About
I’m Andrew Ledford the one behind “MyOnTheRoad.NET” Productions and “MyOnTheRoad.com.”
The Best Way to get in touch with me is to connect on Linkedin
If you have a project to discuss, give me a quick call and tell me about what you’re looking for. I have been involved in online marketing since the late 1990s and experiential marketing and video since the 80s.
This website is the home to our business video podcast and other business community related information.
Early web development
I started building websites around 1998 using the old Mozilla Netscape Browser to compose my first HTML websites. An interesting side note, back then you bought internet directories at bookstores to learn about what websites to visit. They were like paper yellow pages for the internet.
Early search engine marketing
It was in 1999 and the Y2K era that I really started to study search engine optimization (SEO.) This is when DMOZ and yahoo directories where very important for building traffic to a website. At that time Altavista was the most popular search engine everyone was optimizing for. This is when I started using a search engine very few people had heard of. That little unknown search engine was Google. When chatting with folks about the web, people would often ask “what’s Google?”
Early social media
While I was active on early message boards and chat rooms, I classify Friendster as the first real social media site. I never used Friendster for business, but it was a fun platform to become acquainted with the idea of social media. Next came Myspace. I did use Myspace for business. Around the same time I started using Skype for international calling.
Early days of community outreach and experiential/event marketing.
When I started my first business I was quite active in local chamber of commerce groups and attended many social events to network with like minded people. As a youngster I usually was quite noticeable at these events, which was part of my branding. Back then I had a very well trained dog that did some fun and interesting performances. He would gather a crowd, ride his skateboard and then pass out my business literature. Every summer we would spend a few days a week doing street performances at local beach cities to promote my business. Doing the street performances allowed me to showcase my dog and it led to doing several television commercials. At this time I also had a few casting directors as clients and got work for my dogs through them as well.
Early days of Video
I started my involvement with video back when cameras connected to a recording deck you carried over your shoulder. Next in the mid-80s I hosted a public access cable show about dogs. In the 80s and 90s I was a camera operator for a video production company that did beauty pageants and local events. During this time I was also an unofficial Stringer for a news station. As mentioned earlier I was also involved in the Television and film industry with my dogs. In the 1990s I produced a dog training video and sold the training VHS tape on my website.
No picture of me with the camera on this one. I was the roving camera and was moving around the room. Most of the other people had their cameras locked down on a tripod. Back then I was quite young and surprised that I could go right up on stage without security stopping me.
Current web development
In the 21st century I am no longer hand coding HTML websites with a web browser. I now do all my web site building with WordPress. Most recently I have been using the native Gutenberg block builder with some professional addons. I also use the Divi theme builder for more complex websites. I regularly attend WordPress meetup to stay current on what is going on with this rapidly developing platform. The WordPress ecosystem sounds easy, but it can be somewhat challenging for a person new to the platform. If you are struggling with using your WordPress site contact me for a no coast website consultation. I will look at what you have, if the site is live, I will do a brief audit and give you an honest opinion of what I think you should do.
Current search engine marketing
I’m most familiar with doing SEO for organic search engine traffic as opposed to paid traffic. The areas I focus on are the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) that include organic results, the local pack, Knowledge Graph, and snippets. I plan on having several SEO experts on the podcast.
A sub area of local search engine marketing is, getting reviews for your listing on review sites and Google My business. Reviews on your Google My Business are believed to be a ranking signal that will help get you into the local pack. I look forward to having some local search people on to help us do better in this area.
Content marketing for increased traffic and improved search engine ranking. Content marketing is a very popular form of lead generation on the internet and I know several people who are doing this type of content. While content marketing is still important, it is not nearly as easy to rank in search as when the Worldwide Web was new. It’s now more nuanced than before and relies more on your popularity and the size of your business. very small businesses are at a distinct disadvantage for global search, however, they can rank fairly easily for local and maps.
Email is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your audience.
Email marketing is still very effective.
Current Social Media Marketing
I am also quite involved with social media and engagement marketing. I have built several large online communities with my largest reaching one million followers. Then on April 2, 2019 Google shut down Google Plus along with my largest community. Back in its heyday, my G+ account could crash a site with a single post. That’s right, doing one post could generate so much traffic to a site it would overload the site and temporarily shut it down. This happened to my own site on a daily basis. This problem led me to develop onsite optimization strategies where I optimize the use of resources so I could get more visitors before that critical point of failure occurred.
My Google Plus site also taught me about the time needed and the intricacies of managing a very large user base with an extremely wide variety of beliefs and interests, not to mention the thousands of spammers that would infiltrate the community.
Now that G+ is not in my tool kit I am exploring other options including my own directory/membership site. Yes, it is now up and running. I have been using Tumblr for a number of years and now that it’s owned by the people who are behind WordPress I think it will start to once again play a bigger part in the social media landscape.
Most consumer facing businesses should probably have a presence on Facebook. However, those businesses catering to a young demographic may want to consider other social platforms such as tiktok or even Instagram. For B2B companies you will want to be on LinkedIn and industry specific trade social media networks.
Twitter can be a good platform for some businesses. This is usually the first place I go when researching a business’s social media footprint. When I am going to buy a product I usually go to twitter to get a feel for the business’s ethos and how they relate to their users. I also get a better feel for how they do social and their social reach. I want to know if they are a flash in the pan or do they have stability. When researching a company After Twitter I usually go to LinkedIn to see who works at the establishment.
The next social platform I want to mention is YouTube. In America YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google and most businesses should have some sort of presents on this platform. Since YouTube has started placing ads on all videos I rather dislike the platform. I recommend that you use Vimeo for videos you embed on your website. However, you should still have a YouTube channel, it just needs to be used differently. YouTube management has its own challenges. I look forward to having some YouTube and other video platform thought leaders as guests on new shows.
Current community outreach and experiential/event marketing
Coming soon.