[A guest blog spot by Megan Eckert, executive vice president of USstoragesearch.com. ]
Hi Storage Speak readers, its Megan Eckert from USstoragesearch.com. Im excited to be the first-ever sponsor of this blog. Im sure Ive met a lot of you at one of the many great ISS Expos where weve exhibited and presented.
Anyway, enough of the formalities
The first of our three-part webinar series on Internet marketing was last Wednesday. With more than 700 people registered for a 300-seat event, Im pumped about the popularity of this topic. So, I thought Id share something really amazing with you.
In 1995, two Stanford students met, one named Sergey and the other Larry (no, this is not a stale joke!). Twenty-four-year-old Larry was in charge of showing 23-year-old Sergey around campus. They quickly grew a bit of dislike toward each other. They argued about everything they talked about.
I guess through a series of serendipitous events, they ended up working together on a search engine called BackRub. After some innovative thinking, more than a few maxed out credit cards and a cult-like following, they started to see success with BackRub and decided to sell it.
Well, nobody caught the vision of BackRub and/or wanted to pay for it. So the youthful passion and energy of Sergey and Larry drove them to go at it on their own. But they needed investment capital
They approached the founder of Sun Microsystems and, pressed for time, he wrote them a check for $100,000 on the spot and made it payable to Google Inc. Problem was, there was no such entity as Google Inc.!
Anyway, a few more fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants events later, Larry and Sergey had a million bucks and a search engine with unique algorithms and operating philosophies. As you know, Sergey and Larry are now two of the wealthiest men in this world and run the dominant search engine Google.
Today, Google sees more than 200,000,000 searches per day. And guess what? More than 111,000 of them are for self-storage!
The point? If youre not on the Internet and on the first page of the major search engines, youre really missing out on a good source of new tenants. During our webinar series, well be discussing how to do this, what pitfalls to watch out for, and many other useful Internet marketing tips.
I hope you attended the first event. If not, get registered for the second one ASAP. As Wednesdays event showed, there is more interest than seats available. If you have questions about Internet marketing, feel free to contact me at [email protected].