This September marks the 20th year Eden Marketing has been in business! We’re proud of this accomplishment and thank all our friends, family, and especially our family of clients for making this possible.
Twenty years can go by fast. Looking back… my pal and mentor, I’ll call him “Dan” (because that’s his name,) and I bought the domain name in May of 2001, but I had a day job and had to work through the summer, making Eden’s first official day of operation September 10, 2001, a Monday. Now, anyone over 25 years of age will remember what came next that week, as on Tuesday, 9/11, the USA was attacked by terrorists using planes and our world changed forever.
I remember thinking, with two young children and no safety net, as the world got very chaotic/ very quick… “this is a hell of a time to start a business!?” But we persevered and kept at it and before too long we had our sea legs, and were running a legitimate operation, which was fun!
Back then, I worked a lot w/ Frognet, a local ISP at the time. I learned the basics doing websites for Terry Anderson’s empire (blue gator, willow run ranch, skippers) as well as Jorma’s camp and many bands and projects. These guys truly gave us our start by loading us up with projects from the get go.
For 20 years, we’ve been making the internet a nicer place.
In the early years, I tried to do it all, alone, but soon realized I needed help, and we began to grow. For 10 years or so, it was kind of a “2 man band”, with me and my compadre Jef, mostly focused on building websites for new or existing companies. We also spent a lot of time figuring out IT solutions for problems that at the time were quite unique. This was long before WordPress or Shopify or YouTube, so selling online securely, or serving up streaming video could be quite the IT challenge. Download RealPlayer Now! 😉
In 2008 we expanded, as a local web company called it quits and handed off their portfolio to us, suddenly making us web hosts, as well as graphic designers.
It was around this time we also began working with a bunch of New York Acting Schools, as an old college friend hooked us up with some e-commerce jobs that grew into profitable relations we still keep to this day.
We peaked in activity around 2017, with as many as 10 team mates working at Eden, including Jessica, Toby, Beth, Brian, Rachel and of course John Sammon, who went on to create the award winning Sixth City Marketing, a strategic partner to this day.
Lockdown Changes the Scope of Services
Trump hit, then Covid, and I intentionally shrank the business, quite a bit actually, wearier of our fellow man.
Discontinuing our flat fee site builds (unless amply rewarded), and graphic design, our focus shifted to full on SEO.
We eat sleep and breath SEO around Eden Marketing. The reason being, the nature of the SEO work is more routine and stable as compared the the “purge and starve” tendencies of new project opportunities.
We also are kept busy by hosting and maintaining websites and platforms of over 100 of our family of existing clients.
I am fortunate to have an amazing crew going at the moment, William, Luke, Dan and Tom, who show no signs of slowing, and we have aims of making the web a nicer place to live, for at least the next few decades.
Submitted w/ a few more gray hairs,
Roman