Episode 47: Pam Aungst

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Introducing Pam Aungst

Pam Aungst is owner of Pam Ann Marketing, and Stealth Search and Analytics. Both offer SEO, PPC, and Analytics services. Pam loves the outdoors. She lives in Northern New Jersey with her boyfriend and 18 year old daughter.

Show Notes

Website | Pam Ann Marketing
Website | Stealth Search and Analytics
Twitter | @PamAnnMarketing

Episode Transcript

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 47.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Pam Aungst. Pam is owner of Pam Ann Marketing, and Stealth Search and Analytics. Both offer SEO, PPC, and Analytics services. Pam loves the outdoors. She lives in Northern New Jersey with her boyfriend and 18 year old daughter. Welcome Pam!

Pam: Hi.

Liam: Hi, Pam. Thanks for joining us, appreciate it. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? More than what we heard from Tara?

Pam: Sure. As she said, I live in northern New Jersey and I do love the outdoors, camping, and hiking, and fishing, or just sitting outside being out in nature, I love that personally. Workwise, I am the owner of Pam Ann Marketing and Stealth Search and Analytics. We’ve been in business for about seven years now. Both companies are kind of sister companies of sorts. They’ll do the same thing but for different audiences. Through Pam Ann Marketing, we work directly with established businesses and nationwide brands that want to take their search and analytics strategies to the next level, and through stealth, we do SEO, PPC, and analytic services on a private label basis through other marketing agencies that want to offer such services to their clients without hiring employees to do so.

Tara: That’s interesting. Which one is older of the two? What was the first one that you started?

Pam: Pam Ann Marketing is the original, Stealth is a recent addition, less than a year now we came out with that sister company to offer the same services but on a totally different basis, on a stealth basis, flying under the radar basis where we do them on a private label structure through other companies kind of making it look like they’re doing it.

Tara: Yeah, I love that name and the service that you’re offering as an agency owner myself and learning enough analytics and SEO stuff, I can really relate to agencies that are looking to white label that for their clients. Because you don’t want to keep outsourcing it, but on the other hand, you don’t have the resources and expertise to do it at a high level internally. That’s really great service that you’re offering.

Pam: Yeah, we try to customize it as best we can because I think that– and that’s why I call it private label as opposed to white label, I don’t know if that means a difference to everyone else, but to me, there’s a little bit of a connotation with white-labeling services that it’s just this preset cookie cutter package of things done a certain way that you just put your stamp on. And we’re trying to be much more custom than that and try to bridge that divide between that white labeling, slapping your name on something that you have no control over or fully taking control and hiring employees. We’re trying to bridge that gap and be somewhere in the middle where we’ll customize things and do things the way that the agency needs them done so it looks like their way, but not have to fully hire employees and bring that fully in house.

Tara: Nice. Let’s go back a little bit further in time and how you got started in this field and also, as it relates to WordPress, if you work with all different platforms or if you’re focused on WordPress?

