World-Class Internet Marketing

Overview of the Business Best Seller Good to Great and
"Great" Internet Marketing Results

1. "Great" Business Leadership Defined

"Great" business leadership refers to the world-class business leadership and financial results described in the business best seller, Good to Great - listed as one of Amazon's Top 100 books and one of Amazon's top leadership books for the last 10 years.

The book's research team analyzed the financial results of 1,435 companies (all companies listed on the Fortune 500 list, 1965-1995). After an extensive review of the financial performance of these companies, it was determined that 11 companies stood out from the rest. These companies achieved incredible financial results - going from "good" to extraordinarily "great" financial results.

"Great" companies achieved an 6.9x greater financial results than the general market
for 15 years following their transition point from "Good" to "Great" financial results.

In the field of Internet Marketing, evaluating 15-20 year financial results is not an effective timeline for evaluating business leadership success. A "Level 5" Internet Marketing Director should be able to show "great" web traffic growth and "great" business income growth curves within 1-2 years' time.

The percentage of companies that produced "great" financial results in the Good to Great book
(from a list of all Fortune 500 companies from 1965-1995) was .77% - 1 in 130 companies!!!

All of the "Great" companies had "Level 5" Business Leadership in place
at the time of transition from Good to Great financial results.

Read More about "Great" Business Leadership (Important Information!) or
Skip to "Great" Internet Marketing and Business Leadership Work History Examples

2. "Great" Business Leadership Principles Discovered

1. "Level 5" Leadership: "We were surprised, shocked really, to discover the type of leadership required for turning a good company into a great one. Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy - these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more link Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar."
2. First Who...Then What: "We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats - and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage "People are your best asset" turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are."
3. Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith): "We learned that a former prisoner of war had more to teach us about what it takes to find a path to greatness than most books on corporate strategy. Every good-to-great company embraced what we came to call the Stockdale Paradox: You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."
   

   "Great" Business Leadership: The Stockdale Paradox

   
   
   Skip to 2:06 for James Stockdale's description of true leadership and an overview of the key
   "Level 5" Business Leadership Qualities discovered by the Good to Great authors - qualities shown
   to be essential leadership qualities for producing "Great" Financial and Operational Success in Business.

4. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within Three Circles): "To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. Just because something is your core business - just because you've been doing it for years or perhaps even decades - does not necessarily mean you can be the best in the world at it. And if you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business absolutely cannot form the basis of a great company. It must be replaced with a simple concept that reflects deep understanding of three intersecting circles."

   Building a "Great" Business: Simplicity Within Three Circles
   The Hedgehog Concept

   

5. A Culture of Discipline: "All companies have a culture, some companies have discipline, but few companies have a culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don't need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don't need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance."
6. Technology Accelerators: "Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. They never use technology as the primary means of igniting a transformation. Yet, paradoxically, they are pioneers in the application of carefully selected technologies. We learned that technology by itself is never a primary, root cause of either greatness or decline. "
7. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: " ...the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop. There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary luck break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembled relentlessly pushing a giant heavy flywheel in one direction, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond."

3. Qualities of a "Level 5" Business Leader and a
"Level 5" Internet Marketing Director

"Level 5" refers to the highest level in the hierarchy of business leadership qualities identified by the Good to Great  Research Group. "Level 5" leaders embody all five levels of the Leadership Pyramid.
Read the Level 1 information at the bottom of the pyramid first, then read up to Level 5.

4.1 "Great" Internet Marketing Results Achieved: 1st of 5 Examples

1998-2011: JohnLutz.com - World-Class Internet Marketing, 21st Century Business Strategy

• Ranked #1 and #2 on Google for "Top Ranked Internet Marketing Director" out of millions of search results.
• Ranked #1 and #2 on Google for "Proven Level 5 Business Leader" out of millions of search results.
• Ranked #1 and #2 on Google for "Level 5 Internet Marketing Director" out of millions of search results.
• Ranked #1 and #2 on Google for "Level 5 Business Leader" out of millions of search results.
• Less than 20% of the capabilities of the Internet marketing systems that my coworkers and I have developed over the last 13+ years are being utilized to obtain these results.
• The Internet marketing systems have been developed with the goal of being able to obtain #1 positions for the most competitive search terms on the Internet - terms such as "cancer," the #3 searched news term on Google in 2006, and other terms for which Google displays over 500 million search results.

