Alex Melen is an Award-Winning Entrepreneur & Keynote Speaker. He is the founder of web hosting company T35 Hosting (founded 1997) and co-founder of advertising agency SmartSites (founded 2011). SmartSites now manages $100MM/year in advertising spend and has 6 offices & over 175 employees worldwide. SmartSites has been featured in the INC5000 for 4 consecutive years as one of the fastest growing digital agencies and Alex has been featured in Business Week's Top 25 Entrepreneurs, Bloomberg, Forbes, NPR & more.

In 2001, YoungBiz Magazine named Melen one of the top 100 Young Entrepreneurs in America. In 2006 Melen received the Babson College Student Business of the Year Award and was named one of BusinesssWeek’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25. In 2012, Melen was invited to the White House by President Barack Obama to meet with the administration about young entrepreneurship.

More recently, Melen has been cited as an expert on Website Development by Clutch.Co, NamesCon & DialogTech. On Cryptocurrency by Fortune Magazine, Yahoo! Finance, Bitsonline& Finance Magnates. And on Entrepreneurship by AMAFeed and Babson College.

In this episode we discuss:

• Introduction  [01:53]
• Alex’s started a web hosting company at 13 years old  [7:16]
• Virtual reality and augmented reality  [11:57]
• He worked at digital marketing for Samsung and Walmart [16:40]
• How Alex’s help the small businesses [19:36]
• Mistakes that small businesses make repeatedly  [23:33]
• Top things that business should focus their money and efforts  [27:40]
• Mastering SEO, small business expo [32:25]
• Be experimental with marketing [35:05]
• Learn more about Alex and Smartsites  [38:40]

Links to sources and tools:

• Connect with Alex Melen on LinkedIn
• Need effective digital advertising? Visit Smartsites

Quotable Quotes

Google actually determines when you come up in Google maps, organically based on the number of your reviews, based on the score of your reviews, content of the reviews, and they do sentiment analysis. So if all your reviews are without anything, people just say five stars, five stars. It's not going to help you much. 

SEO is ultimately a long-term game. So if you spend three months paying for SEO, and you're saying in those three months, I'm not ROI positive. That's not really a true picture because the content and everything you create gives you value for, I want to say infinity, but as long as the internet exists.

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