Pam: Sure. To go way back in time, as early as six years old, I started playing with computers, my first computer was a Commodore 64. And as opposed to what most kids would do, which is just popping the games the moment they get something like that, I started playing with the programming examples and the manual where if you just typed in the three pages of example code that they gave you that something would happen, a little ball would bounce around the screen or some horrible music would play. I was just drawn to that kind of stuff right away. So the moment we got dial-up internet in the house in early ’90s, I started coding websites in HTML just because I was fascinated with that kind of stuff. That’s what I did for fun in high school as the total computer nerd that I was and still am. That’s the very beginning of how I got into this kind of thing. My first real job was as an administrative assistant for a small company. I think they were actually still calling it secretary then. It was so funny, I literally had one hand in each world. In front of me, there was a desk with a computer, this was in 2001 and it was a small company but they did have a website so that was pretty forward-thinking of them to already have a website at that time. In front of me was a desk with a computer, the company website, they had computerized accounting system. But behind me was a desk with a typewriter and a dictaphone and an old-school green ledger book that I had to duplicate all the computerized accounting entries by hand in pencil in two copies of the letter book because they didn’t trust the computerized accounting software yet. I could turn around, I could kind of have one hand on each desk, one hand in each world verging between the old way of doing things in an office and the new way. With that experience, they had a website and they needed it updated and maintained and I was handy with that kind of stuff, as well as I would go and fix computers for fun, too, in high school. So I became the resident tech support/webmaster who would just be responsible for anything to do with the tech in the office. So I got my first professional with websites, I’ve been creating for fun before that but then I worked with them in a work capacity starting with 2001. I was at that company for a long time, and a couple of years later in 2005, they decided they wanted to add an online store to their website, eCommerce was here to stay by then and their competitors were doing it. It was kind of like, if you can’t beat them, join them kind of a thing. So they were like, “We want a shopping cart on our website.” And I was like, “Sure, that’s right up my alley. I’ll figure out how to do that.” So I found some open-source shopping cart software with osCommerce at the time. And I put that up there and figured out how to configure it and everything, I was so excited. I sent everyone an email and we launched it and said, “We’re live. If you build it, they will come.” Except nobody came. [laughter] So that’s really how I started learning, trial by fire, how to do SEO and other website traffic-driving tactics and AdWords and so on. I just continued to do so for them for several years and got really good at it. That store that I built for that company was only supposed to be like a side thing, they just had a handful of products they wanted to put up there. It wasn’t a core part of the business but I found a target audience that was out there for the products that they didn’t know was out there. So I started tuning all the marketing and messaging, and even the product line towards that audience and kind of spun off into this whole new department of the company that never really existed before and ended up having its own staff and warehouse space. I became responsible for not just driving traffic to a website but managing our competitive pricing strategies and integrating back-end technologies so that we didn’t have to hand-type a shipping label for every order that was coming in and things like that. It was great experience, I morphed into becoming an eCommerce manager. It was kind of like building my own web-based business from the ground up but without my own financial risks. Obviously, it was a great learning experience.

Liam: I like that approach.

Pam: Yeah, definitely. Whenever you can learn on other people’s money, it’s great. [laughs] And that was actually my first exposure to WordPress because at first, I was just focusing on SEO and AdWords primarily, and comparison shopping engines, some email marketing, but social media and blogging were still evolving for how a small business was using them then. But it was definitely by around, I think it was 2009-ish that I realized this was also here to stay and we needed a blog. On this eCommerce platform that we had at the time, which was an ASP.NET platform by then, it ultimately got changed from OS Commerce. I needed a blog and so I found WordPress, I put that on there and I ran it side by side on a Windows server, which was quite the adventure to configure but I figured it out and I ran WordPress next to the eCommerce platform so that we have a blog and then start putting those articles on social media. WordPress was really kind of a catalyst that led me into learning about social media to get the blog articles out there. That was pretty instrumental, WordPress is pretty instrumental and my evolvement as an eCommerce manager. After I worked for that company, I went to another company where I worked in-house as an eCommerce manager, same kind of thing. eCommerce store, WordPress blog. Again, used WordPress for a lot of the organic SEO and traffic-driving efforts on the blog articles. I had some successes in that position, too, that led to people asking me for interviews from trade publications, even internet retailer magazine interviewed me, which you could have knocked me over with a feather when they wanted to talk to me. Because they interviewed the Jeff Bezos’ of the world, but I was interviewed there, it was totally awesome. It was about driving traffic to websites and b2b environment. That was awesome and with that kind of attention, people started to say to me, “Wow, you really know this stuff. Do you do consulting work on the side?” Eve my day job boss was like, “My brother has a company and he needs more website traffic. Can you help him?” I was like, “Sure.” I was starting to get these requests for projects without even really trying. Twitter played a huge role in that, too. I was doing a lot of networking on Twitter, kind of establishing myself as an expert there, getting to know people through Twitter chats and whatnot, talking about SEO and whatnot. They started to trust my expertise and started to refer business to me without even trying to intentionally, I ended up having a side company. At some point, I did start trying intentionally to grow that company and I didn’t take too long, about a year in of having this company on the side, I realized I have 10 clients. This is not a sidegig anymore, I have a real company and something’s got to give. That’s when I transitioned from having a day job into having my own company full time.

