Our Journey

It all started with an idea to make a website about two things best enjoyed together...golf and cigars.  Thus, Goodstix.com was born.

I learned how to make a WordPress website and put in a bunch of content mostly by cutting and pasting from other golf and cigar websites, and waited for the cash to start rolling in. 

Then...nothing happened.

That was my first mistake.  

I joined the Sacramento Wordpress Meetup, watched countless hours of online classes on Udemy and Lynda.com, but still no traffic.  

I learned about content management, site design, user experience (UX), page speed, mobile responsiveness, and countless other things that COULD be the problem. I even rebuilt the site at least five times thinking it was just bad design. 

Then I learned about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.  

Thus began my journey down the rabbit hole of SEO.  I soon discovered I did my project backwards, SEO should be considered FIRST, along with keyword research to find out what people are actually looking for, not just the subjects I wanted to write about.  The more I learned the more my online skills grew. 

I started helping out my employer, our customers, and friends who needed website help as they were having the same problems I had gone through years before.  

Realizing that more and more people need help with their digital marketing, I created Spectrum Marketing in 2010.  

I chose this name because the electromagnetic spectrum has a very narrow band of visible light, the rest of it is invisible, yet powerful.  Like digital marketing, the website is just the visible part of your marketing efforts.  The unseen forces like SEO govern the results.  

Yes, I got an "A" in astronomy at CSUS ;)

What was just a passing hobby became kind of an obsession because I felt I never learned very much useful marketing stuff in college, and now I was learning skills that could actually get website traffic and leads!

I even started teaching class about SEO at the Hacker Lab.  Yeah, I was the only 50 something guy teaching 30-year-old kids about SEO and online marketing.  

Man, had I come a long way!

Once, a colleague said he knew a guy who "figured out the internet”.  It seems I have as well.   Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?