Hi everybody,
I suppose if your here then you probably want to know a bit about me.
Let me introduce myself.
I grew up in the country in Victoria, Australia in a small town called Daylesford. There my mother started a restaurant on lake Daylesford called “The lake daylesford Boat house cafe” I grew up working after school helping out wherever I could and renting out boats on the weekend so at an early age I learned the rewards of a hard days work.
I moved to Queensland when i was 16 after finishing year 11 at high school as I couldn’t find any subjects that interested me for year 12. I had already completed unit 1-4 of Business management, graphics, Art paining and drawing and all the subjects that I really enjoyed.
In Queensland I helped my mother with a new venture “cafe fresh” the idea was great the small coast town was about to boom and you could see this place had real potential. There were a few problems though, my mum was targeting the same demographic she had been in the country and wasn’t listening to her “gold coast” customers.
After a while the business was really suffering and I could see my mum getting further and further into debt, she was about to declare bankruptcy when she said “Dustin do you want this business?” as the business required more active ownership I was reluctant to accept the offer of taking over a business that was about to fail unless something drastic was done.
Side stepping a little my mum and sister had had a falling out a few years earlier and I recommended to mum that she offer the business to Lainie (my sister) as a peace offering and that I would stay on to run the business as long as her and her partner John came up to live and run It with me.
So long story short Lainie accepted and moved up to run the business, we went about asking people what they wanted and started actively Marketing the business to the local market. Big lesson here, once we started looking after the locals they started looking after us and we just focused on individual groups of people and once we got them in the doors and happy we’d focus on another.
As I am know aware this was probably the single most important aspect of this businesses success, at the time i didn’t know anything about Marketing but found myself actively pushing our product in a very competitive tourism market.
I’ll keep it brief, basically the business was a massive success. We took over th shop next door and knocked out the walls to accommodate more customers and started a cult following.
5 years had passed and we were all pretty burnt out so we sold the business, I went on to manage several other businesses and took what I felt was a bit of a holiday by sitting in the backseat for a while. I was working in a place called the beach shack in Currumbin (great place to visit if your ever there) and I was approached by the CEO of my now employers company.
The company I now work for is a Marketing consultancy firm that specialise in a very unique marketing tool.
I’ve been involved in Internet Marketing on several levels with them for the past 4 years, mainly from a commercial business perspective. My journey into Online Marketing started from a lack of understanding of the Google AdWords spend.
I spent several month’s stumbling through the Internet looking for answers. After finding many many answers good and bad, I decided to finally spend some money investing in my knowledge and education, as it seemed that everyone was holding back a few secrets.
As your probably aware the simple question “am i getting the most out of my AdWords budget” can open a massive can of worms and boy did it. Until then I was unaware of how important page rank and quality score really were, you may laugh but as a Sales focused employee we had the IT department look after that area.
Well I’ve since bought many ebooks and Marketing courses, in fact lately there’s been some really good ones that I highly recommend but I’ll go more into that in another post.
Once I was able to understand how so many elements had to be right in order to get the real results you want I was hooked and I’ve been affiliate marketing ever since. Now my real passion is SEO and enjoying my passion which is Internet Marketing.
