My backstory, or how I went from GPS to SEO

Sixteen years ago, I had moved from Western NC to Northern California, and was spending my spare time exploring massive (50,000 acre) tracts of private land that I was being allowed to mountain bike on. There was a maze-like network of logging roads that were often overgrown or blocked by landslides, so in order to figure out which ones connected, I used aerial photos and started mapping my exploits with GPS.

Ultimately, I got into GPS quite heavily and became somewhat of an expert on the subject. I love to write and had been kicking around the idea of authoring a book and, long story short, GPS Mapping was published in 2005.

Becoming a professional blogger

As an afterthought, I started a blog to promote the book. It’s funny how things work out — within 18 months not only was I earning more from the blog than the book; it was exceeding the income of my day job too. By the summer of 2007, I had resigned my position as Executive Director of a nonprofit and was a full-time professional blogger.

My wife and I moved back to Asheville in 2008 and things were going swimmingly. I had learned how to outrank sites like Amazon, CNet and Consumer Reports. Better yet, I was mountain biking and hiking with GPS and getting paid for it!

Enter the smartphone

But most of my income was due to the popularity of auto GPS, and then this thing called the smartphone came along, and before too many years passed, most people had a GPS in their pocket or purse.

Slowly but surely, my GPS income started to decline. I could still rank well, but there just weren’t that many people searching for GPS.

Change is good

So the writing was on the wall. It was time for a career pivot. Fortunately I’m a bit ADD; I like change and new challenges. I took stock of my skills — writing, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO) and local SEO all rose to the top. The first few are relatively easy to understand why; the latter was due to my paying lots of attention to various mapping and location-based services while blogging about GPS.

So a couple of years ago I started doing some part-time consulting, and earlier this year completed the transition when I sold my blog (yes Virginia, you can sell websites, but that’s a story for another day).

What I do now

Now I’m working full-time helping businesses with SEO and local SEO. My livelihood has depended upon my site’s ranking — I know how critical rankings are, but I also know that conversions and defensible traffic are just as important.

Contact me today to put my expertise to work helping your business generate more revenue.