About The Web Marketing Outlaw
My name is Craig Dewe and I'm the founder of the Web Marketing Outlaw. We have a rule in marketing that you should never talk a lot about yourself... only what you can do for the client. But since you clicked on the about link this gives me the excuse to tell you all about why this website came to exist.
A Business Is Born
The concept of the Web Marketing Outlaw was originally created around January 2007. I was living in Madrid, Spain and on a break from Spanish class talking about my experience with websites. The owner of the school overheard my conversation and asked "You know about all this search engine stuff?" as she held up one of those famous yellow books called SEO for Dummies (SEO = Search Engine Optimization).
So I optimized their website a little for the search engines and they were thrilled with the results. But I saw a bigger problem with their website. It just wasn't structured very well and the content wasn't written very well.
Sharing my feelings the next project was rewriting their website. Well the results (coupled with a redesign from their web designer) were quite spectacular and now they were getting all sorts of great comments on their website. And so I got referred around Madrid to anyone who would listen.
The Before Time
Of course I didn't just come out of nowhere with all this internet knowledge so I guess I should go back to the very beginning of the story. I'd always loved computers right from when my parents bought me a little computer games system when I was about 6. It was the type that had huge blocks and very basic games.
I graduated to a full computer - a Commodore 64 - at the age of 11 and suddenly a whole new world opened up to me. I became fascinated by how they worked and world try to program games from books. Unfortunately they didn't work very well and years later I would finally learn I wasn't a computer programmer!
Around the age of 14 (or 1995ish) we had our first IBM compatible PC and I was introduced to the concept of connecting to other computers via modem to play games. I also participated in online Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) that were around before the Internet sprung into widespread use. Yes I was a geeky child!
A few years later I was designing websites for local clubs and businesses in a rather random fashion (technically my first business). I also went to university to study Computer Systems Engineering. Turns out my love of programming died about that time and a new love surfaced.
Business Hits The Scene
At the age of 20 I was housesitting and discovered a book on the bedside table called Rich Dad's Guide To Investing. I remembered being back at high school at the age of 14 and reading the definition of an entrepreneur and while I didn't quite understand it at the time I thought it sounded pretty cool and something I wanted to do. Picking up this book rekindled my desire to be in business.
So I immediately started another business fixing other people's computers with a friend. That lasted all of one client when it took us about 10 hours to replace a broken harddrive and made a massive $20 on the deal. But you should have seen the planning that went into the venture!
Deciding to finish my degree anyway I used my one optional paper to do a course on entrepreneurship and found a 4th year project more fitting to my tastes. I signed up with a university center that was trying to sell business excellence and benchmarking resources over the internet (and it's still going). My project became improving their search engine rankings although much of my advice ended up unimplemented due to programming restrictions.
I also started to learn more about web marketing and how cheap it really was to start a business on the internet. I had found the perfect place to launch my next business.
My First Real Business Is Launched
efrisson.com (just a spam site now) was launched around February of 2003. It was an ecommerce website that started selling DVDs and then niched down to cool computer gadgets for computer geeks. My business partner and I struggled to get it off the ground working two jobs (one unpaid) while we promoted our website.
We had something really cool going and that's where I first discovered the power of forming relationships with visitors. We had daily posts of random news and funny stuff to keep people coming back. We were even making sales all around New Zealand and Australia.
However our search engine knowledge didn't help much since no one knew most of our products existed. So we tried other forms of promotion all with limited success. At one point we spent thousands on cool banner ads on another geeky computer site but the ads flopped big time.
That was the beginning of the end and my business partner quit to go get "a real job." Since he was more the geeky one that kept the brand going I decided to cut my loses and walk away as well. So in January 2005 efrisson shut it's doors and we both moved on with our lives.
Escape Abroad
After closing the business I saved up money and finally was able to travel to Europe. I lived in London for just over a year before moving to sunny Spain in September 2006. There I started teaching English and travelling a lot... life was good.
But business was never far from my mind and I experimented with another website that lasted just a few months before I decided my ambitious plans were a little too ambitious. It was around that time that I had the conversation with the business owner mentioned in the beginning and my new business launched.
Say Hello To Connexted Limited
The original name for the Web Marketing Outlaw website was Connexted (still my registered company). It's website launched August 2007 and I was working with clients to improve their websites. In fact I'm still working with most of those clients right now even though I moved back to New Zealand in September 2008.
I'd spent two years learning all I could about web marketing (although it never ends) and playing with various projects online. Meanwhile my clients were happy and so was I. My business has grown from there.
Back in April 2009 I launched what was then the Marketing Outlaw website focused on improving marketing in New Zealand. However in talking to more business owners I found the need for website advice much greater... so I changed over to the Web Marketing Outlaw and here we are now.
The Web Marketing Outlaw
The focus of this website is to improve your website's performance on the Internet. This means it needs to make money for your business... not just flush it down the toilet. It's also here to remove a lot of the misinformation on the web about how to make money online.
The problem is most people don't know what they're talking about when it comes to web marketing. Web designers and web programmers throw in their own two cents while they rely on getting clients offline. Business owners lack the information they need to make their business a success online.
To prove the lack of knowledge a survey was done of new members to an internet marketing training website. It found that 75% of people who consider themselves to be intermediate and advanced internet marketers still make less than $1000 a month after 2 years of being online.
These are the people that spend huge amounts of time following internet marketing information and trends. They buy the products and spend countless thousands educating themselves. And yet most still make less than $1000 per month online.
If they can't make money online with a significant investment of time and money... how are regular business owners that have countless other balls to juggle supposed to do it?
I Hope I Can Help You
My goal is to help as many business owners as possible to make money online. I do it for my clients but having me personally involved limits how many people I can work with and costs a lot more. Therefore I'm working on courses that will give you step-by-step action plans to success online.
I also give away a lot of free information so you can see what I have to offer works. There's nothing worse than forking out money for stuff that has no effect on your sales. I ask you to prove what I have to say before you spend a dollar.
You can find out more by subscribing to my website and getting access to a whole bunch of free stuff. You even get two shameless bribes right off the bat. Use them to improve your website right now.
So here's to making more money from your website. Trust me when I say it's definitely worth doing. There's nothing better than waking up and finding sales have been made all over the world.
Talk soon,
Craig
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