I’ve known the owners of Voltier Digital for over 4  years, and have worked with them on a large variety of projects.   Since they began in 2007, I’ve been impressed by their knack for staying on top of trends – especially trends in viral and content marketing.  We became friends through our shared passion for social media and its power to help good, unique content spread, attract links and ultimately increase a company’s bottom-line.

We’re also driven by a common goal; to provide services of value that demonstrate real, clear results.   I believe it is this shared vision that makes this acquisition such a good fit.

It was important for me to make sure that the rest of BlueGlass felt the same way. We have had a lengthy courtship with Voltier that involved lots of trips to Tampa, tons of meetings with all of the teams and even the founders attending our holiday party in December (now we can finally post some of the pictures that they were in!). I wanted to make sure that they didn’t just fit in on a strategic level but also on a personal level. I needed buy-in from everyone and we got it.

The team at Voltier Digital demonstrates not only a deep understanding of how great content can be utilized as part of an integrated marketing strategy, but also a wealth of innovative new ideas and resources that can help to strengthen the BlueGlass team and our offering.   BlueGlass has had a strong content marketing offering, delivering consistent results for clients, but we need to be exceptional. We believe that the integration of the Voltier team, their IP  and their processes make us exceptional.

Check out a few Infographic examples below.  You can find more here

BlueGlass can now look forward to executing new content marketing strategies that are on the absolute bleeding edge.   Our offering focuses on bringing additional value to the popular infographic medium, as well as new executions that take advantage of the capabilities of modern browsers.   Motion Graphics, Kinetic Typography, Interactive Infographics, and variety of experimental content types that take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 and other burgeoning web technologies will help to insure BlueGlass remains a leader in the space.

Over the years, Voltier Digital has created content for dozens of clients including eBay, CEO.com, Fanhattan, WellHome, COLOURlovers.com, Greatist.com, and more.  This content has been featured on a huge variety of the web’s top publishing destinations,  as well as some of the most popular blogs.  Websites like Mashable, TheNextWeb, TreeHugger, GigaOm, SocialTimes, ReadWriteWeb, and SingularityHub, among others, are frequent publishers of the content  Voltier Digital creates, generating exposure for clients that is hard to achieve elsewhere.   Voltier’s unique and highly viral infographics have also been featured in countless popular niche blogs and websites that drive traffic, generate links, and encourage social mentions and interaction for clients.

Now more than ever, it’s become clear that high quality content is absolutely essential to launching an effective and truly viral marketing campaign.  Companies that can create content with substance stand to gain a great deal.  Companies who can further innovate and create not only great content but also explore new content mediums will win the day.  The acquisition of Voltier Digital signifies our faith in the importance of highly original content as a fuel for delivering results. So, on behalf of the rest of the BlueGlass team, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Voltier Digital.  Stay tuned, there’s much more to come….

Learn more about what this means here or check out some of their work here. Want to find out what we can do for you? Let us know here.

I have known Richard for years and I have always been impressed with 3 things:

* His technical background
* His business acumen
* His direct, yet patient, leadership style

It’s been an internal goal of ours since we started BlueGlass to have Richard join our board and we have been in discussions (both formal & informal) since late 2010.   Seeing our 2012 roadmap and how far we have come as a team in the last 6 months helped to seal the deal.

We have some pretty lofty goals for the future and we feel truly confident that Richard is the person who can help us reach them.  Richard is a great complement to our existing management team and will help us continue to grow in a smart, sustainable manner.

Click here for the full press release.  Or click here to learn more about Richard.

**Richard will be on the Analytics panel at BlueGlass LA 2012, find out more here.**

We started working together on a bunch of stuff and at the same time tried to figure out how he could possibly join the BlueGlass team.  The only problem was that he had a pretty thriving business. Luckily, we’re pretty persuasive people and got a chance to walk Andrew through everything that we were doing and what he could help create.

