My former life of a golf professional

My name is Brad Stoller, the founder of Discovering Profits.    I’m probably just like any other business owner out there – I’ve felt passionate about what I did, but couldn’t seem to be able to afford to get enough advertising to really make a difference.

I’ll never forget my “grand opening” for a franchise store.    Our franchisor listed out several items on a “checklist” that we should do to promote our new store.   I took their advice and had a local radio station do a mobile live broadcast from our store for a couple hours.   I had $2,000 in the budget for advertising, and it went up in smoke in less than 2 hours.    What was my return????     I felt extremely let down when less than 2 days later, no one remembered the broadcast.    I felt like I may as well have just taken $2,000 one dollar bills and light them on fire – at least it may have lasted longer!

Next, I tried passing out fliers door to door – much cheaper and we actually had people bringing in coupons.   The problem??    I didn’t have the time to go door to door every week, but at least we got a response.

Next – the coupon mailing.    We paid over $1,000 / month to mail out coupons in a packet of other coupons to residences.   At least I could track the results for the investment.   Again, however, after the first couple of days, the coupons disappeared, and so did our traffic.   We simply weren’t bringing in enough extra revenue to warrant spending the money on the coupons

Next step – newspaper ads.     I’m going to start sounding like a broken record, but it’s the same story.   We would get a limited response, but it was never enough to fund the marketing.

Then I discovered something totally by accident.   Back in the year 2001, the internet was just in the infancy and e-mail was still something that not many people used.    However, since we had no more money for advertising, I thought I would collect e-mails from our customers (the ones who had them), and I began sending out an e-mail every once in a while with a coupon attached.    It was a real struggle to make the e-mails look “professional”, but it was FREE.   I actually got a much better response than any of the other forms of advertising.    Unfortunately for that business, however, it came too late and the decision to shut down the store was made.

From that day forth, I have personally spent countless hours learning, making mistakes, having success, and re-learning all over again – all because my businesses demanded advertising and nothing else seemed to work (at least that I could afford the return).

One of the numerous rehabs we had to advertise for

When I was actively rehabbing homes and selling or leasing to others, I had to spend an incredible amount for advertising in our local newspaper.   The advertising for this business worked very well and at the time it was the only real method to get the word out to buy, sell, and rent.    I noticed, however, that my return on invested dollars went up incredibly when I set up a website and had my website address listed in all forms of advertising.     It worked very well.   The problem???     I literally had to spend thousands of dollars each month in order to drive enough traffic to keep the customers coming in.

The last few years has seen incredible advancements with the internet.    I no longer spend ANY money advertising for real estate vacancies – I utilize the internet exclusively and actually get a much better response than I ever did when I had to PAY for advertising.     The return on invested advertising dollars is off the charts.

Through trial and error and countless hours I then proceeded to try to understand how internet marketing really works.   I joined an internet marketing company and found out how difficult it is to understand all the ins and outs of internet marketing.    Several thousand down the drain and I never made a dime.

I found a local advertising company that utilized the internet exclusively for local markets.   It was the first company that provided this service at a competitive price.   They utilized “pay per click” (PPC) advertising and seemed to work – right up to the point where they went under and had to close.    They couldn’t seem to get the PPC advertising done at that price point either.

The stories go on and on – my wife can attest that all I did every spare moment of time was focused on learning the internet.    I became the internet specialist for a large trucking company.   The trucking company began getting “noticed” throughout the trucking world and customers actually started calling in (which is almost unheard of for that industry).   It was a huge success.

Through all the trials and errors, I decided to start “Discovering Profits” in order to help local businesses not only get noticed, but become the “celebrity” in their local markets.   Our goal is not like other marketing companies.   We’re not happy with getting a “non producing website” to rank on the #1 page of Google.    Our goal is to get a website that is made to become a lead generation site and the dominate ALL THE SEARCH ENGINES!

That is “Our Story” – now we need to work on YOURS!

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