If you visited this page recently (it is one of the more popular ones on the website), you will notice that I broke it down into lots of different skills that spread me thinly and gave the appearance of a jack of all trades, master of none.
I listened to the feedback and now I clearly do 2 things only, and do them both equally well.
Online Marketing
When I first started in online marketing, the primary way to do it was through search marketing and display advertising on other people’s websites. Now though, online/digital/Internet marketing (whatever term you want to use – I don’t care too much) involves much, much more.
In fact, one of my clients mentioned to me that back in the old days, you bought a nice looking yellow pages ad to advertise to the whole of Sydney, pay your fee and wait for the phone calls to come in. Now, you need a website, content generators, ideas for the content, time to write the content, a search engine friendly platform, custom modifications of the CMS to meet your needs, choose keywords, share on social networks, monitor the traffic and look for new opportunities, and make it compatible with every single device on the market that the population uses to access the Internet. Phew! I got tired just writing all that. And the reason for the poor grammar and sentence structure is because it is just as tiring to read the above as it is to actually implement.
So that’s what I like to do: create and implement online marketing strategies.
I have been doing it for a while, and as long as people continue to use the Internet, businesses have no choice to be there and have someone run their online marketing campaign.
Web Development
I spent half of my time at university sitting in the computer lab (the other half having fun, but I digress…) implementing small scripts and programs that I could then try to make some real-world application with. I ended up using PHP because I noticed at the time (we are talking about 2004) it was either that or Microsoft’s ASP.net platform that had the most jobs going for in the uni’s career website.
Fast forward to today, Python is my preferred programming language. The reason being I was completely won over when a friend of mine converted his whole code base from Java to Python (using the Django framework). I was completely blown away as I had not touched the language since doing natural language processing at uni – and loved the fact there were frameworks such as Django, Flask, and Twisted that I could play with.
So at present I am currently porting everything I have ever done in PHP to Python, which I will be sharing here and on my company website.
These Powers Combined
What I am really enjoying at the moment is taking both these skills and using them to complement each other. I find there is a huge gap in the market at the moment for a reasonably pricing tool for the SME’s (rather than the corporate enterprise) to analyse online marketing campaigns and look for new opportunities or find out if something is truly working or not. Stay tuned for the results of this thinking.
Dream Apps I Would Love to Build
I can tell you one day I will be launching a purely web based online magazine application run through the web as opposed to specific native apps for each platforms. I have the idea exactly in my head, just not the time to do it.
The other one? A search engine. Call me crazy/stupid/never going to happen – but I think search engines and the way they rank information is completely irrelevant in 2012. The current engines continually refine their current product, but they have not necessarily changed their core ranking signals and I think it is time someone challenged them and redefined what a good search result actually is. Plus it is one of the largest markets available, which Internet user does not use a search engine? 