I am stoked Jon is coming!

The first time you meet Jon you like him. In fact the first time you see Jon you like him.

Jon it the president of Sure Hits.

Simply put they give site owners like us a form to put on our sites that allows insurance companies and mortage companies to advertise on our sites. The user sees an add, clicks on it and you get paid.

I really like Jon as a person, and when I heard about the company I asked Neil Patel what their reputation is like. As you know, not everyone on the Internet has a flawless reputation. Neil, who is very connected, said that he has never heard anything but positive comments about Jon, or about Sure Hits. That is a pretty profound statement.

Jon is a graduate of Stanford. I am personally very familiar with Stanford because for many years I delivered pizza from Pizza-Go-Go to students of Stanford. John on the other hand graduated with a degree in Economics and Political Science.

Jon worked as a management consultant with Mercer, and ended up doing a lot of work with insurance companies while he was there.

Oracle was the next brief stop and Jon considers his boss there to have been a huge learning experience.

In 1998 Jon got a call from a friend who was starting an online insurance company and Jon became a co-founder. They started eCoverage in early 1999 with an amazing board, including former AMEX CEO Jim Robinson III, former BofA CEO David Coulter, then e-Loan (now Prosper) CEO Chris Larsen, and e*Trade exec Tom Bevilacqua. They actually built a functioning insurance company in under a year and had over 80 employees. The dot com bubble burst, and they sold the technology to GMAC Insurance and closed down.

John comments about eCoverage, Even though eCoverage didn’t make it, I got amazing experience in management and internet marketing. Among other things, I discovered something very early – paid search was a huge winner for online insurance (we actually bought the #2 ad on Google for “auto insurance” for $25CPM, before AdWords existed as it does today). I started a consulting & ad buying firm and worked on my own until merging with SureHits in July of 2004, where I became the company President.

When Jon joined SureHits it was primarily a boutique SEM shop, managing PPC campaigns for clients. They then got the idea to build the insurance marketplace, their affiliate system to connect site owners with insurance companies. That system was launched in the beginning of 2005 and soon they were doing eight-figures per year in revenue.

Throughout much of this story, Jon has been doing paid search. He is an expert and regularly speaks on the subject at SMX, SES, and Pubcon.

You can follow jon on twitter.

For the complete road map you can go to JonathanKelly.com