Back In the Blogging Game

Ladies and Gents,

I'd like to proclaim my re-entry into the space.

Update: After an array of interviews, I landed at the one I had perceived as most unlikely: ThinkCash Financial. It's a short-term lending service consisting of three products: PayDay One, ThinkCash, and Elastic, which will be launched in Beta later this month.

The reason I perceived it as unlikely is because it wasn't an advertising agency. I had spent weeks researching to stay relevant on all that was advertising in hopes of obtaining a position at an agency, yet here I am, a proud new employee of the ThinkCash team.

What do I do?

An array of things. Every Tuesday and Friday, I generate reports measuring returns on paid search, affiliate programs, and e-mail campaigns. From this, I now fully grasp the importance of metrics, and why the online space has such an advantage in that regard. It's amazing what it can do.

I create GCID's for the embedded links, and from those we can read the number of opens, unique opens, delivered pieces of mail, application derived from those opens, as well as funded loans. From there, we calculate cost per loan and figure out what's working and what needs to be optimized.

For years, I was ashamed of my father's love of spreadsheets. Only engineers liked that kind of stuff. But now, here I am, publicly stating that I was wrong. They're not so bad after all.

In addition to the reports, I am:

1. Working with a co-worker in developing an affiliate program, which is harder than you'd think when you have the stigma of 'payday loans' hovering over you.
2. Learning paid search: how to bid, how to gather the results, and how to work with the search representatives on optimizing the searches.
3. Best Practices for E-mail Campaigns to improve deliverability: DKIM, SS, IP4, FBL
4. Haven't started yet, but will begin leading more about lead generation sooner than later as well.

Although the subject matter doens't make for great conversation, it's captured my full attention. I'm blessed to have gotten this job, and couldn't be happier with it. The online space is such a dynamic environment, and the skills I'm getting here will be of great use in the future as online becomes more and more important in the marketing/advertising world.