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Back in 2002, Jon Hoch got an idea from a bad shopping experience. He couldn't find the lawn mower he wanted at the local big box or the neighborhood hardware retailer.

This inspired him to go try online retailing. His first venture, while working at Coleman Powermate, a generator manufacturer, was pressurewashersdirect.com, which he operated from his basement.

 "When I started out the objective was just to make a car payment," he says. "If I sold one pressure washer a week could make enough money to afford a new car and make a car payment."

Over the ensuing years, the company evolved into Powerequipmentdirect.com, a $15 million-a-year Bolingbrook, IL online marketer that sports three additional Web sites: Aircompressorsdirect.com, electricgeneratorsdirect.com, snowblowersdirect.com.

It also grew from a one-man operation to a staff of 15.
"It just turned out that ever since we started it, it just kind of took off and we've been kind of fortunate with all the hurricanes in Florida with our generator Web site," he says. "The air compressor Web site has been doing well and we're branching off into the snow blower site this year."

[He notes Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was an exception because the mass level of devastation in New Orleans and surrounding areas left people with no homes to which to return].

Hoch uses search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising as well as local advertising in locations experiencing disasters as his mainstay.

Keywords searches, he says, are pretty simple: the words pressure washers for that product and so on.

"The interesting thing for us is that if you do a Google search for pressure washers, were number one and air compressors was also number one," he says. "We actually get a lot of traffic based on Google's recommendation."

This has been true for about the past two years, Hoch notes.
Powerequipmentdirect also markets through comparison-shopping sites, he says.

"We also do some radio advertising, depending on where the weather is," he says. "For example, when the power went out in Oklahoma City with the ice storm last week, we were advertising there and Tulsa."
From these efforts, the company has pulled in more than 100,000 customers over its existence, says Hoch.

Having recently improved its online infrastructure, the firm is looking forward to spinning off new sites like chainsawsdirect.com and leafblowersdirect.com, says Hoch.

"We have he domain names for a lot of these sites," he says. "We just need the ability to build the Web site."