Pursuit Magazine celebrates its second birthday today…

Well… Happy Birthday to us!

But where has the time gone? No, really… where has it gone?

Pursuit was initially an informal “e-zine” (an electronic magazine circulated via email) created just two years ago in an effort to offer outstanding information to PIEducation.com clients and staying in touch with them in between their license renewal periods.  By word of mouth, a little advertising and subscribers passing their copies on to friends and coworkers, we added a few hundred more subscribers and it became necessary for us to get serious. We gave Pursuit Magazine a more polished look. As a result, our readership expanded to a few thousand investigators from around the world.

As interest in the information we were putting out in our bi-monthly newsletter grew, we saw not only the need to push a continuous stream of timely information out to our readership, but the need to create a comprehensive, community-driven industry portal where private security, legal and investigations professionals could come to learn, share their opinions, exchange ideas and network all in one place.  Pursuit Magazine became the first online private investigator magazine developed specifically for the PI, Process Server, Bail Enforcement Agent (Bounty Hunter), Repossession and Security Professionals.

In July of 2009, we became part of the IRBsearch family when I was asked to join the company as the Director of Brand Management and eMedia, bringing with me PIEducation.com, the market leader in continuing education for private investigators, too. I have immensely enjoyed working with the wonderful people at IRB and appreciate the latitude and support IRB ownership gives me in serving the industry through many different training and networking initiatives.  It is an honor to work with the best information broker in the business, the business I often idolized as a 17 year private investigation agency owner and the database information I most often relied upon pursuing my own success; I look forward to continuing to innovate and bring additional value added benefits to IRB customers.

Today, Pursuit Magazine brings our readers more original content than any other investigative industry publication or portal in existence.  Professional articles written by experienced industry authors, video tutorials, podcasts, opinion polls, social networking and hundreds of articles in the archives mean that the investigative professional has a real opportunity to immerse themselves in a variety of opportunities for education and improve in his or her trade-craft.

Our Private Investigator Jobs board just launched several weeks ago and we have already attracted both Job Seekers and Employers in equal numbers.  The investigation career segment of our portal is proving to be an extremely valuable addition to the community and we are getting really incredible reviews as new jobs are imported every day from many different sources across the World Wide Web.

We are getting traffic from all over the world now as our online PI magazine is indexed and available in 7 languages including Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, German, English and  Russian- making us the only TRUE international magazine for professional investigators.  We are welcoming several thousand unique visitors everyday now to our website and have in excess of 8,000 subscribers to our email and RSS feeds.

And… Pursuit Magazine does this all for FREE.

We remain an active and connected element of the investigation community.  Our Pursuit Magazine Facebook Fan Page continues to grow every day without a great deal of effort and we are appreciative of everyone who is becoming actively involved in contributing to the community.  The fan page initially served as one of the ways we let our subscribers know when we posted new articles, but it has grown into a great deal more than that at this point.  Ideas are being discussed more fully, people are offering suggestions on how to continually improve our message and best of all, the encouragement we receive daily, makes it a worthwhile project.  Pursuit Magazine readers, authors and editors regularly interact with one another through additional social networks as well: the IRBexchange, Twitter, MySpace and several others.

We’re not done innovating and expanding our services to professional investigators! We have several new features coming to Pursuit Magazine early this year…

I’d tell you about them now, but I’d hate to ruin the surprise.

Stay tuned!

A huge thanks to our readers, authors and to Stephanie Mitchell, the Managing Editor, without whom Pursuit Magazine would not have made it this far, grown this much or show so much promise for the future.