I began in retail sales and arrived at enterprise-level marketing. Here are three career milestones.

My first personal computer

My first PC, bought in 1986, ran MS-DOS. It came with Microsoft Works, an office suite. The PC’s previous owner left their store’s business records on the device. I was amazed that a room full of paper records could be digitized into a container the size of a hatbox.

The PC came with marvelous tutorials for the operating system and office applications. I learned to create spreadsheets, documents, and databases. Windows 3.1 was released In 1992 with some cool 256-color games. But there wasn’t a lot to do yet with a personal computer. The World Wide Web was still new. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser wasn’t released until 1995.

E-Commerce

Around that time I discovered some Adobe design software at a local thrift store. I paid $40, hoping to find someone with a Mac computer. That week I learned about a new auction site called “eBay.” The software sold for $450. The buyer was pleased. The software was still in the original wrap and listed for $2,500 plus tax!

My auction stood out because it had a photo. I saw that eBay auctions with photos sold for ~20% more than those without photos. But the seller had to know the HTML code to add one. So I created an eBay quick-start guide to host photos and format text. That project was followed in 1998 by AdWizard and Snipes! (written in C++ for Windows). The seller guide, and buyer and seller tools were the first of their kind on eBay.

It was clear that e-commerce was the “next big thing” in sales and marketing. At that time eBay buyers were still paying via check in the mail. When PayPal offered digital payments for eBay auctions around 2000, then e-commerce took off.

Web Marketing

I built websites in HTML with a text editor and FTP client, before moving into content management systems (CMS) like WordPress. The CMS lets the marketer focus on content while the template elements are provided by a professional graphics designer.

As more businesses moved onto the Web, website placement in the search engine results pages was increasingly important. That led to website design considerations which became known as “search engine optimization” (SEO). Page content had to be optimized for keywords and structure to make it search engine-friendly. Later on, external links (aka, a “Web reputation”) were called off-site SEO.

I’ve studied sales and marketing from Zig Ziglar to Chris Anderson. “Web Marketing for Dummies” by Jan Zimmerman is the Web marketer’s bible. Jay Levinson’s guerrilla marketing series is wonderful. Guerrilla marketing is low-cost and adaptable, making it a perfect strategy for the Web. My approach is customer-centric, known as consultative, aka product evangelist or marketing guru.

What’s next?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the newest technology. AI has access to a vast amount of information. AI is fast enough to simulate a human response to a question. But even a learning system is limited by its design. AI poses both risks and opportunities.