About Insider Perks
How We Got Started
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Brian Searl has always had a love for journalism. Growing up in Ohio, he used to read the sports scores out loud in the voice of a radio announcer for everyone to hear. He was told numerous times that he had a voice for radio and when he made it to high school he sought out the perfect class for him. For 4 years he learned about broadcasting from Kirk Pavelich, a high school teacher who ran the school's student news program. Immediately upon graduating he sought to continue his education, but quickly realized that 4 year colleges didn't offer the type of hands-on experience he needed. Instead, he enrolled in the Ohio Center For Broadcasting, a 10-month technical school that promised him a job upon graduation.
During his time at the Ohio Center For Broadcasting he had an internship at local Cleveland radio station WMMS and later interned for the Cleveland Indians baseball team where he ran camera for live telecasts on Fox Sports Ohio. He worked hard and when he graduated, he found a job shortly after at the local CBS affiliate in Cleveland, WOIO/WUAB.
Brian worked there for 4 years before changing careers briefly for better pay and working for another 3 years at Time Warner Cable. It is here that the real story of Insider Perks begins.
Brian was an installation technician for Time Warner Cable and one day felt a shooting pain in his shoulder. Immediately going to the doctor, he was diagnosed with a partially torn rotator cuff which would keep him out of work indefinitely until it healed. During this time, Brian had begun to pursue a love of travel by opening up his own online travel website. Through this site, Brian sold travel packages, airfare, hotels, car rentals and pretty much anything else you could imagine for those wanting to take a vacation. He was quite successful in this venture but ultimately came to the conclusion that he could never compete with the big corporations like Expedia or Travelocity. After all, he was merely copying what they had already been doing for years.
It was at this moment, still injured and on leave from Time Warner Cable, that the idea of Insider Perks was born. Brian knew that in order to pursue his passion for travel that he would have to find something to differentiate himself from the crowd. He needed to find something that no one else was doing, something that would naturally fill a void, something that people truly needed. When it came to him, it was the most perfect and natural thing in the world. He would combine his two loves, broadcasting and travel, to create a media company that focused on high-quality professional travel videos. He knew there were production companies that specialized in travel, but none that were unbiased and offered their services for free.
He wasn't worried about making a profit up front. He knew that the first thing he had to do was build a website so he could be found online and the challenge was learning how to do that. He didn't have enough money to hire a designer and there were no tools on a Windows computer that he could learn easily. He was in the market for a new laptop and so on an impulse buy he decided to purchase a Mac, not knowing how to work the platform or what software was included.
Call it pure chance when he opened up a program called "iWeb" by mistake one day. A program he soon learned served as a do-it-yourself website creation tool and the tool that he used to build the very first Insider Perks site in late 2008. It certainly wasn't pretty and it absolutely wasn't designed to be found by Google, but he wasn't deterred. He spend day and night pouring over HTML resources on the internet, learning how to modify the existing code that iWeb had generated and make it more SEO friendly.
During this time he also knew that it wasn't enough just to have a website. He had to actually have the content in order to attract visitors. Once again foregoing any sort of profit, he called his local museums in the Cleveland area and convinced them to allow him to film a travel video in each. It wasn't easy. Nobody had ever heard of someone offering to produce a video for free, especially one of such a professional nature. Most were skeptical of his offer to provide free copies, even host the video for them so they could display it on their website.
He filmed 12 different museums in Cleveland and edited them on Final Cut Pro which he learned from his days at CBS. With a desire to spread the word and with a limited marketing budget, he syndicated his videos on social networking sites, YouTube, TripAdvisor and anywhere with an audience that might find his content interesting. He branded his logo onto each video and created a short intro so that no matter where people saw the video, they knew Insider Perks created it.
From there he made contacts in the travel industry by attending the Travel Channel Academy in Washington, DC in July of 2009. He learned from one of the best videographers in the film industry, Michael Rosenblum. During his two weeks in Washington DC he convinced 15 more places to let him film, including several Smithsonian museums.
From that point on it was travel whenever he could and film as much as he could. It wasn't nearly as often as he would have liked with his limited budget. During his down time though he continued to work on his website, learn marketing strategies and engage a growing daily audience on every social network he could find. He was working almost 20 hours a day. He had to, he was the only employee and was wearing at least 10 different hats. He didn't mind though, it was his passion and he never gave up.
Today, Insider Perks has filmed in more than 30 cities around the United States and has produced over 500 professional travel videos. They are in talks to produce several long-form web syndicated television shows, expand into cruise coverage and more. Brian still works about 12 hours a day. Insider Perks still hasn't made him rich but he knows one day his hard work will pay off. He knows that video is the future of the internet and that people will one day find value in his work.
He doesn't have enough to hire a public relations firm so the media coverage he gets is very minimal. He makes his pitches but most go unanswered. Even still the site continues to grow, traffic continues to increase and people are slowly taking notice. The content is there, the design has grown far beyond iWeb and his passion will never fade.
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Art Museums These are located all around the world and for good reason.
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