SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING and direct response space advertising has helped environment-friendly marketer Alternative Energy grow at 25% a year into a $7.7 million business.
CEO Sascha Deri founded the business in 1999. He left a high-paying day job as an engineer at NEC Electronics to follow a childhood dream of doing something for the greater good.
“Ever since I was young I wanted to do something idealistic,” said Deri, who started up the company in his spare time. He was joined after a few years by partners Jason Federspiel and Nick Albright.
The Hudson, MA company sells and installs a variety of solar energy goods, batteries, meters, wind systems, water pumps and related products, as well as how-to books and videos. The target market is homeowners and small businesses across the country.
Alternative Energy buys keywords such as “solar panels” and some very technical product names on search engines. Some perform very badly but others quite well, he said.
For example, when entering “solar panels” on Google, the firm's Web site (altenergy.com) comes up at No. 10 among the unsponsored links. But more technical product names rank higher, Deri said. Overall, the site gets 10,000 clicks per week.
The other mainstay of the company's advertising is a full-page ad in Home Power magazine, a bimonthly dedicated to homemade electricity and renewable energy. Deri said the ad, which costs $1,000 per issue, brings in “two or three times that in profit.”
Looking to the future, Deri sees interest in alternative energy systems continuing to build, if only because of the current rise in price of gasoline and other fossil fuels.
For this reason he said he'll expand the firm's educational offerings, which now include technical articles on installing different types of systems.
Could this successful company — in an industry he estimates is growing some 50% to 100% a year — get acquired by a larger competitor?
It's possible, but Deri wants to keep his hand in the business he and his partners nurtured from the beginning.
He rejected three takeover offers last year.
