SoloSEO

Great Read: How to Get an Influencer’s Attention

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 24th, 2010

Add comment Visited 12197 times March 24th, 2010 Michael D Jensen

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Finding Motivation When You’re “Not Feeling It”

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 20th, 2010

SEO is rough, let’s face it. One minute, you feel like you’ve found the key to long-term wealth and high keyword rankings. The next minute, you read an article that makes you rethink your entire plan. It’s easy to get caught up in the emotional roller coaster — changes in attitude that can disrupt your business plan and leave you feeling stressed out and constantly panicked that you are missing out on “the latest thing.”

To top it off, no one really knows “everything” about this industry, and every industry certainly has new ways to pull in traffic and conversions. To succeed at this game, you need to persist through inevitable failures. But how do you find the motivation?

#1. Slow and steady wins the race

Remember the old tale of The Tortoise and the Hare. The hare sprints ahead, assuming an easy victory. But he gets distracted and meanders off course. The tortoise, meanwhile, slowly plods ahead, ignoring the hare’s progress (and his lack thereof). Eventually, the tortoise passes the hare and wins the race. SEO is a marathon. By acknowledging its marathon-like nature and refreshing and reviewing your business plan and process regularly, you can keep yourself on course and beat all of the hares that are currently miles (and search engine rankings) ahead of you.

#2. Do it for the love, not for the money

Studies on motivation suggest that entrepreneurs who pursue their passions tend to do better in the long term than do entrepreneurs who pursue goals strictly for financial ends. If you don’t love what you do, the bumps in the road will destroy you. True passion is the cure.

#3. Keep an even keel — emotionally and financially

As your SEO practice gets underway, expect ups and downs. Protect yourself by buffering your budget. Build a stable income stream (preferably more than one) to support your venture, and save up for “rainy days” that for some can last many months. If you lack this anchor for your budget, you will feel more pressure to act “quickly” instead of “intelligently” and this can lead you to make costly long-term mistakes.

#4. Take care of your health

Get exercise, eat healthy, take time to be with friends and family, meditate, get enough sleep, get some sun, and don’t spend too long at the keyboard at one stretch. Remember, you are in it for the long haul. If you burn out too quickly, or push yourself to meet unrealistic deadlines, you will exhaust yourself and your business will suffer.

We all have the spark of success inside us — awakening this spark requires showing compassion towards yourself and towards your business and planning realistically and conservatively.

Add comment Visited 6734 times March 20th, 2010 Michael D Jensen

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How to handle SEO client problems

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on March 9th, 2010

As an entrepreneur and SEO professional, you crave credibility and good relationships. This is all well and good. To nourish any business relationship, you should go “the extra mile” – not just because it’s savvy business but also because it’s the right thing to do. I know in this day and age that might be a concept most don’t embrace anymore, but I think it is paramount, even just to sleep at night.

On the other hand, we’ve all had hair-pulling situations with SEO clients. Phone calls in the middle on the night requesting next day edits on a random white paper. Mandatory six-way conference calls that meander and have no point. Heated e-mails randomly directed your way.

So what should you do in these kinds of situations? More importantly, how do you determine when to give in to weird client requests/demands and when to jump ship?

Here are some good working tips:

1. Get opinions from other people whom you trust

Often, we get so knee-deep into these SEO situations that we cannot see the forest for the trees. Talk to friends. Get an objective read on the situation. Take yourself out of the equation to arrive at a more professional and resourceful decision about how to proceed. Getting the emotion out of the situation can be the first step to properly rectifying it.

2. Break ties honorably

If you decide to break ties with a client, do so professionally and honor the terms of any contract or agreement, if at all possible.

Always be a good guy (or girl). Even if a client has behaved unprofessionally or even abusively, that doesn’t give you an excuse to return the favor. I always want to feel like I came out of a situation doing all I could to make it right. You always sleep well at night if you do.

3. Remember: A bird in hand is worth two in the bush – not six or seven

Sure, it can be a pain to lose any client – and not just because it throws your budget out of whack. No one likes dispensing bad news. But beware of the tendency to overvalue what you already have. Sure, an abusive client may provide a steady stream of work. But every ounce of energy you waste attending to the abuser’s tyrannical demands is one less ounce you have to lavish on a new prospect. We have found the often heard saying of 10% of clients take up 90% of you time to be true, unless you make the hard decisions to dump some of them, or never take them on in the first place.

This tendency to overvalue current assets is all too human, by the way. For instance, who hasn’t had a friend who has been mired in a terrible relationship? This person will admit that he/she should get out of it but ultimately refuses to break things off because of a fear that he/she will never again find anyone “that good.” It’s nonsense. But sometimes you can’t see it if you’re too close to it. That’s why reliable outside feedback is so key.

4. Serenity now

To paraphrase (and butcher) the serenity prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept the SEO clients I cannot change but want to keep; the courage to change/get out of dysfunctional SEO client relationships I can change; and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Well, that’s really clumsy and ineloquent, isn’t it? Hopefully, it still drives home the point. Doing what is best for your company, and doing it the right way, can get tough, but in any small business, it sets you up for greater things in the future.

