It’s been years since I first built Paperclip Marketing, named in reference to what people often heard when I told them about my job:
THEM: “What do you do for a living?”
ME: “Pay per Click Marketing”
THEM:”You market paperclips???”
I first launched a WordPress blog at this same URL over 20 years ago. I did it all myself; the writing, the graphic design, the CSS. I even learned PHP to build my own custom template.
Over the course of twenty years in “the game”, literally everything has changed. Some things changed for the better, some not so much. I have managed the spend of many millions of dollars in ad spend (mostly on Google), trying to help literally thousands of businesses to survive and even prosper. It only seems fitting (and more than a bit cathartic) to resurrect this blog and share some of my thoughts from inside this world, but in a very different universe.
In 2005, I was part of a small team with the ambitious goal of bringing the power of digital marketing to small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs). This was at a Chicago startup called LocalLaunch. Those days were a lot like the wild west, and it was fun. Phone book ads, newspapers, and direct mail were owned SMB marketing. Owned by some of America’s oldest businesses, they weren’t really looking for things to change.
Back then, most of the internet was funded by national brands buying banner ads (that were basically hardcoded onto publisher websites and showed for all of their visitors for a contracted amount of time. These were fairly complicated transactions to navigate that necessitated large prices to justify.
We sold LocalLaunch to RH Donnelly (think Dex YP) in 2006 and that started the journey…
It’s been over 20 years and I’m not going anywhere. I (again) invite you to follow along on this exciting journey.
Paperclip Marketing 
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