Fast forward to 2 months later and Andrew Norcross has officially joined BlueGlass as our Senior WordPress Developer.  Andrew is responsible for overseeing the development and implementation of all BlueGlass initiatives (for both internal and client-related projects) involving the WordPress CMS.  He will also be responsible for creating some cool and really helpful stuff for this community.

So welcome Andrew, we’re glad to have you here!

**Note: We are currently only doing WordPress projects as part of overall Internet marketing engagements – no one-offs or development only projects due to demand (sorry!).   If you’re interested in what we can do for you, please contact us and we’ll see if it’s a good fit.**

We promised everyone that this would be our best event yet and we are going to be sure to live up to that  The entire BlueGlass team is dedicated to making sure that these 48 hours will be ones you never forget.

If you didn’t get a ticket for this one, you can still get in on some of the fun:

• We will be live tweeting throughout both days.  So follow us on Twitter here.
• We will be sharing photos, pearls of speaker’s wisdom and other fun stuff on Facebook.  So connect with us on Facebook here.
• And we will be covering each session (along with daily & conference recaps) on our blog.  So subscribe to our RSS now.

Finally, stay tuned for details about our next conference….

The first 10 months of that company’s existence are still pretty fresh in my mind. We ran it out of the basement of a house I was renting in Utah. The basement flooded 3 times during our time there, so we were constantly having to air out computers and equipment. We bootstrapped everything and mostly collected desks that Jordan’s family was throwing away or that we found on KSL.com. We didn’t find our bookkeeper until our CPA let us know we would probably be screwed come tax time if we hit him with just a bunch of bank records and receipts.  Our exploits with Business Development professionals led to stories that Chris Winfield still makes me tell because they are so laughable.

We were a mess.

Since then I have been involved in two mergers and the creation of 11 companies, on top of the countless startups I have done consulting for. Needless to say I have learned a lot about what it takes to start, grow, and nurture a startup.

Last year we formed BlueGlass based on a concept dreamed up by Chris Winfield. Aside from being the most rewarding startup I have been involved in, the businesses evolution had some interesting by-products.

Everyone started approaching us with joint venture concepts.

Everywhere I traveled I was discussing JVs more than I was potential client or software-based relationships. BlueGlass wasn’t set up to handle these kinds of ventures, but eventually a few of them became too exciting to pass up.

Almost in parallel fashion one of our products, CopyPress, grew to a point in both direction and size that it had become an entity within an entity. Nothing is more dangerous to a bootstrapped startup than a lack of clear focus.

In January of 2011, I noticed my passion had significantly shifted from integrated marketing to the nurturing and growth of our projects. I became obsessed with how our companies and others worked. The entrepreneur bug had really taken hold of me, and my focus began drifting more toward the joint ventures and projects we had always passed on.

Due to these developments, in February of this year, I created an internal project we code-named BlueGlass Perform. The project was set up to allow BlueGlass to separate CopyPress and some high-quality joint ventures we were involved in into a division of the company that would only focus on their growth. This was essential because it not only fed these opportunities but also kept these new startups from derailing BlueGlass from its core mission to change the way companies market themselves online with extraordinary strategies, service & software powered by the best minds in Internet marketing.

Quietly, we set up a debt-funding vehicle for potential investors, found some key management pieces for the ventures, and began building what was in essence an accelerator.

Man, did we accelerate.

By June, we were working on four companies that were growing faster than we had planned and were outgrowing the support systems we had built. What had been set up to keep focus within BlueGlass was once again diverting resources.

That month we discussed what we were building with some of our joint-venture partners. They could see the issues we faced, the upside we were sitting on, and the passion we had for building these companies. At that point, they decided to make a large investment in our project, and we began creating a company to sit independently of BlueGlass to continue the mission BlueGlass Perform had started.

SteelCast was born.

SteelCast today is not an accelerator nor an incubator, because a few things became apparent from our work with the startups:

1)   Incubators usually help people build their ideas into working companies. We weren’t interested in outside ideas; we were interested in implementing ideas we developed internally.