4.2 "Great" Internet Marketing Results Achieved: 2nd of 5 Examples

2009: LetFreedomRingUSA.com - Conservative Political Web Site Promoting Constitutional Government, Economic Freedom and Traditional Values

Topped All Major Conservative Political Web Sites (CPAC 2009 Exhibitor Web Sites, over 100 top political web sites)
in Year to Year Traffic Growth. CPAC, The Conservative Political Action Conference, is the largest annual event in Washington DC for conservative political organizations.

*Important Notes:
- 1. I did not even know what left/right meant in politics when I started the project, because I was strongly pursuing other interests and education, and I was not concerned with politics.
-2. Then, I saw Ron Paul videos (the guy running for President, again, who wants to cut 1 trillion in government spending during his first year in office)! I voted for him in 2008 - the first time I ever voted.
-3. I'm a strong supporter of limited, constitutional government. I left the Let Freedom Ring project when it became clear that they were not supporting Ron Paul.

My coworkers and I provided Internet marketing services for LetFreedomRingUSA.com from 1/16 to 4/30, 2009. Internet marketing results shown on Compete.com show that total visits per month on LetFreedomRingUSA.com increased at a rate higher than the rate achieved by all of the CPAC Exhibitor Web Sites combined!

*Alexa.com (a top 200 site online) and Compete.com (a top 700 site online) can provide third party documentation for each of the web marketing results highlighted on this web web page. These web sites can also provide third party documentation that my coworkers and I have produced industry leading web traffic growth on three different web projects in three different industries - healthcare/alternative medicine, financial news/investing and political news/politics.

Web traffic statistics referenced: Compete.com Yearly Change - total visits per month comparing April 2008 to April 2009. The stats are located below the traffic graphs on the right of the Compete.com pages. Example: Comparing total monthly visits for wnd.com, drudgreport.com and nytimes.com.

Video Produced for LetFreedomRingUSA.com (April, 2009)

4.3 "Great" Internet Marketing Results Achieved: 3rd of 5 Examples

2006-07: Taipanfinancialnews.com - Financial News and Investment Site

Led a 23 million dollar business with 87% of revenue generated online and 23 million per year in online sales from 15 web sites (none of which were fully developed) to a new primary domain name, totally new site layout (optimized for natural traffic results), new trademarks, a new medium of delivery of content (video) and a top 50,000 Site Ranking on the Internet... a ranking higher than 99.98% of all sites on the Internet in less than 6 months' time . Ranking source: Alexa.com, owned by Amazon.com; 4th qtr 2006/1st qtr 07. Topped all major financial web sites in year-to-year web traffic growth.

Led a web marketing team of 10 web experts, 4 marketing experts, 15 content producers and 6 supporting team members (about 35 team members). Installed cutting-edge, search engine optimized XHTML/CSS web code on the site and a new site layout. Reformatted the site and product mix to increase natural traffic results and increase sales-per-transaction and sales-per- visitor. Marketed financial e-newsletter subscriptions (financial investment advice) - free introductory subscriptions up to $7,500 per subscription (a one-time fee with a $99/yr annual renewal fee). Purchased 20K in computer equipment and 10K in Adobe training to quickly change the business from a text-based e-newsletter subscription format to a video-based format. (This was way back in 2006 when YouTube was just beginning to become popular!) Managed a 130,000 name e-newsletter subscriber list and a $40,000 monthly pay-per-click advertising budget. Distributed search engine optimized content to many top sites online with links back to the main site.

 

Alexa Traffic Stats for TaipanFinancialNews.com, 1/7/07

The Rate of Web Traffic Increase during our final 3 months of work on the project was similar to the rates for sites
highlighted on Alexa as "Movers and Shakers" - web sites gaining traffic faster than any other sites on the Internet!

Notice the below web site ranking - #108,730 - and the 3 month change - an increase of 4,833,732 positions!!!
Two months later, after all of our Internet marketing work was picked up by
search engines, the site reached a top 50,000 Alexa ranking!!!

4.4 "Great" Internet Marketing Results Achieved: 4th of 5 Examples

2003-05: Ayurvedaonline.com, a web site for three businesses: (1) an alternative medicine clinic, (2) an alternative medicine school offering continuing education programs for medical professionals, and (3) an alternative medicine products company featuring a private label line of nutritional supplements, bodycare products, medical equipment and specialty foods.

