Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Eric and I’m the Director of Business Development at Evergreen Search Marketing. We’re an online search marketing firm based in Los Angeles, CA. Our goal is to provide online businesses with effective and long-lasting online marketing solutions. In a nutshell, that means we want to help businesses increase relevant traffic and sales online. We specialize in search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC).
How do you bring ideas to life?
It might sound like a cliché, but it’s really all about doing. I can read all the books and blog posts that I want, but at the end of the day if I don’t put these teaching into action, I’ll just forget everything. The best way to bring an idea to life is by doing. You’ll make a bunch of mistakes along the way but it’s important to make these mistakes so you can avoid them in the future. In terms of HOW I do things: I just create a list of priority items for the day and execute. Rinse and repeat.
What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?
I’d say it’s Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh of Zappos. My main takeaway from this book is that life is really all about being happy. It’s not about maximizing your profits or starting the next Facebook; it’s about making the most out of your life and having a blast while doing it. There’s no point in waking up every day to go work on something you dread. You only get so long to live, so go out there and do something about it!
I believe I read a quote from David McClure that said something like this: “Do something fun. Do something worthwhile. Do something with fun and worthwhile people.”
What is one piece of advice that you’d like to give?
FOCUS. Distractions are all around us: e-mail, instant messaging, social media, new projects, etc. The list can go on forever. Keep these distractions to a minimum and focus on the purpose of what you are working on. I once heard somewhere that success is like a sphere. You start in the middle of the sphere. Success is at all the edges of this sphere. All you need to do is stay the course and you’ll eventually reach success. However, if you keep losing focus, you’ll never reach the edge.
What is one idea that you’re going to bring to life in 2012?
The idea behind Evergreen Search is value-add. It’s not a new idea, but we’re intensely focused on getting customers to where they want their business to be online. Online marketing is all still relatively new and the opportunity for businesses is enormous.
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.