Add comment Visited 6679 times March 9th, 2010 Aaron R Stewart

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Avoiding Problem SEO Clients

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 2nd, 2010

As an SEO professional, you are always on the prowl for new business relationships. There are many great people out there to work with. But there are also many “problem clients” who for whatever reason turn out to be more of a hassle than they are worth. These type of clients will disrespect your contract or call you at 3:30 am with random questions about some minute issue. How do you stay away from the bad clients and keep the good guys on the bus?

Here are some tried-and-true rules of thumb to separate the wheat from the chaff (or the curd from the whey or whatever other metaphor de jour you want to use to describe this process):

1. Eyes out for red flags

- Does a new client keep you on the phone for 30 minutes to talk about her dog? Red flag.

- Does the client repeatedly reschedule calls/meetings for arbitrary reasons? Red flag.

- Does the client complain to you at length about a previous writer or partner – and his complaints make absolutely no sense? Super big red flag with sugar on top.

2. Listen to your “spidey sense”

Do you get a strange intuitive sense that something about a business or client is not quite right? 99 out of 100 times, this is but the tip of the iceberg. Don’t waste time hooking a fish that’s going to die once you get it into the aquarium (sorry, again, a pretty weak metaphor there).

3. Incomplete references or credentials? Bad news

Everyone on the Web is in some sense flailing. This medium is so very new, and we all wing it to an extent. That said, sometimes a leap of faith is just jumping off a cliff. Protect yourself. Check references and credentials whenever you engage a new client (or have questions about an existing one!)

4. Get it in writing – and get it clear.

Set clear expectations. Tell the client precisely what you will deliver and when and how you will deliver it. Remember to keep expectations low and then over-deliver too.

5. Baby steps.

Don’t do $5,000 worth of work before getting your first check. It’s okay to spec out on what might ultimately only be a $50 assignment. But before you invest too much time/money/heartache into a project, make sure that the client shows you the money!

4 comments Visited 6999 times March 2nd, 2010 Michael D Jensen

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SEO 101: How to crank out content for SEO

Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 1st, 2010

It is a cliché in the SEO world that “content is king” – that to feed the hungry search engine beasts of Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, you need to churn out targeted, keyword focused, and most of all useful content. This leads to the long-term passive pay-off that is the SEO pot of gold.

To succeed, you don’t want to get stuck fine tuning content and rewriting blog posts forever. You need to get stuff out the door so that you can get indexed, get ranked, and make a living.

So what’s the secret? How do you quickly create high quality content – stuff that’s really good and useful and that’s optimized for the search engines?

1. Get stuff out the door

Fritter away time fine-tuning your web pages, and you will eventually get discouraged, and your writing will also suffer. Do NOT be afraid to make mistakes. Build web pages, write your blog posts, tweet your tweets. Do whatever you need to do. But just get content produced. You will learn by doing.

2. Focus on keywords, but make it natural

Content needs to be first and foremost natural and good for readers. When you optimize and emphasize for keywords, keep each article focuses on one keyword or phrase, but you can also include variants on that. You spread your article too thin when you focus on 10 keywords.

3. Get input from coaches

Even if you majored in literature at an Ivy League College, you no doubt have a lot to learn about how to write for the web. The internet is a wild world with its own rules for what constitutes “good” or even “acceptable.” You can’t do it alone. You have to talk to people who’ve made a living at this business. Read about how SEO works and how the web writing community functions. Attend SEO and Internet marketing conferences, specifically go to sessions on copywriting and content.

4. Group your assignments

Instead of just doing 1 page for a topic at a time, try doing 10, 20, even 50 pages on the same topic. This may sound like a terrible chore to some people – who wants to write 50 pages in a row about long-term healthcare insurance, for instance? But if you are going for volume, then grouping helps. You can get into the spirit of the topic easily. You can also do research upfront and then have it all laid out in front of you when you write your pages. Take notes while you do research of different article ideas, and use keyword research as a tool to create pages for your topic.

5. Protect your hands

If you plan to bang out more than a few pages a day, you need to be aware of the ergonomic dangers of overtyping and keyboard misuse. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and repetitive stress injuries run rampant among web professionals. Take breaks, stretch, eat well, and maintain a good keyboarding set up. Listen to your body.

6. Develop and refine your system over time

You are not going to get it right the first time. You are not going to get it right the second time. Hopefully, a few days into the process of cranking out good SEO pages, you will begin to develop a rhythm. Get feedback from everyday people as well as SEO professionals to better develop your style, attitude, and routine. Keep reading. Keep building your skills. Focus on easily attainable short-term goals to string you forward.

7. Hire writers if you can’t do it yourself

If you don’t have the time to write your own content, consider hiring a content company like Applied Content, our content writing company. We have a team of very skilled writers that can do lots of high quality, unique content, very fast. If an hour of your time is worth more than the cost of an article, you should seriously consider assigning out your writing.

2 comments Visited 7502 times March 1st, 2010 Michael D Jensen

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