Celebrating 12 Years!
On June 25, 2002, I started Nextiny Marketing, formed as an IT company focused on maintaining networks and computers in Rockville, Maryland. We've grown a lot over the years. In May 2010, we relocated our offices to Sarasota, Florida, where today we are the area's go-to agency for Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing.
As a 12-year-old digital marketing agency, we have a proven record of success. It's interesting, because our successes and specializations have evolved quite a bit over time. In fact, we love change, and are constantly adapting and embracing emerging technologies.
I thought our blog readers would enjoy a quick trip down memory lane as we celebrate our 12th anniversary this week.
2002 - We started off fixing computers and setting up networks as Destiny Technologies. One day someone saw the website I created in HTML and flash and said, "Do you guys do websites?" I thought for one second and said, "Of course!" :)
That was our first website project.
2003 - When the real estate market started to grow, we grew with it. We maintained lots of networks, servers and computers for mortgage companies and realtors. In the meantime, EVERY type of business started realizing that they needed a website.
2004 - Our website business kept growing as we continued to stay extremely busy with IT support services. It was such a different time! The flash websites we created were not SEO-friendly, but they worked great when paired with affordable pay per click campaigns. (Businesses would receive 20 calls from $100 in Adwords back then.)
2005 - We started doing software development in ASP, .NET and PHP as a third division of the company, launched as Destiny Soft. The website business was really growing and the Internet was exploding. We added SEO services to help people get their sites onto the first page of Google. SEO pretty much consisted of building a bunch of weird links and pushing keywords on titles and meta tags. We started creating custom HTML and PHP sites to make them SEO-friendly. I had an army of IT guys running around fixing computers while I dedicated 20 hours a day to the website and software businesses.
2006 - The real estate market crashed, and with it, most of our big IT customers. The bright side? Our website and Internet marketing business was booming. Software development was increasingly complicated and required too much time, so I decided to close that division and dedicate most of my time to developing websites, learning about SEO and finding the right people to do all of these things. We started playing around with Joomla! websites, and social profiles started to make sense for link building.
It sounds funny now, but we were creating MySpace accounts for everybody.
2007 - We stopped doing all static HTML, PHP and flash sites and focused on CMS (Content Management System) sites. We became proficient in Joomla! and Joomla! 1.0 was AMAZING. We were using SEO-friendly features and providing great results through RSS feeds, blogs and SEO-friendly URLs. The social media phenomenon kept growing and everybody had to have links from social media to grow. Reporting tools improved and SEO became a big deal for our clients and for us. We started working with clients through ongoing partnerships with businesses participating in monthly packaged services. This was the beginning of the Nextiny Marketing we know today.
2008 - I teamed up with some big names in the Maryland area and started providing white label websites and SEO as an agency. We continued learning the SEO business and kept adding services such as social media management and content creation, but most companies did not care about content yet. We started talking about blogging pretty seriously, how including blogs on every website was (and is) so important to Google. Blog entries looked pretty much like this: Keyword, keyword, keyword. Blah, blah, blah. Keyword, keyword, keyword. We would include a bunch of keywords on the footer with city names to rank higher.
2009 - Our white label business (meaning we served as a subcontractor to other businesses who would hire us for specialized website and SEO services) kept growing. However, I began to feel like we were working too much on helping other agencies grow, rather than growing our own company. We started to plan a big move… Literally…We closed the IT division and prepared for big changes.
In the meantime, Facebook became a big deal and we were dedicating lots of hours per day to everyone's favorite social network of this time period. Blogging became more of a real thing and we started blogging and training people on how to blog the right way… In May, we relocated to Sarasota. We retained a few big customers from Maryland, but otherwise started from scratch - focusing on local businesses in Sarasota. Our education series started in 2009 and we produced several free workshops for local organizations. To begin establishing roots and developing partnerships in the community, we provided sponsored and donated services for several key organizations.
2010 - We formalized and began using our current business name: Nextiny Marketing, We moved into a shared office space and started doing a lot of websites…and I mean a looooot of websites. We teamed up with a local social media expert to deliver social media workshops which were met with great success. This was the year of what I call the social media EXPLOSION. We started pushing blogs on all social networks and focusing a lot on Facebook. We were creating a Facebook page one day and getting 500 likes by the next. Those were fun times… everyone was all about Facebook. Some might say our our Facebook workshops became famous.
2011 - We moved into our own office in the Pen West office complex and the team started to grow. Now websites, SEO, social, blogging, support and hosting became intertwined. You could not do one without the other - if you wanted to grow online. We started selling packages with all these things with great local success. This was the year we formalized our workshops and started doing them on a regular basis. Social media kept growing and we started talking about the new social network, Google+. (Although it seemed like NOBODY wanted to hear about it at the time.) We predicted G+ was going to be a big deal for businesses and started doing workshops about it. At this point, we were utilizing HubSpot as a great research tool and business resource.
2012 - We celebrated our first decade in business with an anniversary party in our office courtyard attended by our family, friends and customers. We began hosting workshops every other week. This was the year of mobile websites. old school SEO started to die - making way for real content, which started becoming more important than ever!
Jackie, my new partner, became a driving force of Destiny and helped me build the company we have today!
10 YEARS
2013 - Blogging, blogging and more blogging… or should I say Google+, Google+ and more Google+. This was definitely the year of Google+ and producing real content. Google introduced the Humminbird update and every website that had repeated content and bad links went down. Since we were blogging, creating new fresh content and creating real links and citations for our customers and utilizing social media networks the right way, ALL our customers saw an increase in traffic after this update. In October, we made our biggest evolution to date and became Hubspot Partners!
2014 - This year, we've already moved into a larger office, cultivated amazing additions to the team and maintained a focus on education and empowering our customers. This is going to be the year of our greatest growth and transition as we prepare for the best years that are yet to come!
