How I Can Help SCUBA Marketing

A few people have inquired as to my background and what makes me a qualified individual to discuss the evolution of SCUBA Marketing.

The Internet Came First

I was sneaking onto the Internet back in the days of BBS’s, Prodigy and Compuserve. I started coding HTML the same year it was ratified.  I almost failed Computer Science 101 because I kept correcting the instructor. For the final class of my Computer Information Technology class, the head of the department said it was pointless for me to be there since I’d already done everything they would cover years prior.  I built my own blog platform back in 2000, almost 3 years before WordPress’s initial release. I’ve been marketing online just about as long as humanly possible.

SCUBA Was My Calling

I had been renegade diving (diving without a certification) since I was a very early teen. When I was 17, I decided to get certified as a freshman in college. My first pool dive, I was in love. I accelerated through Instructor training as fast as PADI would allow. I moved through the instructor ranks just as quickly and attained a Master Instructor rating. I ran a college program when most of the students were older than me.

Struck By Punk-Kidism

I had dreams of wild dot-com fortunes upon graduation, which meant I had to leave the college town I lived in to move to the “big city”. Then the bubble burst.  Oops. I spent a few years learning the finest sales skills available. I won awards. I was good at it. Then I moved into the real estate industry teaching real estate professionals how to use blogs, email marketing, social networking and other technology tools to market their business.  Then the housing crisis hit. I still have my job, but it is a very stressful industry to be in these last few years.

My Re-Awakening

When I was in Fiji for my honeymoon, I remembered how much I loved teaching. I also realized that the dive industry is incredibly far behind when it comes to marketing online. Since I am an experienced internet marketing educator, I decided to bring these skills back to the SCUBA industry.  New SCUBA Marketing was born.

Teaching

I have spent the last few years as active, non-teaching status.  Basically, I have kept current with all of the standards, but haven’t kept my insurance active. I am currently going through the process of refreshing myself, reassembling part of my staff from the college program I ran and have big teaching plans in the works.  I will be able to share quite a few real life experiences regarding how to build a program from scratch (again) because this will be my 3rd time doing it.

Before I launched this site, I did some research to see if anyone else was covering these topics and I found no one. So if someone is, they aren’t doing search engine optimization (SEO) very well, which is one of the concepts I’ll be teaching here.

I know how to teach marketing. I know the internet. I know how to teach SCUBA. I know how to build a staff and a program. I’m going to share all of that with you.

If you have specific topics you’d like to see covered or questions you’d like to ask, please let me know in the comments below.