About Us
Our slogan is, “We Help Businesses Succeed Online – Period,” but you might be asking what does that mean exactly? Well it’s simple, we help businesses get more customers from the Internet. Our goal as SEO experts is to develop an Internet presence for your business so that the people looking for your services online will find you before they find your competitors!
That means more than just optimizing your website for the search engines (although that is a big part of it). It also means optimizing and ranking your Google Places listing – and making sure your business is listed and found in all the major business directories in your industry. In short, the goal is to get your business as much exposure online as possible so that potential customers can find you!
How NorthStar SEO, LLC Came About
We formed our company as a partnership of two highly successful search engine optimization experts and professionals. Combined, we have over eight years of experience working on various Internet projects of our own. We have worked successfully in a variety of highly competitive industries from education to finance to high tech. By working in such highly competitive niches and succeeding in the them, we learned how to optimize websites and how to get them ranked for maximum traffic.
We also learned a thing or two about conversions. There are two aspects of Internet marketing – getting traffic and then converting that traffic into paying customers. That’s exactly what we did with our projects. The websites we worked on got a ton of traffic from the search engines and made a lot of money.
Even though we were both happy and successful working on our own projects, there was something missing. By nature, we both like to help other people out and one group of people we quickly realized needed help was small businesses. After numerous conversations and observing what most small businesses were doing online (or what they weren’t doing), we were convinced small businesses could benefit from our Internet Marketing and search engine optimization experience.
Wanting to collaborate on a business venture together and wanting to do more than just work on our own websites, we decided to take the plunge and take our combined experience and knowledge to the “main streets” of Minnesota and the surrounding states as Minneapolis SEO experts.
We bring a tremendous amount of experience, knowledge, and success to NorthStar SEO. We want to offer our SEO and Internet Marketing expertise to local businesses by helping them build a dominating presence online. We want to help businesses succeed online – without having to spend an arm and a leg to do so.
Why We Are So Passionate About What We Do
As mentioned previously, we both have a strong desire to help people succeed online. It’s exciting to have the opportunity to help small businesses grow by helping them build a dominating presence online. It’s fun to be a part of other people’s successes!
It’s also exciting to be a part of a rare and fleeting opportunity. Big businesses can no longer dominate small businesses with their deep pockets and large marketing budgets alone – at least for now. The Internet now provides a level playing field where small businesses can compete with the “big boys” without having to spend a lot of money doing so.
And while this is a great opportunity for small businesses, the window is closing fast as big companies are quickly realizing how effective a strong presence online can be. Small businesses can’t afford not to invest in their online marketing efforts or their competitors – both big and small – will leave them in the dust.
By investing even a small amount of their marketing dollars online, it is not only possible for a local business to compete with any business of any size online, but it can dominate the competition and get more customers and grow by leaps and bounds without going broke in the process!
If done the right way, the return on investment from marketing online will outperform any other marketing be it via TV, radio, or print. We believe so strongly in the power of the Internet that we are passionate about spreading the message to every business owner we come into contact with!
James Dreesen – Managing Partner
My LinkedIn Profile
If you’ve made it this far down the page, congratulations! You will now be rewarded with my candidly told personal biography. To save on time, I will keep it short:
I was born in Minnesota. Fast forward twenty years later…. I’m back. Okay that was too fast, let me elaborate:
I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana. For those of you who don’t know Midwest geography, that’s the home of Indiana University (go Hoosiers!), a college town that thrives on independent thinking and an entrepreneurial spirit.
After graduating from Indiana University in 2009 with a Degree in Finance, I was ready to take on the world, but the world decided to tumble into a recession, and a recession instigated by the financial sector no less. I looked at this mess caused by the industry I had spent the last five years of my life studying, and realized that I could not get a job with my degree. Not good.
So then a family friend recommended I should get into the insurance industry. And since I was a little frustrated at the time, I took him up on the offer. I studied, passed the tests and became a licensed insurance broker. I could tell you a few stories about how exciting insurance policies are but I’ll spare you.
Despite the recession, Google was generating record profits, I had friends and family making tidy profits from Ebay, Facebook was the only way I kept in touch with my friends, and had my college roommate continuing to call and say “You should make money on the Internet.” So it began…
I didn’t know how the Internet worked, how to code, or design a web-page but I kept asking the same question over and over “It’s obvious the Internet is the future, but how are these people making money?” I decided to find out while working a myriad of jobs (Chinese delivery, catering, golf caddy) during the day and reading blog after blog after ebook after forum at night.
After about a year of addictive studying and trying to teach myself Search Engine Optimization, getting ripped off from multiple ‘make money online’ adventures, and reading a lot of stuff from guys who claimed to have “figured it out”, I struck up a conversation with a guy running FlipWebsites.com who actually knew what he was talking about. This guy was actually making a living from SEO and the Internet. This was the guy I needed to learn from and his name was Travis Van Slooten.
Travis quickly helped me start my first affiliate site before introducing me to Cary Bergeron, an Adsense Guru who is well known in the SEO community. This guy was making 5 figures a month, every month from the Google Adsense program and just had happened to be starting a personal coaching program. Travis was promoting Cary’s program on his site and said “this guy is the real deal.” So I jumped in head first.
