After serving four very exciting years in the United States Army, I came back home to Northeast Pennsylvania. Still adjusting to civilian life, I began to take an interest in the Internet and social media. I began working for RCN, where I spent my days troubleshooting high-speed and dial-up Internet connections for customers. At RCN, I learned a lot about how the Internet works, the mechanics of a network and how to maintain it. And in my free time, I became increasingly interested in building websites.
I wasn’t then, and am not now, a programmer. I know very little about working with CSS, Python, or Java. I can do basic things with HTML, but that’s the extent of my coding prowess. However, thanks to the many powerful website publishing software platforms out there, WordPress being chief among them, I was able to create websites without having to know how to program. For me, this was huge. I began building sites for me, my friends, and family. Most were short lived and just for fun. It wasn’t long before I began to pay attention to how many hits those sites were getting and how the tweaks and changes I made to the sites affected traffic levels. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was beginning to learn the basics of search engine optimization.
I also began promoting some of these sites on various social media platforms. It was also about this time that I left RCN and enrolled at Wilkes University. In exchange for my four years of military service, the Army had agreed to help me pay for my education. I took full advantage of the GI Bill and became a full-time student, majoring in Business Administration. The business program at Wilkes is very forward thinking and hands on. During the freshman year, all the business students are put into groups and told to form a business. The first semester is spent planning the business and the second is where it is executed. Any profits made by the business are then used, at the end of the Freshman year, to fund a public service project.
My group decided to create an advertising booklet that we would distribute all over the area. We pulled some strings at the school printing office and got them to agree to print all of them for us at no cost. We may have forgotten to tell them we were looking at two runs of four thousand copies each (each copy contained about 10 pages), but whatever. Agreement in hand (we made them put it in writing and the suggestion of one of our business professors), we began to visit local businesses, asking them to place an ad in our book. The prices for ads ranged from $25 to $100, depending on the size and location of the ad. With no production costs, everything we made was profit. In the end we grossed over $2,000.
As I progressed through business school, I decided that I wanted to make a career out of marketing. I was also becoming more and more involved with social media and website design. I became interested in local politics and decided that I would use the Internet and social media to take on a mayor who was running for Congress. While this mayor was wildly popular, he struck me as a bigot and a moron. I set up a blog and began to promote it via social media. I read up on SEO and learned how to build quality back-links to increase the site’s performance in search engines. I learned how to write good content, how to partner with other bloggers to spread my message, and how to move my ideas across various social media platforms. That site, which I still run today, attracted quite a bit of attention from local, state, and national media. I achieved a number one search ranking on Google, ahead of the mayor’s own campaign website. The mayor lost that election (although he is running again, which is why the site remains active).
I graduated Wilkes University in May of 2009. I graduated into one of the worst economies the nation had experienced in a long time. Jobs were hard to find. Many companies weren’t hiring. I tried getting in with several local media and marketing firms, unsuccessfully. When I ran out of marketing firms to apply to, I decided to form my own. I partnered with one of my classmates at Wilkes, John Botch, and we formed Laser Burn Media. John had interned for a long time with a local online marketing firm and was Google Adwords certified. He knew all about designing and executing online search marketing campaigns. I knew quite a bit about building blogs, using social media as a marketing platform, and how to use the Internet to build relationships with a target audience.
Today, Laser Burn Media is one of the few online marketing firms operating in the Northeast Pennsylvania area. John and I know we operate in a rapidly evolving industry, where things are constantly changing. We spend a lot of time keeping up with all the latest ideas, strategies, and news related to online and social media marketing. Both of us are determined to become the very best at what we do. We want Laser Burn Media to be the go-to online marketing company for small and medium sized businesses. We take what we do very seriously, put in a lot of hours to get better at what we do and how we do it, and are determined to earn the trust and respect of our competitors, our clients, and our community. I co-founded Laser Burn Media because I want to be the absolute best at what I do and I want to do it on my terms.
-Dan Cheek
LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnmedia.com
Twitter.com/LaserBurnMedia
(570)795-9467
