How did Driftpoint Media come to be?
In 2009 I went on a race across the country called One Lap of America. It was a once in a lifetime experience which of course I have repeated every year for the past 5 years. That first year on One Lap we worked really hard to get ourselves some sponsors. Frankly we were trying to make the trip happen on a tight budget and needed some financial help to put it all together. It was not intentional, but that first year I crashed coursed myself into the world of content based marketing without even knowing it. That introduction into content marketing and inbound marketing would eventually evolve into the foundation of Driftpoint Media.
We ran a blog site, tied into social media outlets and broadcasted what we were doing online. We had conversations going in all of the automotive forums, which we were already established members of and we did everything we could to tell people what was happening on this ultimate road trip.
It didn’t really sink in what had happened until the end of the event. Motor Trend was involved in 2009 and their media crew came over at the closing ceremonies to let us know that we moved the majority of all of the online traffic for this event this year. I didn’t even know what that meant, but it sounded cool, and I appreciated somebody recognizing how much we worked to get our names out there for our sponsors. Another kudos from Motor Trend arrived 2 months later when they published the article on One Lap and our 18 year old sedan had more photos in the article than the winning team that year.
In 2009, we had 15,000 hits to the website for that one week in May. I took some notes, saw where traffic was moving to and from and made myself some mental challenges of moving more traffic in 2010. It worked…I doubled it and we had 30k hits in 2010.
2011 I had the audience targets moving for another monumental leap of traffic until we had a major car fire before we even got halfway through the event. While that year sucked beyond belief for the team, it gave me a new perspective as I went home and tried to follow the rest of the event. The traffic flow was scattered and it was hard to keep up with what was happening and it gave me new angles to play with.
I started experimenting more, learned how to shift the press release traffic coming out of One Lap event itself and watched the impact of keywords as we moved certain value added posts around the site. Sleeping with a wrench in one hand and Google Analytics in the other, I decided that I had way too much fun doing this and I got serious. In 2012 I founded Driftpoint Media to deliver the recipe for content driven digital marketing solutions to other companies.
In 2011 Google revamped their algorithm that controls how to move up your website up in Google results. Favoring the world of natural content and social media, and devaluing sites who were trying to manipulate search engines, it was as if Google realigned to the recipe that I already knew. There have been many revisions of Googles algorithm since then, all trending towards websites that generate regular content for their site as part of their growth strategy.
Operations and clients are growing in 2013 all because an automotive race around the country gave me an addiction to moving online traffic. I still retreat to the shop and work on the car when I need to brainstorm and love that I can tell the story for years to come on how this company was founded behind the drivers seat of a race car.