Hello. I'm Ryan “theJenks” Jenkins.

Thoughts on Marketing

Ryan “the Jenks” Jenkins

Bio

My name is Ryan Jenkins. I've been working in online marketing since 1998. (That was 12 years ago!) I was all of 16 years old.

I started off doing website development. Back then, everyone wanted a website because, well, "because everyone has websites these days". I made a lot of crummy websites (by today's standards) for businesses that didn't know how to maintain them, let alone optimize them for top performance.

I started to realize that most of my customers were completely wasting their money. Their website wasn't even covering its own hosting costs, let alone making a profit. And worse yet, it would be years until the businesses would realize this, because they had no good way to measure the site's impact on their offline business.

Eventually, I decided to become a freelance online marketing consultant. I wanted to show businesses how to get more out of their online presence. I started teaching them how to measure business performance and determine what was effective and what wasn't. We installed analytics tools and started observing traffic. We made business decisions based on visitor behavior. Gone were the days of "get as many visitors as you can".

  1. Website ("Everyone's got one")
  2. Hit counters - "We had 30 more visitors today!"
  3. Display advertising - "Popups anyone?"
  4. Paid search - "Introducing Google"
  5. Analytics - "Some of my visitors are more valuable than others?"
  6. Conversion optimization - "You mean I can make my site easier for my customers to use?"

My Skills

Paid Search

I’m really good ad paid-search management. One of the top 20 in the USA actually. In the past 2 years, I grew one company’s search traffic by Nx while at the same time reducing cost per click by Nx and cost per conversion by Nx.

Email Marketing

I’ve been doing email marketing for years now. I hate it. It’s a hassle. Maybe one day when Gmail and Outlook figure out how to render email messages according to modern standards, I’ll get into it again. But for now… I’d rather baste myself with battery acid.

Marketing Strategy

My marketing strategy can be summed up by the following principles:

  1. Make a good product. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but put some care into making it, and don’t exchange that care for a quick buck. You know your product better than anyone else; only add what you think should be added and always think about what could be taken away. Be a craftsman.
  2. Appreciate your customers. You don’t even have to listen to everything they say, but you should at least hear it. “Thanks for your input. I’ll take it into consideration when I make my decision.”
  3. Success is a long-term goal. Sure you have to take today’s cash-flow into consideration, (you’d be a pretty irresponsible businessman if you didn’t,) but try to make as many decisions as possible around what will be best in the long-term.
  4. Do one thing really well. Sure, you are fully capable of adding feature XYZ to your product, but are you really the right company to be providing that to your customers? If you can’t completely kick butt, then don’t get involved.
  5. Release early, release often. I sincerely believe that, “If you aren’t embarrassed by version 1.0, you waited too long to release.” Get something out there. Execute. You won’t know how your product is received and what needs to change until you put it in the hands of those who will be using it.

Quotes I like

We are the music makers. And we are the dreamers of the dreams.
Profits are a result, not a purpose.

Books I advocate