marketing.

It simply did not register with me. I ignored it.

Looking back, I know why.

To me, at that time, two things were true. I used search engines and I got spam (not that spam was related to the search engines, or if it was related, I was so clueless about internet marketing that I would never have connected search engines and spam). Today, of course, I know that there should be no connection between using a search engine and spam, but that’s a topic for another day.

I liked and used the search engines. I did not like spam.

Although I was somewhat computer savvy, having been a network administrator in another life (long before Google and even before GUIs), I never really thought about the internet as anything but a sort of digital encyclopedia or thesaurus.

Well, I would make plane reservations online and I did use online banking and for very specialized tools or clothes, I might check on the Internet, but that was about it.

If anyone had asked me (which they didn’t) I would have said that internet marketing was pretty much all about spam and internet marketing was the type of advertising that was on all night cable channels (I have since learned that all night cable channel advertising is enormously successful and useful, but that’s not what I used to think).

Anyway, I was so ignorant about internet marketing that I didn’t even consider it a “real” business and certainly not a business that could add to the success of a “real” (brick and mortar) business.

It was the beginning of an internet marketing skeptic’s not so long but very successful journey.

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