Tara: What a great case study, wow. It must be really rewarding and gratifying to see that you started out as a ‘secretary’ and then you basically built a whole division of a company. That is a great story.

Pam: Yeah, it was very cool. I mean, I certainly don’t take credit for all of it, it was a group effort and it kind of happened almost accidentally but I just kept running with it and learning more and more and more. It turned out to be an excellent learning experience. Now that I have my own company, I have stuck with WordPress as one of our– actually, not one of our. Our absolutely preferred platform. We do work with other platforms if we have to but we try not to have to. It’s just so much harder when– it’s really an open source versus non-open source thing as far as when you need to make a lot of technical adjustments to appease Google Bot and there’s limitations on what you can do in any platform that’s not open, especially now with all these sites being tuning and how that’s part of SEO. A lot of that happens at the server level so you can’t do that on a closed platform. It’s really an open versus closed thing, the reason why we prefer WordPress. But since WordPress is so greatly supported by such an enormous worldwide community, it makes it even easier on WordPress versus any other open platform to keep up with Google’s demands. Because as soon as Google says that they want something, it’s usually a matter of weeks at most before WordPress community comes out with a solution. AMP, for example, didn’t take very long. As soon as Google said, “We want you to have this new thing called AMP.” And the WordPress community just responded and that’s completely unmatched by any other CMS that’s out there, that level of support and community and responsiveness to Google’s demands.

Liam: Yeah, and it’s not just Google, just in my own business having a client who is part of a bigger partnership and the partnership has a website that’s on a proprietary system by just a small firm. “Should we switch to WordPress?”, “Don’t switch because of me but switch because of the control and the versatility and the scalability.” As you just noted, when GDPR comes out, when Google changed, when some other significant player on the internet says, “Guess what, everybody, all change.” It’s really hard to change in a proprietary system where there are not millions and millions of people willing to pitch in and say, “Okay, let’s make it better.” That’s a great way to tie back to WordPress. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts, if I could change gears a little bit, on at what point did you appreciate that Pam Ann Marketing could use a sister company and how did you decide the shape and impetus to move forward with Stealth Search and Analytics? How did that come about?

Pam: Sure. A couple of things drove that. First of all, I think I’ll just clarify this so that this will all make sense. Through Pam Ann Marketing, we don’t actually design or develop websites. We’re kind of more like an architect, we dictate how they should be built from both a technical and content perspective. What keywords should be on which page and what elements should be there as far as the technical optimizations. But we don’t build it ourselves, we don’t build websites. Part of the catalyst for starting Stealth was that since we’re not in full control of the website, we can make a lot of recommendations but we’re not in control to execute them and bring them to life. That’s a tricky thing. When someone’s coming to us and paying us for SEO services, they want results. It’s like a brand new check for SEO, “You’re responsible for my SEO, get me results.” And we absolutely know how to do that but we’re not in control of doing that and making sure that they get results. We have to rely on their developers or designers, or their content writers, or whoever we pull in as a recommendation for the project. And that doesn’t always work perfectly. Part of it was filled by that frustration so that we could get– we wanted to be able to get pickier with who we work with directly, making sure that they’re the right fit, that they have really good development team who’s really open to executing on our recommendations, same with the content writers. As far as people who don’t have those resources in place and kind of rather just work under another agency where if you only need a couple of things done, only want a couple of things tweak, if we’re working through another agency, that’s all we’re expecting to do, that’s all they’re looking at us to do is, “Can you just give us keywords for these five pages because we have five new pages on this site and that’s it and that’s all we want.” Sure, but working directly with the client, they’re expecting big results and traffic changes and whatnot. We can only get that if we are in full force with all the right puzzle pieces in place and other partnerships. Otherwise, we can do those smaller tweaks and whatnot, if they’re needed, but would rather just do that through another agency and work with the agency. It’s basically about making the end client happy, and we would just get so many requests from other agencies. Like, “Can you just help us with this one part of this project we’re stuck on. We’re not sure how to code this to make it as SEO-friendly as possible.”, “Sure, we’ll help you with just that one little thing. That will make your life easier.” I guess it’s actually not only just about private labeling and them being able to offer their services. It’s also just about helping them only with what they need as far as SEO goes because their clients are expecting to get an SEO from their website in the end. A lot of these agencies are very capable of getting it very close but they might run into something they’re stuck on, so we just kind of help them get past that and move on. So we would get a lot of requests from agencies and we also wanted to get a little pickier with who we work with directly and making sure that it’s the right DNA of relationships that we can get results by only doing our architecting and not being in full control.