2)   We are more focused on creating profitable companies than accelerating companies in growth and taking private equity without option.

3)   Our structure and process is far more hands-on than most incubators and accelerators because we are the sole ownership group in the ventures.

It has been a crazy 2011. I have essentially been working on projects no one knows about outside of our building. It has been interesting hearing the rumors circulate about where I am and what I am doing with BlueGlass. Today, I am a board member for BlueGlass and stay super active as an adviser to the BlueGlass management team. It’s been an amazing move to have someone one step removed from the day-to-day for brilliant guys like Greg Boser and Chris to bounce ideas off. It allows me to be a lot more objective than I have in the past. All I can say about where BlueGlass is going is WATCH OUT! Seriously, the software and service model BlueGlass is building goes well beyond even our initial vision.

When SteelCast was formed, we knew we would need to have a strong support system in place, and for this reason we decided to have Tony Wang and Jordan Kasteler join the new company. Tony Wang brings a deep experience in application and software development to our role of CTO, and Jordan was the perfect fit for CMO because his marketing background is so balanced across disciplines. Tony and Jordan are also active today with BlueGlass as board members.

So now I can finally show off my proud baby, SteelCast, and at the same time stay involved in growing BlueGlass into the monster integrated marketing company we all know it will become. I get to have my cake and eat it too: every fat man’s dream.

I will continue blogging about integrated marketing concepts on BlueGlass’s blog, but I will also now begin blogging regularly on startup concepts and also produce an ongoing video segment at SteelCast.com.

Rae wears a lot of hats, but her main ones are of the CEO of Sugarrae SEO Consulting & CEO of MFE Interactive – her publishing powerhouse. Seriously, Sugarrae is an AMAZING speaker and incredibly smart! Sitting down with her for 5 minutes can lead to honest and impressive insight that can actually change the entire way you do business. Having her AND Greg Boser AND Lindsay on the SEO Clinic will bring three diverse schools of thought into this session which, if you choose to participate, can lead to consulting time from these experts that can be valued at much more than the price of your ticket to BlueGlass TPA –> REGISTER NOW! Our speaker lineup for BlueGlass TPA is one of our best ever, including :

• Brian Clark of CopyBlogger
• Greg Boser of BlueGlass
• Rae Hoffman-Dolan of Sugarrae
• Marty Weintraub of aimClear
• Tim Mayer of Trada
• Simon Heseltine of AOL
• Dennis Goedegebuure of GeekNet
• Kunal Das of Microsoft Bing
• Jon Henshaw of Raven Tools
• Melanie Mitchell of Digitas
• Chris Winfield of BlueGlass
• Scott Skurnick of Edmunds.com

And Many More Top Shelf Speakers & Presenters What are you waiting for? Register for BlueGlass TPA!

For the past two and a half months, we haven’t taken on any new projects due to being at max capacity and rolling out new internal systems (amazing stuff!).  We never want the quality of our work to suffer, so it was important for us to take this time and focus on constantly improving what we offer.  And boy have we ever!

In the past 2.5 months, we have improved our offerings (which were already pretty damn good) dramatically, rolled out new internal tools, focused on intensive training of our current staff and hired some pretty amazing new people (we’re still hiring more if you’re looking!).

We currently have 1 (possibly 2) openings for new clients for September. If you are looking for an Internet marketing agency to take you to the next level, please contact us using this form or call us at 877.298.4680 and let’s see if there is a good fit.

To say we have grown up in the last 12 months is an extreme understatement.

Despite what BlueGlass appears to be from the outside, internally we are a self-funded startup, with all of the trials of any other tech startup. Today we are still known for our consulting services, however that is because most of the work is happening under the hood.

We are attempting to do something unique and disruptive, even though it isn’t clear to everyone yet (and to be honest it wasn’t clear to us a year ago). When the companies that formed BlueGlass came together our current vision was only a seedling amongst a forest of existing concepts and business models.

