About

Success Only Needs 1 Spark

It can be the moment you come up with a new idea. It can be when you add a new strategy to something already in motion, create a unique product, launch your service oriented business, or any other first or next step. One spark. It’s the thing that gets you started or takes you to the next level. It could even be making a new business contact or a collaboration. One spark starts the fire that can grow into an inferno.

How We Got Here

1Spark Digital arose out of the need to help small businesses with their local marketing and it complemented an already successful track record of product launches, product marketing, and launching new websites.

It’s a culmination of experience that began in 1993 when 1Spark Founder Nick Romer landed on the largest home shopping channel in the world, QVC, with a unique product line that went on to become a best seller on QVC, then HSN, then shopping channels in the UK and Germany – then into over 22,000 stores in 23 countries.

During the rocket ride of Nick’s first official endeavor with physical products, the internet was also experiencing rapid growth. Jumping online in the early days and getting a site to rank #1 for a keyword could be accomplished by simply overpopulating your home page with keywords. Then, backlinks came along. Then, Google came on the scene and changed everything to where we are today – with a more sophisticated algorithm that is evolving to replicate the nature of discovery.

In the middle of all this, Nick launched a first of its kind digital photo sharing website that he used to share the birth of his daughter. Friends saw the online scrapbook and wanted one for their own children. The site went on to have over 150,000 indexed web pages and over 100,000 members before being sold.

It was in this process that Nick and his team learned search engine optimization, the power of split testing, how to get websites and standalone pages to convert, the application of online strategies using any and all new tools and opportunities, Adwords, Facebook, you name it, including the creation of “feeder sites” to support a main site, and one very important tool to energize and grow any business – email marketing.

1 Spark’s 1 Spark

After hearing about the power of collecting emails one day and how they could be used to increase sales, Nick set out to create his own test to see if this was just another shiny object or if email could indeed be used to drive business. After launching one of the first “tell-a-friend” campaigns he collected 480,000 emails in just eight weeks and began to offer what is now known as “jab, jab — uppercut” (a method of providing value, more value, then making an offer) to increase sales, sometimes as much as $11,000 in just ten minutes! And it was through this process that he realized that email addresses were an asset, and if used properly could get the attention of anyone. 

This method crossed paths with paid advertising and as Nick started helping others with marketing, collecting retainers in exchange for marketing services, things soon evolved to include a Pay Per Lead model, which offered more accountability , and often, a lower barrier of entry for small but growing businesses. 

Today, 1Spark has grown to include 1SparkConsulting and 1SparkDigital, each working to provide leads for businesses of all types — 25+ years of experience providing tangible, measurable, powerful results for you!