About
Hi Everyone!
My name is Amad Ebrahimi.
I registered my full name, and some of you might still be linking to it, but I recently redirected it to AwakenStrategy.com. Just thought it would be easier for everyone to remember, plus I like the way it sounds. 
About This Site
My main goal with Awaken Strategy is to provide information for small to medium sized businesses about Internet Marketing as a whole. Instead of getting too technical with my posts, I’m gonna focus on overall strategy. SEO, Usability, PPC, and Analytics along with the right tools and programs are what make great websites. But at the end of the day it’s your strategy that counts.
About Me
I guess this is where I tell you about myself, so here it goes…
I know some of you hate reading a bunch of text, so I created a short version and long version of my story.
Short Version:
I work as a Web Strategy Consultant paying particular attention to SEO, PPC and Conversions.
You can go here, here, and here to learn more about me.
Long Version:
I was born and raised in Goleta, Ca which is a small city outside of Santa Barbara.
I attended elementary school at Ellwood, high school at Dos Pueblos, and I went to Santa Barbara City College for a very long, but unproductive time.
Yup, I was never really a good school boy, well I take that back, only up until the 6th grade. After that, things kind of just went downhill. I guess you can say that I was a bit of a trouble maker in my early years, and I’ll just leave it at that.
After high school, I started college in SB (Santa Barbara), but I didn’t really have a definite purpose in life. I did know that I wanted to have my own business, but I wasn’t focused enough to narrow it down or to set goals for myself. One day, I remember hearing about this web start-up, and I can’t remember the name right now, but it was a site that would let you buy and sell used textbooks for school. This was back in 1999, so if anyone can remember the name, please remind me. Anyway, from that moment on I decided that I wanted to have my own web-based business. But, of course, I was too busy partying to make anything come of it…fast forward to 2002.
I was 22 years old and most of the people my age had graduated from college, but I on the other hand, was still working on my general education requirements at the local city college…horrible, I know. At that moment, I made up my mind that school was obviously not for me and I left.
I started brainstorming possible ways for me to break into the e-commerce world. Â I had heard a bunch of stories of people making money on ebay, so I opened an account and called myself the AuctionX-pert. I began selling “junk” that my Dad had saved up over the years, which there really was no shortage of, as he is an avid junk collector to this day. One day he came to me and said that the company he was working for was closing shop, and that they were leaving all of their remaining inventory to him. Well, you can guess what we did with all of that left over stock. It kept me busy for an entire year.
After I sold all of it, I started hitting up local businesses for their excess inventory. Although I was doing very well, I was starting to get burned out on ebay. Especially since they were increasing their fees on a quarterly basis which kept digging deeper and deeper into my profits.
By 2005, I decided that I was going to try my hand at another venture, so a friend of mine and I began an online classifieds website for automobiles. We called it CyberMotors…it only lasted about 5 months. In retrospect, I think that the site was good, and our plan was solid, but we just weren’t in the right state of mind at that time. Had we stuck it out, and been persistent with our efforts, I think that we could have cut out a decent size of the market. Even a small percentage would have been sufficient. Back then, the online auto advertising market was sitting somewhere around $2 billion, and growing. Oh well, you live and you learn…I learned a ton!
All throughout the CyberMotors and AuctionX-pert experiences I had been reading about PPC advertising, SEO and Internet Marketing in general which intrigued me to the point of obsession. I tried reading as much material as I could on practically every aspect, and about search marketing in particular.
By late 2006 I was really into the search marketing side of everything. It was what fascinated me the most, and what held my attention for long enough to prevent my ADD from kicking in. I read and read as much as I could, and I’m still doing so to this day. It’s really an addiction of sorts, but a healthy one, unless you take into consideration the massive amount of caffeine that I consume on a daily basis.
In the end, I love what I do, and I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.
I recently started a online marketing and  publishing firm called Ranked Media, Inc. Feel free to check it out if you like.
To be continued…