It’s exciting to see where we stand today, but it’s also important to reflect on where we have come from.

BlueGlass has been able to make a lot of amazing things happen this year.  Sitting here and reflecting on it, it seems like it’s been more like a decade than a year.

Self-Funded – We have paid for our own party. This is the best decision we made early on. From the outside, our company looks to be a purely services entity, and our P&L reflects this perception. Taking funding would have been tedious, and dilution would have been painful. On top of this, when you already have a large group of opinionated shareholders, adding private equity into the mix, with the terms associated with it, we likely would have imploded in the first six months.

3 Dog Media Acquisition – Acquiring 3 Dog Media was the smartest thing we did. The acquisition came right before the large local update from Google, and a few months before Panda. There isn’t a single Internet marketer in the world that understands these changes to the level that Greg Boser does, and he was prepared for it even before the updates.

Along with Greg we got Dax Herrera, a brilliant software developer, and the leading force for our product development team today. The work his team is doing is going to be the basis for what BlueGlass will become in the next 24 months.

Lots of Talent – BlueGlass was really founded on the idea of merging together talent, but the talent I look at today has nothing to do with the founders. Sure having Chris Winfield, Loren Baker, and a slew of other brilliant marketers running the show is helpful, but our staff is full of unsung heroes.

Pamela Lund, Joanna Batten, Annie Cushing, Selena Narayanasamy, Stephanie Weingart and Ryan Sammy are just a few of our gems. The most amazing thing about our team is that they have almost entirely been developed internally, and are dedicated to excellence in Internet marketing. Many of them are also versatile in their approach of Internet marketing, something we pride ourselves on at BlueGlass.

The talent pool is deep. Very deep.

Lots of Projects – The positive side of being a well-known Internet marketing company is that you get asked to work on lots of cool projects outside of client services. We have been lucky enough to team up with some amazing partners on projects that have quite frankly taken us in directions we never expected and opened doors we never could have anticipated.

CopyPress – When we first began designing CopyPress we really weren’t shooting very high, we wanted to create a content development system and that was all. Once Panda hit, and “contentless content” became a useless commodity we saw a huge opening. We have now spun CopyPress off into its own company, having matured past an internal tool. It is the only system I know of that can create highly customized, shareable content in an easy to manage interface, and then handle customized distribution and management of that content.

What do I mean by the above? CopyPress can handle creating unique buyers guides for a 15,000 product catalog, allow for easy editorial changes, and then distribution of this content directly into your database. Marketers and IT teams alike love CopyPress.

We don’t want to be the next ‘content company’, we want to be the first scalable copy company, any writer can tell you the difference.  We want to fuel the Internet with the kind of copy people want to share via social media, and that search engines love. Our passion for quality copy is tangible.

Amazing Software – Greg, Dax, and our CTO Tony Wang have been busy at work for the last 12 months creating software that will change the way companies approach marketing online. Our development concept and approach to utilization of the software is something completely unique in the market.

While other companies are focused on simply creating good tools, and leaving users to figure out how to utilize them in their pursuit of Internet marketing success, our tools are setup to follow proven strategic concepts, and integrate data with high level strategic thought. This is not another simple crawler that tells you how many errors your pages have based on simplistic algorithmic concepts. This is a suite of tools designed specifically to empower the growing online marketing community.

From CMS management, to search marketing, and back to social media our team is looking at the entire scope of the Internet marketing lifecycle in our software.

Self-Funded – As good as it was, it hurt like hell. We didn’t really have a sound financial plan when we merged all of the parts of BlueGlass together, and that many moving pieces needed a financial navigator on board.

We made bad decision

s, and then we made worse decisions.

However, we continued to work as a team and have made it through the last 12 months unscathed.

Today we have what we didn’t have in place at the beginning, amazing forecasting, budgeting, and auditing processes. This was simply a growing pain in the development from 4 consulting companies into 1 startup.

