Jerry Work was working in Memphis as a financial analyst at one of the top business appraisal firms in the country when he realized he was bored to tears. Crunching numbers and writing reports just wasn't the life he was looking for. So he quit his job and took what money he had to start a web site design business. It took about a year and a half to go completely broke, so he then joined a small IT consulting firm to run their web design department. He eventually got heavy into ASP programming and more advanced aspects of dynamic web design.
Around that same time, his brother, Chris Work, moved to Memphis to join him in his business ventures. The Work brothers took a very early stab at starting a search engine optimization company before such a thing even really existed. But it was a hard sale back in those days.
A contract programming gig eventually brought Jerry to Nashville (very close to his hometown of Dickson). He worked a few jobs, including a contract stint at Capital Records, then wound up at Shop at Home TV, where he became the Manager of Search, responsible for both the optimization of on-site search as well as external search engine optimization for purposes of driving traffic. He also took control of the company's paid search accounts. He had some good results, at one point increasing traffic from natural search by 300% in a matter of weeks.
Meanwhile, Chris went to work as the Director of Internet Marketing at CJ Advertising, a Nashville ad agency specializing in advertising campaigns for law firms. At CJ, he successfully produced and managed online marketing campaigns for law firms across the United States. The campaigns often involved purchasing search engine clicks that cost more than $10 each, so Chris had to be very efficient at spending his clients' budgets to maximize their return on investment.
In 2006, Jerry launched Work Media, a search engine marketing firm. In 2007, his brother joined him as a full-time partner in the business, and later that same year a new company was formed with Frank/Best International, a successful full-service Nashville ad agency, as a minority partner. The new company, Work Media, LLC, moved into new offices at 705 2nd Ave. South, downtown Nashville.
Work Media has managed search marketing campaigns for companies like Honda Power Equpiment (the division of Honda that sells equipment like lawn mowers and generators), Bentley Systems (an engineering design software company with sales approaching $400 million), and Columbia State Community College, an educational institution outside Nashville. The company also has numerous smaller clients, such as a language translation company, a human resources consulting firm, an acne treatment company, and several law firms.
We've learned a lot from all of this, the number ONE lesson being that you cannot predict human behavior. To try and do so is pointless, which is why testing is such a critical part of everything we do.
We have released our first book for sale on Amazon.com, Scientific Search Engine Marketing (How to Maximize Your Pay per Click Return on Investment). The book teaches the strategies and techniques that Work Media uses to get the most out of our clients' paid search budgets.
We're Work Media. Search engine marketing is what we do.
To learn more about us, check out http://workmedia.net.