That Smith

Laura went back to the hospital Monday after they sent her home again Sunday without knowing what was wrong with her. She’s better now though and wrote about what it was on Baby Smith, and her new personal journal Shiny Duck. Other than that excitement, we still haven’t been up to a whole lot.

I have been pretty busy at work and realized recently that I haven’t explained what I do now.

As you know, Laura and I are living in Wichita and recently bought a house. I also started a new job in October, so I now do marketing for one of the world’s largest industrial suppliers of a certain type of material and equipment.

I know it probably sounds boring, but it’s not a bad job. It’s not exactly what I applied for either. The position was supposed to be similar to what I did at my old job – basically marketing, and tracking which ads and activities were generating revenue. Then about two months ago I also became the company webmaster and web designer, as well as the person in charge of internet marketing.

I am told that a typical day for the person who used to be in my position involved checking the company e-mail and forwarding sales leads as they came in. Then he ran monthly marketing reports and helped the marketing manager prepare for trade shows. He got burned out on it so now I get to do this. I will also be going to a few trade shows later in the year.

In addition to that, I have also been working directly with the engineering and sales teams to make the whole process go smoother so we don’t miss a single opportunity (something that used to happen more than it should).

Surprisingly, I have been doing a lot of programming since they fired their consultant/web designer to save money. This means I have learned a new programming language. I have also been doing a lot of Search Engine Optimization too, so we can spend our online marketing budget on things other than Pay Per Click ads.

I already knew quite a bit about internet marketing and SEO from working on my other sites, but never used any of it on a website that generates millions of dollars in revenue each year, let alone in a highly competitive market such as ours. Now, other than trade shows, running reports, and forwarding leads, I have been tracking and learning a lot about our customers.

I have learned things like where they come from, what they are looking for, what products they are most likely to buy based on if they come from Google or Yahoo, how much each source is worth if we did decide to increase our advertising, and even which products we should advertise and where.

We used to advertise on several websites and never really knew if they were working until I started there. Recently we also dropped a service that was supposedly one of the best sources out there, because I decided it wasn’t worth the $50,000 cost.

So, that is basically what I do. It’s pretty boring I suppose, but does a lot for a multi-million dollar company in a highly competitive industry. I have also been trying to write more on my other websites (there’s one about homebrew and parenting, small business, productivity, and personal finance for newlyweds).

About a month ago I also decided to put my data skills to use just for fun by starting my own music / karaoke tracking website. I still have quite a bit of programming to do on it, but it should be pretty fun when it’s done. The whole idea is to provide an API for DJs to use on their websites so they can list their songs and let people search them. With it, I will be able to gather information about their business and singers. You can see a demonstration on Open Mike Music.