Using marketing techniques just for the love of Phoenix


I'm an old marketing guy, a graphic designer, and my hobby for a long time has been collecting old photos of Phoenix, Arizona. And, as you'd expect, I'm comfortable with scanning, with Photoshop, with pixels, with resolution, all that kind of stuff. I have a website where I can upload an unlimited amount of images (thanks to the nice people at BlueHost!), and so I'm very comfortable in the world of cyberspace.

I've also been around advertising, promotion, and marketing all of my life. I know the techniques of getting the word out for a product or service. I've worked for a lot of fine companies in both Arizona and California. Yes, there are companies out there that are stinkers, and scammers, but I never worked for them. I'm proud of the places I've worked, such as Blue Cross of California, and Bank One Arizona, just to mention two.

I started posting old photos of Phoenix on the web when I first started doing web pages, and teaching web design, back in the early 2000s. I like old photos of Phoenix, and I liked to create projects for myself to help me understand HTML, then CSS. Like most of my students, I learn best by doing, not reading about something in a book.

In addition to web design, I did consulting for SEO, which is Search Engine Optimization. That's the process of doing everything right so that your product or service can be found in a Google search. There are a million little things that you can do, and every little bit helps with getting your business to rank higher in a Google search. By the way, no matter how badly you do things, you will be in a Google search, but only on page 1,347 or something. No one looks beyond the first couple of pages. So if you're not there, you're invisible. If you found me in a web search, I did something right.

Anyway, I've applied everything I know to optimizing my stuff about Phoenix, even though I'm not "commercializing it". This blog, by the way, has a domain name of .com, which technically means commercial, although it's not. It's just that most people will remember a dot com name more than a dot net name, or something else. It's just a trick.

This past year I looked back on all of the things I've done over the years and got to wondering what my goal was? Did I want to get rich? No, not really. I wanted to enrich my life, which is what's happening. And I do it for the love of Phoenix, my home. Is there a better reason?

Image at the top of this post: Camelback Mountain behind the Papago Buttes in the 1940s
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