About Ben Wills

My Journey From HTML to MarketingEngineer.io

I’m Ben Wills, the founder of MarketingEngineer.io.

Back in 1994, while still in middle school, I taught myself HTML by printing out source code and rendered webpages side by side, comparing them to understand how they worked. I quickly filled up a 3″, 3-ring binder. I then created my own HTML guide around the same time the first HTML books were published.

This early fascination with how web pages were created laid the foundation for what would later become a career spanning both marketing and engineering. I always wanted to work in online business, and that opportunity finally came in 2001 when I entered the digital marketing world through SEO.

Building a Marketing Career

My marketing career took off quickly. I joined what would become (and likely still is) the world’s largest SEO company, helping grow it to over 1,400 clients. As Director of Search Marketing, I managed approximately half the company – between 70-80 people including writers, editors, and analysts who executed SEO strategies for our clients.

I became the company’s go-to SEO expert, conducting frequent training sessions for the entire company and leading dozens of lunch-and-learn sessions over the years. I also spoke at roughly eight to ten marketing conferences in the early 2000s, translating search, strategy, and execution into material teams could actually use. When clients or prospects needed specialized expertise, I often stepped in. During this time, I also helped lead what was likely one of the first international SEO campaigns for Motorola, and managed a major long-term campaign for Lowe’s Home Improvement, leading weekly strategy meetings every Friday morning at 8:30.

After this experience, I helped launch another SEO agency where we grew from zero to $140,000 in monthly revenue. As VP of Operations, I managed a team of about 15 people – account managers, writers, editors, and analysts. I designed our service offerings, execution strategies, and internal training approach, continuing to deepen my understanding of what marketers truly need to succeed online.

From there, I transitioned to consulting and contracting, working directly with clients to solve their marketing challenges. This hands-on experience gave me invaluable insights into the day-to-day struggles marketers face, and reinforced something that had already become clear to me: most people in marketing need better explanations of how the underlying systems actually work.

From Marketing Into Engineering

In 2008, I founded a company called ontolo with a small team including Garrett French and a few others. It was an attempt to solve problems I’d seen marketers struggle with throughout my career, and it forced me to confront a larger reality: if I wanted to build the kinds of systems I had in mind, I needed much stronger engineering depth.

The marketing expertise was already there, but the technical capability to fully execute the vision was not. So I made a decision that reshaped the next decade of my career: I decided to become an engineer in a much more serious way.

That shift matters because MarketingEngineer.io comes out of both sides of that experience. It comes from having lived in marketing, managed marketing teams, taught marketing concepts repeatedly, and then gone deep into the engineering side to understand the systems underneath it all.

The Decade of Engineering

What followed was a decade fully dedicated to engineering. I immersed myself in learning everything from low-level C and C++ to web front-end development, database design, system architecture, search engine design and scaling, and very high performance web parsing. This wasn’t just academic learning – I took on paid professional roles that pushed my skills to their limits.

I worked as an embedded engineer programming microcontrollers like the ESP32, designing network protocols for communication between devices, and writing the test code to verify everything worked correctly. This experience taught me how to build reliable systems from the ground up.

At the other end of the spectrum, I developed large-scale web scraping applications, writing my own downloaders and parsers in C and C++ that could process an 400 million web pages per day on older commodity hardware. These systems had to be incredibly efficient and robust – and they deepened my understanding of the infrastructure, algorithms, and data systems that now shape modern marketing.

This decade of engineering wasn’t a detour. It was the technical foundation that made it possible for me to explain, with much more precision, how search engines, databases, distributed systems, parsers, classifiers, and machine learning systems actually affect the work marketers do every day.

Where Marketing Meets Engineering

What makes MarketingEngineer.io different is that it comes from someone who deeply understands both sides of the marketing and engineering equation. It’s uncommon to find someone with half their career in marketing and half in engineering – these are usually two very different disciplines with different mindsets, priorities, and ways of thinking.

This combination also shaped how I teach. Early in my career, I spent a great deal of time training teams, presenting to rooms full of marketers, and explaining complicated topics in practical terms. MarketingEngineer.io extends that same instinct, but with a broader scope: helping marketers understand the systems behind the tools, platforms, and algorithms they rely on.

I understand the marketing challenges because I’ve been there – managing teams, running campaigns, building processes, and helping people get better at their craft. I also understand the engineering side well enough to break technical subjects down without reducing them to fluff. That intersection is the entire point of this site.

Why This Site Exists

Most marketers do not get useful explanations of the technical systems shaping their work. Most engineering content assumes too much engineering context. Most marketing content treats important systems like black boxes. This site exists to address that gap directly.

The goal is not to turn marketers into software engineers. It is to give technically ambitious marketers a clearer mental model of how things work: search engines, ranking systems, data structures, machine learning, large language models, crawlers, databases, and the infrastructure behind modern platforms.

That focus comes directly out of my background. I have spent years operating as a marketing leader, years operating as an engineer, and years teaching along the way. MarketingEngineer.io is where those threads come together.

From the middle school kid comparing HTML printouts, to the marketing director managing dozens of people, to the engineer building systems that process hundreds of millions of pages, every stage of that path shaped how I think. This site is the result.