About Me and My Passion for SEO and Entrepreneurship
I run a small local search engine optimization (SEO) agency out of my home in Pittsburgh and I’ve been building websites for fun since 1997.
Keep reading my story to learn more about me and what I have to offer (mostly for free).
I don’t know why, but I had a strong desire to be a computer programmer while I was growing up.
Maybe it was my innate ability to solve problems quickly.
Maybe the movie Office Space just gave me the idea that I could get away with doing nothing for a living.
Either way, I spent a lot of free time working on my software development skills in high school.
I figured it was the closest I’d ever get to being a rockstar. And it really did take me places.
Over the years, I’ve had many professional adventures, including starting my own web hosting reseller business while I was in high school. I had to sell the business at a discount due to what I can only describe as a bit of hereditary bad luck and a total lack of self-discipline.
But I never gave up and I never stopped learning, especially when it came to the areas of user interface design, SEO, and entrepreneurship.
I was all about solving real-world business problems. It’s too bad that I was forced into post-secondary education after high school in 2003 and I didn’t have the spine to stand up for myself.
I just wasn’t ready. I became a burnout, a dropout, and unemployable.
After hitting rock bottom in 2005 and almost being homeless, I reenrolled in the same program that I dropped out of 2 years earlier.
But this time, I was on a mission. I was ready to turn my life around and be their biggest success story.
It didn’t take long for me to go after what I wanted. I remember it like it was yesterday.
In what was possibly the boldest moment in my life up to that point, I walked into the IT Director’s office, slammed an ASP 3.0 book down on his desk, and demanded to know what else he needed me to learn before he’d let me loose on their intranet site that was being held together by a work-study with virtual duct tape.
He said, “keep your grades up.”
After posting straight A’s for a couple of months, they gave me what I wanted. Well, mostly.
I became a help desk support technician and web application developer.
I was that guy in the hoodie who made that sweet app everyone used to check their grades.
I had finally made it. I got my fame, albeit for $7 an hour as a part-time work-study.
But I wanted and needed more. I was hungry (and still am).
I became immersed in materials like the Google founders’ Anatomy of a Search Engine paper that they published through Stanford. That might be normal for some college students… but I did it for fun.
To help make ends meet, I also started freelancing as a website developer, and I found that I really enjoyed it. I was able to make an extra few thousand dollars every year or two from my website design work. But I still sucked at SEO and couldn’t get an ROI if my life depended on it.
After graduating, the school kept me on part-time as a 22-year-old developer, instructor, and help desk tech. I was hot shit.
And at the same time, I was greedy, naive, and still a little bit ignorant when it came to the real world.
After a traumatic layoff, I settled into my software support niche in 2011. It paid the bills but didn’t allow me to grow my income as much as I wanted.
Don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot. But my now ex-wife was much more interested in financial stability than independence, so I put my big dreams of owning my own business on hold to focus on my career.
And saying that I was focused is actually an understatement. I was obsessed and refused to be anything less than #1.
That’s how I earned technical leadership positions at the last 2 companies that I worked for and finally started making the kind of money that I thought I wanted.
But there was a price and the cost was my time and mental health. I felt trapped and there was no way out.
That all changed when I learned my 1 missing ingredient for running a successful business in 2020 – recurring revenue.
I immediately pivoted my side hustle from website design freelancer to SEO agency.
Apparently, being able to make local businesses show up on the map in Google searches is a pretty big deal. So I’ve used that expertise to help my customers scale their businesses and multiply their revenue.
Fortunately for me, I always stayed up to date on the latest SEO trends and hit the ground running. It was nothing short of magical.
And I did it while still holding a full-time job thanks to the power of delegation and my innate ability to create effective systems.
Thanks to my efforts, my biggest customer was found by Epic Games as well as several other big national brands.
As of Q1 2023, they’re earning a $220,000 salary (more than 14x ROI) with no other marketing.
They’ve graciously given me a lot of the credit, but honestly, my customers make it easy for me by doing top-notch work and customer service.
It’s probably needless to say at this point: I’m always looking for new opportunities to help myself and others grow professionally.
I’m going to provide you with a lot of great material, including details on several tools, techniques, and shortcuts that I’ve utilized to help small to medium-sized companies grow throughout my 20 year career.
If you’re interested in learning more about me or how I can help you, please don’t hesitate to check out some of my content and contact me. I’d be happy to chat if you think we can help each other out.
Thanks for reading!
– Bill
A note to advertisers and affiliate partners: I will always publish my honest and objective opinions. You can pay me to talk about your product or service, but that won’t in any way affect what I say about you.
Please don’t ask me to jeopardize my integrity because I will always value it more than I value any professional relationship.