STRIVE July 2017 | Page 16

A Happenstance Innovator By Michael “Buzz” Buzinski I have never considered myself an innovator. In fact, as a young musician, I frequently found myself one step be- hind the curve when it came to creating the next cool sound. During the formative years of my professional career, I was constantly told there are very few new ideas and more regur- gitation and repackaging of old ones. So, my creative motif became one of making what already existed better. That was until what I wanted to make better didn’t exist. I began my journey to innovation in 2005 when I opened Buzzbizz Studios. It was a recording studio and marketing firm for working musicians. As a veteran musician, I wanted to make sure no new recording artist had to go through the terrors of what I experienced during my 15-year part-time career. Of course, it only took about one year to realize that making a living off starving musicians was a bad business proposition. So, I pivoted to what paid the bills throughout my musical career and focused the marketing of my media production services on small, locally owned businesses. The company is now 21 employees strong and known as Buzzbizz Creative. 16 July 2017 In 2010 I decided to add Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to the list of services Buzzbizz Creative offered. SEO is the practice of optimizing websites in a manner that is favorable to search engines like Google in an effort to be listed on the first page for search terms profitable to one’s particular product line or service. I adopted the service because there were no reliable and local opt ions to refer my website devel- opment clients at the time. In 2010, SEO was still what many called Voodoo Magic and not necessarily understood by small companies. The basics philosophy was simple – the higher you rank the more traffic to your site sees from the search engine – but the execution at the time was spotty and expensive. My goal was to create a system that would create substantial results without an exorbitant cost to the business owner. For the first four years, our process and outcomes were fine tuned to a point that we were actually performing our- selves out of a job once we obtained the target rankings for our clients. This was because that even with top listings in the most profitable keyword terms, clients were not getting more business. Basically, the clients didn’t care that they were