Michael Clay, an online marketing consultant, owns Marketing Master Groups, which specializes in generating targeted traffic to your site for a minimum of 30% growth. See www.marketingmastergroup.com .
“I’ve been a geek my whole life,” Clay said. “By the time I graduated high school, I had started and sold a computer company.”
In addition, the last four years have seen him as a professional balloon entertainer. So, not only has he been a computer geek for a long time, but he has also been playing with magic and balloons for nearly as long.
“I had been doing birthday parties since I was 18 or 19,” he said. However, until recent years it had always been a hobby. Then Clay said he got burnt out on web development, and in 2005 Balloon Guy Mike was making more money than ‘internet guy.’ “My wife wondered how long I was going to play around since Balloon Guy Mike was making three times as much as ‘internet guy,’” he said.
Clay also offers a Boot Camp that focuses on internet marketing for entertainers and has a recent class about blogging posted on his site. “This is a 10-week college-level course teaching how search engines work, understanding rankings, directing web traffic, and data analysis,” he said. “By the time you’re done with this Boot Camp, you’ll know 98% more than the pros doing this,“ he said. Currently, he added, MMG is reevaluating Boot Camp in preparation for marketing it to corporate America.
In addition to being a balloon entertainer and internet marketing consultant, he is a family man. “Now I’m just enjoying life,“ said Clay, married and a father of a young son, Gabriel. “It’s so exciting to see how he learns and grows. It’s exciting to see it firsthand.”
According to Clay, before owning his own company, his past positions were technology-related and included senior vice president-technology at Enterprises, Inc. “This company grew into a multimillion-dollar company almost overnight,” he said. “We developed websites, web-based apps, software, and video games. Then we fell apart. We had expanded too fast, we bought 35 businesses in three months, 9/11 hit, and we lost a lot of income.”
He has also taught at industry conferences like DEFCON, Business Builders workshops, and Professional Network Connections, where he would travel teaching for different chapters.
Clay began as an internet guy that later became a balloon guy. “I know how to market to corporate America because I speak their language,” he said. “It’s a different mindset.” Then he later added, “The balloon community is a small pond, and we’re teaching people how to be sharks in that pond.”
Micheal, I look forward to reading more about SEO – I’m a big fan of getting my pages raked high in Google!
Good articale. I missed the boot camp. I may sign up for the next one.
Thanks…
I took the MMG classes and I have to say that I totally do NOT recommend it to my competitors. It is jam packed with rock solid information and helped me learn quite a bit. I’m really looking forward to his articles.
Just need to say, Mike is a great and very helpful guy. He has a wealth of useful information for your business.