Tara: Right, that makes sense. I’m going to change gears a little bit, although everything that you talked about might relate to this question which is the question we ask everyone which is, how you define success, Pam, either personally, professionally, a combination of the two? What does success mean to you?

Pam: Sure. I had to think about that quite a bit when I knew you were going to ask me about that because there’s a lot of different ways in which I define success. I’m trying to find running themes. I think the running theme professionally is helping demystify SEO and analytics for clients, whether that end client be a company we’re working with directly or another agency. The sense of relief that they express after we’ve demystified some of this for them is so gratifying. It is hard stuff to conceptualize, SEO is very, very complex and analytics too, but so important, so crucial, yet so complex and hard to understand. I get great satisfaction out of any situation with anyone which our team can demystify that for someone and make it make sense to them. I’ve been told I guess I have a knack for breaking down complex concepts into much more understandable terms and that sense of relief that people get after I do that is just so incredibly rewarding. I guess that’s the running theme professionally throughout everything that I do and that we do as a team. It’s like, that’s our end game. We really enjoy giving people that sense of relief like,” Ah, this makes sense. Now we know exactly what we need to do. It’s not a big mystery, it’s not overwhelming anymore.” Personally, I think my definition of success has changed a bit. When I first started my company, of course, I was all about success in terms of growth. We did have a lot of growth at first which was excellent. But now I’m looking at it like, “How much more do I want to grow as far as getting bigger and how does that play into work/life balance and making sure that I can still enjoy the things in life that I enjoyed personally like spending a lot of time camping when it’s nice out, and bike riding and things like that.” That’s very important. Now I’d say success for me personally is about maintaining a good work/life balance where I’ve got a good chunk of my life that’s dedicated to that professional goal, and it provides just what I need to take care of my needs and my family’s needs, but also have time to enjoy life. Life is so incredibly short in the scheme of things, and I think it’s really important to enjoy it now and make that a goal for now and not leave that a goal for later.

Liam: I love the, “My goals have changed. And as I think about this, I realized they’ve changed over time.” To roughly paraphrase what you said. I think that’s really interesting, that idea that has– we walk through our journeys of life and that which matters today doesn’t matter tomorrow. And two days from around the road we look back, we say, “Why did that first thing ever matter to me at all? How was relevant at all?” That’s really interesting. And the other thing that resonated with me, and I wanted to ask you a question about it, was the value and joy and professional satisfaction you get from taking the mystification of SEO and breaking it down for clients to the point where they understand and you probably feel like you’re more of a partner and less of a consultant at that point because you’re able to speak in a common language. And I wonder, going back to how you got into the job you have now, the business you own now where you started in high school– well, even at age six with the Commodore 64 and then HTML sites in high school, then taking on various technological tasks for that company that you worked in until, eventually, you’re building an eCommerce site and helping them market and grow division. How much of your ability to break complex concepts down in digestible elements, how closely does that relate to the way that you approach learning complex tasks, learning something new tech? How does that interplay come about for you?

