Shane first went online in 1999 with ambitions of being a web designer or programmer.  He soon found out that he lacked both design flair and the mindset to program day in day out, so decided to try to make money online.  First he registered and sold domains then moved into affiliate marketing, then in 2001 Adwords launched in the UK and Shane was amongst the very first early adopters of this new advertising channel.  He used Google to drive traffic to affiliate programs specialising mainly in the finance sector on credit cards and loans, but also covered other sectors from hotels to charities, mobile phones and the bizarre such as dog clothing!

Not wanting to be at the mercy of any one channel or revenue model, Shane’s company, Targeted Media Ltd, also started managing pay per click advertising for merchants as Google AdWords was evolving into an environment where lack of knowledge was costing users money.  He realised that most businesses don’t have the time to be proficient in what they do in their business to keep up to date with the intricacies of Adwords (and pay per click marketing in general), so he moved into offering an agency solution and has clients in varied channels from travel to sex toys to gifts etc.. 

Always one for shiny badges, Shane was the first person worldwide to take and pass the Google Adwords Professional exam, and Targeted Media is an AdWords qualified company also covering Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer in addition to Yahoo and MSN paid search management.

With the online philosophy of ‘diversify or die’, Targeted Media moved further around the paid search arena into web applications and developed www.BrandWatcher.com; a brand monitoring and protection tool designed with affiliate marketing in mind.  BrandWatcher was initially used in house to protect client’s campaigns from abuse by rogue affiliates, and allowing clients to see what competitors were doing on their brand and product terms across the UK search engines.  It was subsequently rolled out as a standalone product and is now in use by agencies, networks and merchants monitoring hundreds of the UK’s top brands.

Shane looks forward to seeing the online marketing arena develop over the next few years before retiring and buying an island stocked with playboy bunnies yet totally devoid of any internet connection, phone lines, mobile signal or computers of any kind whatsoever!

Shane’s Introductory Post