Too Many Chiefs – When we merged we setup a system where everyone had an equal say in all affairs, and we ran the company as a committee.  We made it through but I don’t think any of us would say it was the most efficient way to create an organizational structure.

In Q2 we set out to change this model, putting key players at different level of organization, and separating the role of share holder from day to day employee. Some of us had to take a bruise to the ego, but overall we all came out stronger than before.

The Food Court Model – A byproduct of our “too many chiefs” issue above is what I am now calling the Food Court Model of servicing clients. Essentially if you were a client that came to us in July of last year and wanted integrated marketing you would be sent to Brent Csutoras for your social media needs, Loren Baker for your online PR needs, and me for your search needs. Not much integration was happening.

This was the core change we made during our reorganization in Q2. Clients were coming to BlueGlass to get an integrated approach to marketing, and that was something we had to deliver. Our timing couldn’t have been better. With the changes happening in the search and social media landscape an integrated approach is a must, and no longer a luxury.

Unchecked Growth – When we merged we opened the sales funnel, and simply exploded with growth.  We signed on some great clients, and grew out a great team. However when you look at the issues I have noted above you can see why growth without scalability in mind could quickly become a problem.

The other part of our Q2 reorganization saw us completely check growth. Furthermore our Q3 continuation of transition into BlueGlass V.3 has seen us slow growth even further. Our focus is today is on three fundamental elements:

1)   Unparalleled Strategy

2)   Unparalleled Service

3)   Unparalleled Software

Catering to Feelings over Creating Vision – Part of the reason we setup the organization chart we did in the beginning and the Food Court Model was so we could all play nice with each other. Anyone that has been in a room with Chris Winfield, Greg Boser and myself knows that’s a lot of personality.

Playing nice had severe consequences. Our vision suffered. We didn’t have a cohesive roadmap. We knew what our goals were in general, but the specificity wasn’t there.

This isn’t the case today. BlueGlass is 100% vision driven. The change from one extreme to the other has been nothing short of amazing to watch.

Resetting for the Vision – Once we began to change from our splintered model to a unified vision we had to make tough decisions. Staff and clients alike had to be examined to see if we could feasibly move forward with them and get to our unified goal. In this process, even extraordinarily talented staff and beloved clients were left off of our roadmap.

The end of Q1 was one of

the toughest times in all of our professional lives. Greg has likened it to making repairs to a car that is going 50 mph, and he is right. When you are a self-funded company, major overhauls are even more difficult because the machine must keep moving.

SIMS – Scalable Integrated Marketing Solutions. Put simply this is our unified vision at BlueGlass. Our goal is to create products and services that empower marketers to scale their marketing efforts efficiently. Tools are a piece of this puzzle; people are a piece of this, and education as well. Where we are going to take BlueGlass is going to empower the in-house marketing professional and the one man consulting shop alike. Our systems will allow marketers to create and execute campaigns across multiple channels, gauge ROI, and report this information to their clients or C Level with ease. We will empower agencies with ethical production methods to fuel their client strategies.

If you want to see what the future holds, buy a ticket to BlueGlass TPA (when they go on sale) because it will be on display there.

We also have exciting announcements coming over the next few months in regards to all of the projects we have become involved in, and our organization will continue to change and grow.

Today we are a few weeks into our second year as a company, and the next few years of our life are the clearest they have ever been. As a company we are closer than we have ever been. Ironically, the killing of the idea that feelings come before the company’s health actually helped us foster the family style culture we were looking to create from our outset.

Where are we as a company?

Healthier than we have ever been.

We have had to stop actively taking clients for the next few months in order to focus on providing our current client base with the best service, while scaling our future staff to handle new clients in our SIMS system.  (If you would like to start with us in September, please feel free to contact us to see how we can help.  But we won’t be taking on anything new during July or August.)