Pam: Oh, that’s an interesting question. I’m not sure I’ve ever really thought of it in quite that way. It’s actually a recent revelation of my own that that’s really what I do for a living. It just so happened that over the past couple of months, a couple of different people have said to me in almost the same way, they’ve complimented me on my ability to break down complex things in an understandable way and I kind of try not to be an egotistical person so I kind of really never wanted to toot my own horn about too much of anything. But I realized, maybe that’s really my thing and that is a strength and that’s something I should play up and focus on and just own it and run with it. The more I’ve been thinking about that in the past couple of months, I realized that’s definitely a running theme throughout everything that I’ve been able to do so far with growing this company or even before that. That’s always instrumental, even if it’s an internal thing, someone who’s working in-house, they need to convince the bosses to embark upon a project a certain way. Now we work with all these other partnerships where there’s different design teams from different copywriting teams, and then the client, and then us. And trying to get everybody on the same page is a really crucial part of everything, breaking it down and to understand so that everyone’s literally on the same page once everyone has the same level of understanding about something. As far as how I learn new things, I guess I kind of do that for myself in my own head. If something is really perplexing to me, I’ll break it down and learn one piece of it at a time and then come out with a simplified key takeaway from it. I guess the most recent example would be site speed. Google has taken site speed into account for several years now on the desktop algorithm. But as of July, they’re going to incorporate it into the mobile algorithm and mobile accounts for over 50% of searches. This is going to be a much bigger thing than it used to be and much more important than it used to be. I had over the years just almost by osmosis absorbed quite a bit about what makes a website load fast. But now, I’m in a position where we need to guarantee that our clients’ websites meet very stringent speed requirements. Three seconds or less total page load time which is not easy, and that’s something that I had to dig in and learn really quickly and was very, very confusing to me at first. Once you get down to the level of things like renderBlock in Javascript and how exactly caching works and the different types of caching, object caching and so on. I’ve been just kind of trying to break it down for myself. I made a list, I broke it down into an outline of all the different pieces that were confusing to me and then went and researched each piece one at a time until I got to a point where I was like, “Okay, this is why this matters and this is the level we need to get it to in order for it to affect all the other pieces.” I guess, I don’t know, to answer your question, I guess I kind of do that to myself internally first and then I just relate it to the world the way that I broke it down for myself.

Tara: Yeah. I’ve seen you at a lot of WordCamps lately so it’s also something that you’re not just sharing with your clients but with the WordPress community. So your involvement in the WordPress community, would you say that’s grown as a result of this desire, passion, discovery for your ability to translate these complex things like analytics, boil them down to something that’s easier for people to understand?

Pam: Yeah, I guess so. That’s definitely related as well, my involvement in the WordPress community and speaking at a lot of WordCamps. I do kind of get– even before I was so distinctly aware of it in my own head that I do get kind of a rush out of doing that for people, breaking complex things down into understandable terms and that’s really what presenting at a WordCamp is all about. I really want to make sure that the attendees walk away with a better understanding of whatever topic it was I was talking about. And when they do, they get that sense of relief when they come up to me and that’s exactly what fuels me to do that. It’s very, very rewarding.

Tara: I’m going to go back to when you were talking about not just work/life balance but this idea of is growth really what you want? You reach a point where you realize that you could keep growing but that would be a change from what you are. So it sounds like you have a team, you have some people working with you, but I know as you grow and you get a bigger team, that extends your rest, it changes the ways that you operate your business. What do you see for the future? Do you see yourself maybe transitioning to more of an educational role, turning yourself into–? Like a lot of people have done once they sort of reached their max bandwidth that they can do themselves without having to add a team, and they start doing online learning or different kinds of classes. Have you considered that? What is your future goal?

