I went on to graduate from Weatherford High School and entered the restaurant business.
I owned and managed several restaurants in Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.
After 10 years in the restaurant business, I decided to follow in my parents' footsteps as an educator.
I went back to Weatherford and earned two Education Degrees from Southwestern Oklahoma State University.
I began a career in teaching and support positions in the Oklahoma public schools.
Teaching was a great experience, but not something I wanted to continue until retirement.
It was rewarding but also extremely stressful.
I felt stuck in the "Rat Race"! In 2004, I decided I was not willing to continue with that stressful lifestyle until retirement.
Enough was enough! I wanted a new career which allowed me to work from my home in northwest Oklahoma.
I loved my country home and wanted to spend my days there with my wife, Kay.
The Internet offered the perfect solution.
I knew other people were making good money with the Internet at that time.
I also realized those people with online success were not lucky or more intelligent.
I spent the next year reading everything I could get my hands on about Internet marketing.
More importantly I took action! I began building websites and applying what I learned.
It became obvious that the single most important factor for success was traffic Without online traffic, it was all a lost cause.
Traffic was the weak link in the whole system.
No matter if I had the best product and/or service and the "prettiest" of all web sites, my online business would fail without traffic.
I first tried the "easy way" to get traffic.
I bought traffic using what's called Pay Per Click advertising.
Sure, it was easy to get traffic, but try as I might I had zero return on investment.
(Actually, my wife kept pointing out that there was more money going out than was coming in!) So I ditched the Pay Per Click method.
I needed free traffic! I needed my sites listed in Google and Yahoo in the free listings! I needed the free advertising the internet was so famous for! Enter SEO (search engine optimization) I discovered something called Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is a method of creating pages and listings that the search engines respect and will rank well...
and send that free traffic! I learned SEO and applied the concepts to my sites.
SEO changed everything! Traffic picked up and sales began happening.
The Internet became my ticket for escaping the rat race.
Over the next several years, my wife Kay and I simply "washed, rinsed and repeated" our SEO efforts with many different web sites.
I gained experience in all areas of Internet marketing including retail, affiliate marketing, and AdSense marketing.
Life was good! It didn't take long before friends, family and even our own web site customers began asking me about my online success.
As a former teacher, I realized I was in a great position to help people enjoy their own success with online marketing.
I began teaching others how to earn money online by using SEO to bring free and targeted traffic to their websites.
How Local Search Fits In While all areas of the Internet were growing like wild fire, Google was the first to notice that more and more searches were based on local search terms.
People were not only using the Internet for broad based searches, they were looking for information about goods and services in their city This was huge news for local business owners! I observed Google's new focus on local search (such as the addition of local business listings via Google Maps).
With Google moving into local search, it was obvious the direction things were going.
More and more people were going online with high speed Internet connections and Internet enabled phones.
Local business owners had a brand new, and low cost, marketing outlet! There was very little difference in how Google served local results compared to my very broad SEO marketing methods; it was still about their perception of what was most relevant.
Actually, and this is important, achieving great rankings in Google for local search terms is much easier than for the broad, nationwide search terms.
In many cases, getting ranked for specific local terms is easier than "taking candy from babies!"