MarkAttwood.com

Teaching Internet Marketing came about by accident for me.

I had already cut my teeth in online marketing and had generated several million online in 3 years when I went on a business conference with 17 other UK business owners in San Diego in 2008. We were riding high on a wave of success, and life was sweet.

Whilst at this conference I was faced with a room full of people desperate to get more of what was in my head.

I had already owned and sold out of a successful promotional marketing business, so was not really in the mood to schlep across the country again going on client meetings (I’d had enough of that), so I set up a number of two day clinics in my home town of Manchester. I bought the mountain to Mohammed.

The clinics were a raging success and I got a real buzz out of teaching this stuff.

Since then, I’ve been through many ups and downs as to whether I should continue teaching, but it has been the success and support I’ve had from a core group of brilliant students that spurred me on to continue to develop the website and business you see here.

We chose MarkAttwood.com as the domain for this business simply because as my blog it already ranked highly for important keywords like “internet marketing expert” and “seo expert”.

Although I am the front man, there is an extremely talented and likeable team behind me. You can meet them here.

My motivation stems from back in 2003 after I had launched the world’s first online skip hire business, Topskips.com.

I was desperate to get to the top of Google and hired a very expensive SEO company to help us achieve this.

I was already pretty nifty at marketing in the real world having produced extremely successful campaigns for a wide range of blue chip clients such as Panasonic, RBS, Dunfermline Building Society, Thus Telecom, Stagecoach, Bradford and Bingley, The Co-Operative and many more.

I had also got myself up to a very high level of competence with pay-per-click marketing thanks to the help of one Perry Marshall in Chicago.

I was also versed in the art of copywriting and split testing, having been inspired by the likes of Claude Hopkins’ book “Scientific Advertising”.

BUT, I became very unhappy very quickly with the SEO company (who I will not name publicly) and their lack of explanations of what they were actually doing for the money.

So I decided I needed to work this SEO thing out for myself. Which I did with staggering results.

Our business grew at a phenomenal rate of knots. Too fast for us in fact.

A range of bizarre circumstances saw us defrauded of £257,000 via a very well organised and hidden scam including forged signatures on standing orders, cheques from clients banked in other accounts but posted on our system as paid, cloned cheques (you would not believe how many ways we got screwed), at the same time as a pile of things that made it impossible for us to continue:

• Lloyds Cardnet withholding nearly £100k of OUR credit card money because, they said, our growth represented too much of a risk (how we got that money back makes for a good story over a beer). My advice with credit card companies is: don’t trust them and read the small print.
• Our committing all our profits to new offices, new phone and CRM systems
• RBS mis-selling us an Invoice Finance arrangement and then moving the goalposts without explanation on a weekly basis so we never knew what we had available to pay suppliers. I really do not know how the employees of that bank sleep at night.
• Over half our client base in the construction industry going bust at the start of the recession in 2008

During this time, we actually increased our sales and our gross margin thanks to our marketing efforts BUT it was a crazy time – all of our suppliers were jittery as hell and our clients were becoming more and more averse to paying for the services we supplied.

We ploughed every penny we had into the business to keep it going, maxed out all our personal credit cards to keep suppliers paid, borrowed money from our family to keep going…

But it was not enough.

We were entering the seasonal downturn and the pressure from our suppliers was simply too great to bear any longer.

If you’ve ever been in a situation like this, you’ll recognise the feeling of the walls closing in on you and the inability to breath properly.

So, we took professional advice again.

Our accountants suggested a pre-pack administration (I had no idea what one of these was) but it sounded like a workable way to continue the business we’d spent so long building up and to keep most of the employees in work.

When I asked the question: “What about the suppliers? Won’t they be pissed off with us?”

I was told: “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be amazed how many of them will happily trade with the new company – you might have to pay above the odds until they’ve recouped any losses, but the sensible ones will trade on with you”

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was being sales-pitched to go into administration because there was “plenty of fat” on the business.

It made perfect sense to me that suppliers could regain their losses by trading with us at higher prices, in theory.

The problem was, we had hundreds of suppliers, so I simply did not have the time to call them all up to explain what we were doing. The administration happened in a matter of days and we were sworn to secrecy by the administrators.

I also had no concept of how personally some of the suppliers would take this.

My family and business partner went through a period of threatening phone calls including death threats to us and threats to kidnap my children.

This was not a good time.

But, many of our suppliers did still trust us and we did start to trade again. We’ve never even been late paying them once since then.

In fact, we also managed to pull off a 6-figure investment to put the new company on a firm financial footing during this insane period of our lives.

Despite it being a tough time for all of us, I had already served my time in the armed forces and had suffered the death of my father at the age of 17, so I was not about to let any of this crap beat me.

Why am I telling you all this?

Well, because you need to know who I am and why I am doing this.

Most of our students tell us that it is precisely because we have been through these experiences that make my way of teaching (which does involve quite a lot of swearing and crap jokes I have to warn you) so much more genuine and valuable to them.

This website and all the teaching we do is not just motivated by cash.

Back when I was desperate for help with SEO, I could not find anyone who was telling the story straight.

I got information overload with all the various and varying versions of what works online.

I would have killed to have a resource like our members area back then. It would have saved us a fortune in mistakes and errors.

I regularly get feedback from our students that we have literally “changed their life” with what we teach. Check our testimonials here.

This is extremely rewarding for us.

What we have ended up with here is a community of forward-thinking business owners that want to just get on with their businesses and maximise their potential.

It’s quite the most amazing business I’ve ever been involved with.

You need to understand that this is a place that aims to demystify things, not overload you with jargon.

For really in-depth SEO, there are better places to go, like SEO-Moz. We’re not competing with them. The truth is most businesses don’t need to know that level of technical knowledge to succeed online.

What we try and do is give you hands-on, practical, clear and fun learning to help you get to where you want to get to at the speed that suits you.

I do hope you’ll at least try us out – it’s only a fiver for a 7 day membership.

You can find out more about what’s in the members area here.

Thank you,

Mark Attwood