Pam: Yes, absolutely. I have considered that. I can’t say exactly what the end future goal looks like because as we mentioned, goals change over time so I really only set goals usually one year at a time. Goal for this year is to start creating educational material that people can access a bit more easily if they can’t come see me at a WordCamp. I can only do so many live webinars at a time. I want to start creating recorded video courses that people can take on their own time and continue expanding the reach of that mission of bringing people tools that can help them break complex topics down into much more understandable terms with actionable takeaways that they understand they can do right now. I guess what I envisioned was sort of a third division for us, I do it with team already, a team of five and a half of us that we do great job at executing on the work that we have and I think it’s the right level of work. I don’t know that I want to take that team and turn it into a team of 10 or 20. I just think it’s just a whole different animal. We’re right size right now, we’re just at the right size to handle the amount of business that we need to keep us going. And I’d like that the way it is for the Pam Ann Marketing and Stealth part of things. I envision a third category that would be for expanding the reach of our educational content through courses exactly as you described. Most likely, I’ll go with– we do have a site where we experimented with some of that called Webtrafficcontroller.com. It’s not live right now so don’t look at it right now. But we do have it and I’m thinking of reviving that as kind of the third segment of our business. We’ll have Pam Ann Marketing for working with established companies and bigger teams, Stealth for working with agencies, and then we’ll have Web Traffic Controller for all those small businesses, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs that need help learning this stuff but need to do so in an accessible, affordable way.

Tara: That’s great branding, I love the connection to the Pam Ann.

Liam: You come up with great names, yes, I’m jealous.

Pam: [laughs] I really don’t take credit for that, it happens accidentally, as we talked about before. I named it Pam Ann Marketing just because I wasn’t going to name it Pam Aungst Marketing, I used my middle name. But it rolled off people’s tongues as Pan Amm and that spawned the whole interline aviation-themed branding that we have just kept running with.

Liam: That is awesome. Let me ask you a different question. What’s the single most valuable piece of advice, be it personal, professional, or otherwise, or both, that you’ve ever received and implemented in your life.

Pam: That is a very tough question because there’s so much, again. But I think for me, mine’s very personal answer because I– something we haven’t touched upon yet. I struggle a lot with perfectionism. I really like to cross every t and dot every i, and pay attention to every detail and get everything exactly right all the time. But that’s not realistic, especially when running a business. And especially in SEO and analytics. They’re such complex topics, so many moving pieces, you can’t get every single one perfect and move forward with the project. Aiming for perfection will stall things. I think for me, one of my biggest most valuable pieces of advice that was given to me is that my 80%, what I consider only 80% good enough is probably most likely other people’s 120%. What I think I’ve underdone, most other people will probably think I’ve overdone and they’re more than happy with whatever we’ve done. That’s been huge for me and I try to keep it in mind all the time because it’s just too easy to get stalled in what we do if we don’t just say good enough and keep going.

Tara: Perfection is the enemy of the good.

Pam: Yes.

Liam: Yes.

Pam: But it’s also, being a perfectionist by nature has lended to our success, too. That’s what enables me to dig into something so deep until I’ve really fully figured it out and then figure out a way to explain it to everyone else. And I just don’t stop until I get there. It’s something I have to embrace and suppress at the same time.

Tara: Yeah, it’s hard to know when that 80% is acceptable because it doesn’t feel right to you and so you can remind yourself. But then you think, “Well, am I just saying that? Am I just getting myself off a little bit, slacking off?” I think I struggle with that, too, I can understand.

Pam: Exactly. Part of it, I guess, is also learning to trust myself, that I’ve done good enough and even though the perfectionist side of my brain doesn’t think it’s good enough, there’s this other side of me that now has been there, done that, been through this routine on so many projects with so many things that I’m just going to trust myself that it’s good enough and I can move forward.

Liam: Speaking of good enough but moving forward, we are actually officially over and out of time. It’s been a great conversation and clearly one that we could continue for many a longer hour. But Pam, thank you so much for joining us, it was absolute pleasure to hear about you and to hear about your business and some of the amazing you’re doing and the balances that you’re trying to achieve, that’s fantastic.

Pam: Thank you so much for having me, this was awesome.

Tara: Thanks for being here. Thanks, Pam, great to see you.

Pam: Likewise, I appreciate it.

Liam: Pam, before we say officially goodbye to you, will you let people know where they can find you online?

Pam: Sure. Pamannmarketing.com is the easiest place and all the social medias associated with that.

Tara: Great. Thank you. Bye.

Liam: Excellent, thanks. Bye-bye.

Pam: Thank you, guys.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.