The Personal
I met my first computer when I was very small and computers often took up whole rooms. My dad was a computer engineer and on the weekends, his company that built computers was often my playground. Now computers fit on our laps (even on our wrists!) and my laptop has become my playground.
Like often happens, it was my friends that had to tell me I was a techie. When you grow up in a home of computer nerds, having tech skillz is just part of the family culture. I didn’t think I was anything special. But as I’ve gone through life and my career has evolved one thing has stayed the same: my love of technology. When I went off to college, I was the only one of my friends with a computer. (Yes, I know, this dates me.) When I got my first teaching job, I was the only teacher using desktop publishing to produce her newsletter each week. When I went back to work as a preschool teacher after my kids were school age, I piloted an iPad program in our school, and when that went well, I started a teacher blog to write about it. Then, I had so much fun messing around with the code on the teacher blog that I decided to go back to school for a certification in computer programming. I learned to build websites and a few fun games. I left the classroom a few years ago to work as a senior editor for one of the top education websites in the country. Can you guess what happened? I wrote buckets of articles, scheduled social media for hours and hours, and managed complex marketing campaigns. I loved it. But I also found myself spending a lot of time tinkering with the website and playing on the back end of Facebook, learning to master their ads platform. The truth is, I have always been drawn to the tech, and I just have to embrace it.
Now I’m working with small business owners to help use the technically complicated Facebook/Instagram ads platform to drive traffic to their content and products so that they can sell more. My background as a teacher, a teacher blogger and in educational marketing means I know the education niche like the back of my hand. I love sharing my experience. If you need support learning how to drive paid traffic to your products, I can help. Visit my services page to see the kinds of things I can help you with.
And because my favorite part of “about” pages is reading little personal tidbits about the author, I just had to throw in a few:
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- I’m totally addicted to Dr. Pepper.
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- I love Starbucks but don’t drink coffee. (Tea and hot chocolate for me, please. But none of that wimpy herbal tea. I like my tea black and strong.)
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- My current guilty pleasure is binge watching all the early 2000’s TV shows I missed because I was living in a blur of babies and toddlers. (Why didn’t anyone tell me that Gilmore Girls and West Wing were such good shows?)
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- I have never considered myself athletic (at all!) but by far my favorite pastime these days is watching my kids play the sports they love: baseball, soccer, football, lacrosse and Ultimate (Frisbee), just to name a few.
The Professional (Experience)
- Six years of experience working with websites in the education niche.
- Managed social media channels with hundreds of thousands of teacher followers.
- Grew some of the channels I’ve managed by 2, sometimes even 3 digit percentages.
- Deployed thousands of corporate marketing emails.
- Managed email accounts with 60,000-200,000 contacts.
- Managed multi-faceted marketing campaigns with email, blog article, and social media components.
- Executed Facebook ads campaigns for brands like Amazon, Walmart and National Geographic using the Facebook pixel and retargeting strategies.
- Produced countless teacher-centric articles for a wide range of audiences seen by over 1 million teachers.
- Built websites from scratch and set up many WordPress sites using custom code to personalize them.
- 15 years classroom experience: I’ve taught every grade Pre-K-5 as a specialist or classroom teacher, with the bulk of my years spent in early elementary.
- Endorsement in early childhood education.
- Certificate in computer programming (JavaScript.)
I’d love to help you out. Get in touch with me and lets chat.
Connect with Karen
Still want to know more? Listen to me on some of my favorite podcasts or read some of my articles on other websites.
On the BixChix Podcast
Facebook Business Pages and Ads with Karen Nelson
On the She Thinks Big Podcast
BAM Success Summit: 5 Guest Takeaways
On the Business Among Moms Blog
