This site and company is 17 years in the making, and while it is based on my experience, my goal is to take everything I have learned and grow your company.
In 1997 one of my friends was selling computers to students at The University of Florida. He needed help building computer and as a student, I needed money. Our relationship began there where I was trained on how to build a PC from a pile of boxes with parts inside. About a year later, the profit on those computers was dwindling as PC’s were going from 2K/piece to under a thousand bucks. Margins went from 30 – 50% to maybe 15% if you were lucky. We decided to change our strategy and “sell parts online” instead of build systems. About 6 months later and with the help of a teaching assistant from a 1000 level computer course… we had an e-commerce website selling parts from a computer parts distributor. We thought we really had something… until we didn’t log a sale for weeks.
That’s when I started to learn Internet Marketing. We started listing our products on the same sites were were buying them from and generating some sales. Then the online shopping engine’s became a big part of what we did. We listed products on every shopping site possible and re-worked our pricing strategy. Online reviews were (and still are) the name of the game for those sites and between 1998 and 2002 we grew from virtually no sales to 32 Million in gross revenue 2002. We even survived the dotcom bomb but it came back to bit us a year later when lack of capital pretty much put us out of business. I reserve the details of that to when I am drinking a cold beer.
Starting in 2003 I was hired by MarketingExperiments.com as their “Director Of Optimization Research”. Initially I was just an analyst on the team learning directly from Dr. Flint McGlaughlin. It was an invaluable experience where I was able to work hands on with literally hundreds of companies on their marketing strategy, analytics, optimization, and testing everything possible. I was fortunate enough to work with fortune 500 companies and small businesses. In many cases it was shocking to see “what actually worked” with each company. Our team even developed a patent pending conversion optimization Heuristic (fancy name for formula) that we then taught to other marketers and companies to help them improve conversion rates and grow their businesses. I was at MarketingExperiments for almost 8yrs until I ventured off with a business partner to raise money and grow our own companies.
That is where I am at today, overseeing multiple e-commerce companies while doing optimization and marketing management for other businesses where I can significantly grow their company. Conversion Mechanics is my own personal team of GO TO marketers, designers, developers, and entrepreneurs I have worked with over the years that simply GET IT DONE. When you work with me, you get access to the whole team.
Thanks for listening,
Jimmy Ellis