As a small business owner, I have had first-hand experience with the challenge of having to first establish a company website, then drive traffic there to promote my company's business profile and services. I am principal partner and VP of Personnel & Operations for the Sloan Sports Group, Inc., an agency that provides contract negotiation, management, and concierge services for professional athletes. We started our company in 2005, and in 2007 we decided to create an online presence to promote our services to our potential clients and business partners.
Our first foray into the online marketing arena was a self-designed site using Earthlink's basic webpage development and hosting tools. This site was rather pedestrian in terms of graphic design, but it was effective in conveying our company's mission, services, and the unique aspects of our business offering. As the size of our client roster and the quality of our business network grew over the next year, we determined that we needed to invest in a more robust, more polished presence reflective of our company's loftier pursuits. So we enlisted San Francisco-based AxiomLogic (http://www.axiomlogic.com), a cradle-to-grave internet solutions provider, to design and host our upgraded website. After 3 months in development, our vastly improved internet offering rolled off AxiomLogic's assembly line in March 2011. The website, which is still hosted on AxL's servers, is located at http://www.sloansports.com.
AxL has shown its proficiency at understanding website design for search engine optimization, an impressive feat considering it is a fellow small business and not a brand-name SEO firm. Since shortly after its inception up until today, our company's webpage remains the first link listing to come up in searches of the term "Sloan Sports Group" using the Google, Bing, and Yahoo engines. Likewise, a search of the more generic "Sloan Sports" term using the Big Three puts our webpage second only to the more widely known MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, an annual gathering of tech-savvy sports industry insiders that started in 2007. (We certainly don't mind any happenstance traffic that may come to our site from sports-minded Curious Georges originally surfing the web for those guys.)
By virtue of our enhanced online presence and its favorable SEO characteristic, Sloan Sports Group has been able to utilize internet marketing to increase consumer and business partner confidence in our ability to sustain a profitable enterprise in the dog-eat-dog world of athlete representation. Our webpage -- designed and powered by one of Silicon Valley's best kept secrets -- has proven an effective branding tool for promoting the unique mission, values, and objectives of our growing company.
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