I was doing something yesterday that I rarely do: promote myself. Sure, it would seem like a no-brainer that someone in my profession would be a whiz at promoting his own career.
Well, I’m not. I’m a bit of a savant when it comes to making my clients famous and even wealthy. But me? I guess I’m just too close to the situation. I can’t gain any perspective.
But yesterday, I decided to kick things up a notch on several levels. I had let a lot of things go over the last year or two, mostly because business was brisk last year and there’s only so much of me to go around.
It started out innocently enough. I got an email from Amazon.com inviting me to set up an author’s page. Easy enough, I thought. I followed the prompts on the screen and then my day started to get sucked away. Amazon has a lot of neat features for an author. Not only can you put your bio up, but you can link into your Twitter account and integrate your blog, which for me, is what you’re reading now.
Pretty cool. I drew some inspiration from some of the authors there. Some of them started their careers out self-publishing and were then signed onto Amazon’s publishing house or one of the major ones.
It was there that I noticed my own error. All these people had websites that used their own names. A light went off in my head, one that should have come on back in 1995.
Why that year? That was the year CommuniCreations started to design websites. My then wife and I were driving down Mile Hill Road in Port Orchard when we started to discuss this Internet thing that we had been in for about a year. I said, “You know, I don’t think it’s going away. I think it’s going to be big. Perhaps we should start designing websites.”
And we did. We shut down the company for a few months and learned how to make websites. If you want to see what the dark ages looked like back then, see our 1995 website here.
Yes, we were in on the ground floor of the whole Internet craze. This was back in days when a 9600 baud modem was a screaming Internet connection, delivered with the characteristic sing-song of phones talking to one another.
We were definitely in the midst of a revolution. Only the year before, a then unknown company by the name of Amazon registered their domain name. We weren’t far behind them. In April of 1995, we registered our first name, comstation.com. The idea behind this is lost to time, but it was our first of many websites to come.
Lots of websites. Some 800 over the years. At one time we even had a small startup insurance company – Progressive Insurance – contact us about designing their site.
So you’d think being at the cutting edge of a revolution that we would have snapped up our own domain names. Nope. CommuniCreations.com didn’t get registered until 1998. RobZerrvations, 2005. Robbzerr.com. Yesterday.
So, you’d think I would own the domain name, robbzerr.com. I have plenty of others, including oldportroyal.com, theoryofdrunkitivity.com, cheatwhileyoueat.com – the list goes on. And I’ve purchased plenty of others on behalf of clients.
We got our first domain name in 1996. RobZerrvations? CommuniCreations? Nope. It was comstation.com. Go figure. The idea behind comstation.com has been lost with time. Thankfully, clearer heads prevailed and we actually reserved our own company’s name two years later.