About Jerry Work

Hello, I'm Jerry Work. Here's my story.

I graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1994, then went to Memphis to strike it rich in the bond business. After failing misorably as a broker, I became a financial analyst at Mercer Capital, one of the country's top business appraisal firms. After crunching numbers and writing reports for a couple of years, I got really bored and quit my job to start a web design business.

That went fine until I ran out of money and had to go back to work, which took about a year and a half. Then I went to work as the head of a little web design division of a information technology company called Eagle Systems (still in Memphis), where I met the girl who would become my wife, Wendi.

Around this same time, my brother, Chris Work, moved to Memphis fresh out of high school. I gave him some web design lessons, and then he and I started playing around with search engine optimization. We even took a very early stab at starting a search engine optimization company before such a thing even really existed. But it was a hard sale back in those days.

I picked up ASP programming on the side and started doing contract IT work, which eventually brought me to Nashville (very close to my hometown, Dickson). I worked a few jobs, including a contract stint a Capital Records which was pretty cool, then wound up at Shop at Home TV, where I became the Manager of Search, responsible for both the optimization of on-site search as well as external search engine optimization for purposes of driving traffic. I also got brief control of the company's paid search accounts. I say briefly because a year or so into my stint there, Shop at Home got bought out by another company and everybody got let go. But we had some good results there (at one point increasing traffic from natural search 300% in a matter of weeks), so I decided that it was time to launch Work Media.

In 2007, my brother joined me as a full-time partner in the business, and that same year we formed a new company (Work Media, LLC) with Frank/Best International, a successful Nashville advertising agency, as a partner in the new venture. We currently work out of the same building as Frank/Best, at 705 2nd Ave. South.

We have managed search marketing campaigns for companies like Honda Power Equpiment (the division of Honda that sells equipment like lawn mowers and generators), Bentley Systems (an engineering design software company with sales approaching $400 million), and Columbia State Community College, an educational institution outside Nashville. We also work with people like Sandra Alboum, a professional language translator, C. Emory Cross, who provides human resources consulting in Florida. We've worked with several law firms and a brand new acne treatment company.

We've learned a lot from all of this, the number ONE lesson being that you cannot predict human behavior. To try and do so is pointless, which is why testing is such a critical part of our strategy. But I digress...

Through it all, I've written extensively. Scientific Search Engine Marketing is the first book that I am offering for sale. There is lots of free material on the Resources page at WorkMedia.net (books, articles, blog posts, eCourses, etc.). But I think this book is worth far more than its price, because it provides a clear set of strategies to improve your paid search performance.

Anyway, that's who I am.

I'm Jerry Work. Search engine marketing is what I do.