I spent the next year and a half learning, testing, networking, and building a website portfolio consisting of 10+ sites that still produce a nice 5 figure a year income on the side. During this time I also spent 7 months as the Super Moderator of Cary Bergeron’s private 431 member SEO forum where I compiled over 1000 posts asking and answering questions about SEO, Google Adsense, and social media.
These experiences over the last 2 years have provided me with a lot of confidence in the SEO world. They have also now flatteringly even caught the attention of Google’s HR department, see here. Where was Google when I was just graduating college and needed a job? lol.
Through it all I stayed in close daily contact with Travis and when he said he needed a partner to help start a business that would provide something EVERY small business owner needed and the business would be centered around the Internet… I jumped at the opportunity and moved back to Minneapolis.
So what’s next? Since I now have become a SEO expert and a dream partnership with my mentor, I’m now spending time with my family (who moved back to Minneapolis when I started college), and hitting the links with my Dad (I love Golf, and I’m proud to say I’m a scratch golfer). I also spend a great deal of time staying on top of the latest changes from Google and all the social networks via weekly Webinars and a plethora of online courses.
Travis Van Slooten – Managing Partner
My LinkedIn Profile
Hello! My name is Travis Van Slooten. I’m 5′ 11″, have blue eyes, brown hair, and I love long walks on the beach…lol. Just kidding. I hate writing these “about me” pages because I always feel like I’m writing a bio for a dating site. O.K., no more funny stuff, let’s get serious.
On a personal level I’m married to my wife of 16 years and we have two incredible kids (ages 5 and 7). To say they keep me busy and entertained is an understatement. Oh ya, we also have a dog that drives me nuts (one of those fancy Golden Doodles), but the family loves him so I don’t think Buddy is leaving anytime soon:) We reside in a suburb of the Twin Cities.
Oh ya, I think I’m supposed to tell you I enjoy spending time with my family and that I’m an avid golfer like James says. Well actually, I will say the same thing because both are true for me too. I do enjoy spending time with my family and golf just happens to be one of my favorite things to do. I just wish I was better at it. James is a scratch golfer but I’m lucky if I break 100. It doesn’t matter to me, though, I just love the sport and have since I was a young lad growing up in a small Southwestern town in Minnesota (young lad – now there’s a term I guarantee you won’t read on another About Me page on a Minneapolis SEO company website!).
O.K., let’s get serious again and let’s talk about my professional experience as I know you’re dying to learn more:) I got my start online back in 2005 trying to become a Power Seller on eBay selling vintage baseball and football cards. While I had some success, let’s just say it’s hard to strike it rich making a few dollars on a Jim Kaat and Fran Tarkenton rookie cards. After stumbling through that with very little success (but learning a ton), a friend of mine turned me on to affiliate marketing in the summer of 2006.
Since that summer, my professional life has never been the same. I have had a lot of success through the years building websites and promoting various products and services on those websites as an affiliate marketer. For those of you not familiar with affiliate marketing, you get paid a small commission by the companies you are “affiliated with” when someone buys their products or services from your websites.
The success my websites had were the result of my SEO skills that I honed over the years. I learned how to get websites ranked high in the search engines so that they would get a flood of traffic without me having to spend a dime for it. That’s the beauty of SEO (search engine optimization), once you get your sites ranked, you don’t have to pay for traffic. It comes naturally and it comes in droves if you’re targeting the right keywords.
I also contribute my success to my ethical marketing practices and my zero tolerance for crap websites and content. By ethical marketing I mean I learned how to get websites ranked the right way (they call it white hat marketing) and I didn’t settle for anything less but the best in terms of the quality of the websites I built and the quality of the products and services I represented.
In addition to affiliate marketing, I stumbled into website selling (and some buying too). I say stumbled because I never intended to get into it as deeply as I did because I was just trying to sell one of my more successful affiliate sites on Flippa. The first site I sold went for over $6,000. Well one thing led to another and before I knew it I was selling more of my sites – and buying other sites along the way too.
At one point I even bought FlipWebsites.com and turned it into an authoritative resource where I provided tips and strategies for website investors. And as all website flippers do, I eventually sold it so that I could concentrate on my affiliate marketing business.
Then in the summer of 2011 everything changed. I sold one of my best websites for several thousand dollars. I was interviewed about the success of that site under my ownership by ClickNewz.com, a popular Internet Marketing blog. And as luck would have it, the company that bought the site brought me on board as an Internet Marketing and SEO Expert.
While doing that, I sold a few more of my sites and started to have more in-depth conversations with James about starting this local SEO company together. I kept telling him how fun it would be to work with local businesses and help them with their Internet Marketing and he agreed. Can you guess what happened?
Long story short – and to wrap up the longest About Me pages in the history of About Me pages – I ended my consulting gig and James and I launched NorthStar SEO. Today I do this full time and in my spare time (which is becoming rarer with each passing day), I work on this little golf site of mine. What can I say? I’m addicted to Internet Marketing! Some people read in their spare time…I just do more Internet Marketing:)