Worked as Internet Marketing Director part-time from 6/03 to 1/04, full-time from 2/04 to 3/05, part-time from 4/05 to 6/05, and full-time from 11/05 to 12/05. A more traditional Good to Great business growth curve is shown below for Ayurvedaonline.com, with the longer development phase before the rapid growth phase. On the TaipanFinancialNews.com project and the LetFreedomRingUSA.com project, the Great results were obtained very quickly (80 to 150 days) due to the experience and skills obtained while working on the Ayurvedaoanline.com project and sufficient funding provided by these projects to support rapid web traffic growth. Ayurvedaonline.com was sold in 2006 after achieving outstanding financial results and "great" business success.

The site was non-functional, with outdated content, a non-optimized brand image, a non-functional shopping cart and less than 10 visitors per day when we began work on the project. The site's final Traffic Rankings, Reach, Page Views per Visitor and Rate of Traffic Increase figures were some of the highest results achieved out of all of the sites on the Internet. Alexa rankings indicated that the following Internet marketing results were achieved:

1. 117 fold increase in web traffic produced over 20 months' time (about 16 months of full-time work).
2. Topped most major nutrition and natural healthcare web sites in web traffic growth.
3. The site's top Alexa ranking was #100,000 - a ranking higher than over 99.9% of all sites online.
4. The site's Alexa ranking had increased 1,100,000 positions during the prior three month period - a rate of increase in web traffic similar to sites listed as "Movers and Shakers" by Alexa.com.

The web traffic growth curves shown above are similar to or greater than the growth curves
produced by the "Great" companies highlighted in Good to Great!

In Good to Great, only .77% of the 1435 companies studied (1 in 130 companies)
were able to produce comparable results!!!

4.5 "Great" Business Leadership and Marketing Results Achieved: 5th of 5 Examples

This example is related to (1) my pursuit of top level skills, knowledge and abilities in my fields of interest (see Stockdale Paradox),
(2) my work in the field of nutrition and natural healthcare, (3) developing top level Internet Marketing abilities, and (4) "greatly" proving these abilities on my first web project, after producing "great" financial and business leadership results in a retail business format for two Fortune 500 Companies.

1993: Nordel Karate, awarded Black Belt in Shotokan Karate from an outstanding traditional/non-commercial martial arts school.

1993: Moved 3000 miles to train at the top martial arts training center in the world at the time, Benny's Jet Center (2).

1994: Began my work in the nutrition/natural healthcare/natural products industry with Mrs. Gooch's - the top organic foods and natural products retailer in Southern California (the company was bought by Whole Foods Market, a Fortune 500 company, in 1993/1994).

• Initially hired as a salesperson in the stores Nutrition/Whole Body Department (sales of nutritional supplements, natural healthcare books and natural bodycare products).
• Promoted to Assistant Manager of the department about 5 months later.
• Scored 100% on the company's suggested training program in nutrition/natural healthcare/natural products industry. This program was developed by Bastyr University, the top college in the country for studies in nutrition-based medicine.
• Led the Nutrition Department from years of minimal sales growth and 13-14% of store sales (department sales divided by store sales) to significantly increased sales (over 20% of store sales - while helping increase the sales of the other departments in the store), significantly increased profitability, and the Award for Top Nutrition Department in the Region (for the Southern Pacific Region, the most advanced region in the company in regards to producing outstanding financial and operational results).
• See Nutrition/Natural Healthcare/Natural Products Industry Cover Letter , Whole Foods Market Work History and Awards, and Nutrition/Natural Healthcare Research Example (2).

1997 and 1998: Completed the LA Marathon.

1999-2003: Returned to the East Coast to study computers and Internet marketing.

• Successfully located outstanding training in computers and Internet marketing (a new, emerging field in 1999).
  • Quotes on the importance of being able to adapt and locate information necessary to be successful in a rapidly changing and highly competitive field like Internet marketing.
  • Educational path for obtaining highly advanced Internet marketing knowledge and abilities.
• Produced store leading sales and profitability for CompUSA - a Fortune 500 Company.

2003-2005: Moved 3000 miles (again) to apply, test and further develop my industry knowledge and marketing abilities in the fields of nutrition and natural healthcare (prior to 2003 - retail sales and business leadership) ... and develop the skills necessary to be able to produce "Great" Internet Marketing Results (2).

Cover Letter | Resume | Personal Profile
Internet Marketing Portfolio | jl@johnlutz.com