While this means we have had to turn away some very attractive client projects, it also means we will be able take our current client engagements to a new level of service in terms of performance and customer relations. We are actively looking for our next crop of young up and coming marketers to join us and be trained by some of the best minds in Internet marketing. (Want to work at BlueGlass?  Email us -> careers[at]blueglass.com)

Have we achieved perfection? Not yet. But being conscious of you weaknesses is vital. So much of what has made this amazing year possible (and is fueling our growth into year two) is our unique ability to be as critical of ourselves as possible.  And to become better because of it….

This last year has been nothing short of the best learning experience of my life. I wouldn’t trade what I have personally learned for a Harvard MBA. My personal growth has coincided with BlueGlass’ growth and any pain was well worth the end result.

Some people build companies to get rich. Very often these people fail.

We are building BlueGlass to create something extraordinary for ourselves, our staff and our clients. Our goal is to change our market in a way few companies have before, and if we follow the plan we have laid out, we will succeed.

I hope everyone has as much fun watching what we do, as we will doing it.

If you want to (1) love what you do everyday (2) work with some of the most amazing people on the planet and (3) are looking for a career (and not just a job!) then we just might have a position for you!

We are currently looking for a bunch of awesome future BlueGlassers to join us on our Internet marketing adventure in our Tampa,FL office.  You can check out all of the current jobs right here:

• BlueGlass Interactive, Inc. Careers & Job Openings

The link above lists our current positions at any given time (using the awesome Recruitics platform) but we are always looking for smart, talented & driven individuals in all areas of Internet marketing.  So please feel free to send a quick overview of yourself, what you’re looking for and a resume to careers [at] blueglass.com so we know (everything is kept 100% confidential!).

Hopefully we’ll see YOU soon…

It has been one of the founding visions of BlueGlass to take our holistic marketing services and the product set  we are building and expand it across the globe. “For us, making Australia the first step in our global expansion was a relatively easy decision,” said Greg Boser, President of Services and Products for BlueGlass Interactive. “It was fueled by a growing need for marketing services on the Australian continent, a strong, stable economy and an amazing partner on the continent that shared our vision for where online marketing services are going.”

BlueGlass Australia will serve as the model we use to continue our global growth in the online marketing industry. Becoming a global firm is a must in today’s environment where companies find their customer base being citizens of the world and not one geographical region. The move also allows us to bring competitive marketing tools to regional markets that are completely under serviced.

Within the first five minutes of meeting Darryl King, and the Ireckon team many years ago, we knew that there was a great business relationship in our future. Their incredible passion for all things web related, years of experience in web development and the cutting edge work they’ve been doing in the area of developing highly scalable Cloud-based hosting infrastructures made them the obvious first choice when we sat down to develop our international expansion plans for 2011.

Ireckon builds highly scalable, high volume dynamic web sites, web/mobile and social media applications. It also runs its own hosting and has local and overseas data locations and currently delivers more than one billion pages per month for its enterprise business clients.  Their proprietary  content management system is used in Australia by News Ltd. to run  a number of its regional and smaller city  daily publications and Ireckon’s expertise across open source platforms such as WordPress and Drupal enable it to best fit and custom develop the right tools for enterprise clients who need reliable professional expertise.  Working with many brands and clients both in Australia and the UK, Ireckon’s clients include News Ltd., News Digital Media and The Australian Red Cross Blood Service.

With the completion of this deal, we are now in a position to bring a level of end-to-end service to the Australian market that is simply unprecedented. And I firmly believe that the products and services that will ultimately come out of this new venture will not only lay the foundation for all of our future international expansion efforts, they will also fundamentally change the game when it comes to the way large companies do business with Internet marketing agencies. And for me personally, that is the most exciting thing of all.

Oh yeah, this is just the beginning….

If you’re an Australian company and want to find out how BlueGlass Australia can help you, please visit: http://www.blueglassinteractive.com.au

To read the full press release, please click here.