Best Startup
A QUICK INTRODUCTION ABOUT WHAT YOUR COMPANY DOES/YOUR VALUES/MISSION.
515Hosting & Web Design is a central Iowa-based company that offers websites, search engine optimization, and web hosting services to small businesses.
TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF?
I’ve been involved with WordPress since 2008. Over the years, I slowly accumulated enough knowledge to eventually build a blog that reached 35,000 organic visitors per month.
I realized, as an individual, I was capable of outperforming a lot of web designers and local SEO experts, so I built my own website marketing those services and, low and behold, began climbing up the ranks, taking what was a hobby and turning it into a small business.
IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME A YEAR OR TWO, WHAT PIECE OF ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE YOURSELF?
Keep going until you turn the corner. You’re often just one blog post away, one day away, or one step away from breaking through and realizing the goal.
With SEO, for instance, it really is a long game, and you might not see good results until 6 months to a year down the road, even if you’re doing everything correctly.
WHAT PROBLEM DOES YOUR BUSINESS SOLVE?
I help small businesses get found in search results and maintain their websites.
WHAT IS THE INSPIRATION BEHIND YOUR BUSINESS?
Locally, I found a lot of web designers were just taking templates and uploading them to a shared web hosting account and then charging customers for that service – but it was leading to a lot of problems, such as getting locked out of hosting accounts.
I felt like I brought a level of expertise in search optimization that other local businesses weren’t providing based on my own success that other companies couldn’t emulate.
WHAT IS YOUR MAGIC SAUCE?
Most of the local SEO companies are performing monitoring and using the natural ebb and flow of Google changes to SERPs to skew their reports to act as though they are performing things.
I take a different approach of much less proactive maintenance and instead encourage content expansion instead of content changes.
WHAT IS THE PLAN FOR THE NEXT 5 YEARS? WHAT DO YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE?
I’d like to have a consistent increase in the number of residual customers that are finding me and organically signing up for web hosting.
While I dominate many aspects of search results, I still find myself struggling to compete against big dogs like GoDaddy. I feel I offer better pricing and better service, so I may require word-of-mouth marketing to get there.
WHAT IS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE YOU’VE FACED SO FAR?
Time. It seems like when business is good, it’s overwhelmingly good, and I just struggle to balance it all. Then when it’s slow, it’s slow, and I feel overwhelmed by how I’m going to compete for that next paycheck. That’s just the nature of entrepreneurship.
HOW DO PEOPLE GET INVOLVED/BUY INTO YOUR VISION?
I’m looking for primarily small business owners who have WordPress sites they’d like to generate more business from.
