Marc Snyder – Personal Blog

Marc Snyder

I’m Marc Snyder and I founded the website Careers.org in 1995. I’ve organized several fairly successful, businesses over my career.

In 1972, while a student at the University Iowa, in Iowa City, Iowa,  I became Manager of Iowa Student Agencies (ISA), and negotiated the contract with University of Iowa Regents which brought beer to the Student Union, for the first time. ISA then opened an off-campus pizza and beer restaurant, which I helped organize. ISA also had a successful (5000 customers, 45 courses) ‘lecture note’ subscription business, supported by the university and affected professors.

After graduating in 1973, I formed by own business, Uni-Print, Inc.,  in Iowa City, also printing lecture notes, initially in competition with ISA but soon as sole provider, with a ‘royalty’ payment to ISA, based on about 7,000 customers and 62 courses. We then decided to bring our lecture note concept to other campuses, Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota. In 1974, I decided to further diversify, this time into fund-raising recipe books. Within 18 months, we had produced 238,000 books for more than 300 organizations in 38 states.

In spring 1986, in Seattle, I formed a new, large scale, outbound, tele-servicing business, TeleService Center, Inc. using a newly created automated dialing system, from a Redmond, WA based technology company, making calls on behalf of Washington Natural Gas. The program, involving more than 1.3 million outbound calls and 35,000 in-home appointments, was very successful, winning the American Gas Association’s award as the nation’s best marketing program for 1989. Later, TeleService Center, Inc. went on to work with 15 other natural gas companies in 7 states.  In the late fall 1993, I was unemployed, and thinking of self-employment, after exploring the corporate job market, and coming to the conclusion that I was best suited to develop an income stream for myself. I decided that researching career information and bringing the material to a wider audience was to be my niche. The internet was not really in my consciousness yet, and I imagined a multi-line ‘bulletin board system.’

Monetizing such an endeavor, however, was to be very challenging. Advertising was unheard of, as the audience was sparse and the available content miniscule. I investigated various ‘fee for access’ ideas, but it quickly became clear that free information was to be the future. I decided that grants from state and federal governments as well as from private foundations, were most likely to produce results. I formed a 501(c)(3) non-profit, corporation in Summer 1994, Career Resource Center, Inc. and became a frequent visitor to the Washington State Employment Security offices in Olympia, the state capital. I was unsuccessful in finding funding for my ambitious new venture.

By the spring of 1995 it became clear to me that this new thing called the internet, was about to become a phenomenon. Potentially valuable new ‘real estate’ (domain names) was being sold for just $35, on a first come, first served, basis. I registered the domain CAREERS.ORG in March 1995, as the first domain owner of that domain name. I quickly built and deployed a website, which was quite primitive, even by standards of the day. Yahoo had just begun curating and categorizing a ‘directory’ of web sites and I submitted careers.org and it quickly became part of Yahoo’s ‘Career’ directory. Google, of course, did not yet exist.

I had become very familiar with ‘college career services’ offices’, while in college at the University of Iowa and I had those offices in mind when I was organizing Careers.Org. With that model in mind, I approached the University of Washington’s Career Center’s Director, Robert Thirsk, seeking his advice. He was immediately supportive, but told me he had just left UW to become Director of Career Services at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro. We exchanged many emails and became pretty good friends and colleagues. He then asked me if I would be interested in taking on a significant new project.

My writing experience occurred when I agreed in 1996 to become co-author of How to Get a Job in Seattle/Portland for Surrey Publishing in Chicago. The book, published in 1996 was one in a series of books, Surrey was to publish. It would have common ‘career advice’ content, combined with a well-organized directory of local resources to be compiled, curated and written by a local co-author, such as myself. I became an author again for the 1998 edition as well, How to Get a Job in Seattle / Western Washington. Surrey asked me to contribute common content to each of their regional editions, focusing on ‘internet career resources’. Today, well over 200 published books mention Careers.Org, many mentioning my name as well.

Careers.Org, from its beginnings in 1995, through May 2008, was exclusively written, edited, and publicized, by me. There has never been any paid promotion or advertising. Soon after the site went up, I compiled a list of about 500 email addresses for college career centers, local, state and federal career service web sites. I sent individual messages to their webmasters inviting them to link their sites to Careers.Org. Since the site had nothing for sale, appeared to be a non-profit, appeared in Yahoo, and had significant value, many sites did link to us. As the Internet grew, and more sites appeared, the new sites simply copied links from other respected sites and the number of inbound links grew exponentially. Well over 35,000 sites link to Careers.Org today. These inbound links, combined with the site’s content, longevity, and traffic, encouraged Google to rank Careers.Org as #1 on page 1 for the keyword careers for all but 19 months since Google first published rankings.

Careers.org began earning significant revenue by 1998. In 2008 I sold the site and domain name, in a complicated and somewhat unhappy scenario involving two outside companies. Now, I’ve developed plans for a new venture, iCareerGuides, Inc..