Greetings and welcome to the Collins Harris LTD blog. We officially got started in 2012 when we incorporated in Nevada, but founder Nick Harris (me) has been active and successful in web marketing since the late 1990s.
That actually reminds me of one of my first web marketing projects that I started and ran back in high school: a cell phone customization website called celltonez (now defunct). Looking back on it evokes about the same mixture of embarrassment and pride that looking back at ones high school yearbook photo does. But the site actually generated a lot of traffic (upwards of 2,000 unique visitors daily) and I managed to make a pretty sizable amount of ad revenue. Some of the details about how I managed to generate that level of traffic are pretty hilarious/quasi-shady… ask me over a beer sometime and maybe I’ll share! Weekends were especially lucrative, and I remember returning from soccer practice or windsurfing with my dad on Saturdays and Sundays to see what at that time seemed like ridiculous amounts of cash in my advertiser account. Here is a screenshot from early 2001 of celltonez.com, a babe as part of my logo and all!
I’m actually kind of shocked to realize that I’ve been involved in web marketing for a quarter of a century now. But at the same time, my early success with celltonez proved to me that there was and still is a vast opportunity to utilize the internet to sell products and services.
I’ve launched and run a number of companies in the years since, but the one thing I’ve always excelled at is driving traffic and revenue with online marketing. It has never been just about creating a website for me; it is always first about figuring out who the customer is, what they want, and then how to create a website that caters towards them and produces results.
In recent years, some of my most successful work has been driving traffic via a combination of inbound marketing techniques and business development. One client had seen stagnant traffic and declining sales for several years, and then I got involved in the middle of 2011 and over the course of several months managed to do this:
Sales and profits are up nearly 3x for this client since I first became involved and we continue to launch new traffic and conversion increasing initiatives. The arrangement has worked out so well that we only charge them based on performance, and everyone is quite pleased.
So this brief history of my life as a web marketing professional leads up to where I am and we are as a company now. We’ve got successful projects accomplished and under way, but are striving to go a whole lot further. Launching new world-changing companies, partnering in success with awesome entrepreneurs, and continually learning are the future I envision. The purpose of this blog is to share what I learn along the way. With that, I conclude this first post and look optimistically towards the future.