Posted on: January 26, 2010 by Jordan Hardy
Small and larger companies have so many options in choosing a company or consultant to take care of their SEO that it can be dizzying. From consulting and running marketing agencies, I’ve seen a lot of what is out there.
It is not easy to find the best. Items to look for in hiring the best:
1. Client list – they should have worked with good clients in different verticals to have extensive experience.
2. They should be willing to show spreadsheets of work done and articles or URLs secured.
3. They should be able to analyze results in front of you and explain what is happening.
Posted on: December 18, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
As an online marketing professional for more than fifteen years now, I have always spent my working time building up companies through intensive marketing strategy. It pleases me to no end getting results and innovating for companies.
This website is focused on those companies that generally hire me for 6 months to a year and a half, each for 5-30 hours per week of consulting. Consulting work is constant, very intense work where I’m hired in by a company for specific long term marketing and team building projects.
On the other hand, I’ve also done extensive work running a marketing firm over the years. The benefit here for a company who hires our firm is that they have us closely involved with them longer term. Usually these engagements are for years, so that we can help build up companies month by month. Delivering results, reports, and new innovation launches month after month and year after year is truly something we enjoy and where we excel.
With well over 40 hours of week required of me on a weekly basis, is becomes important to limit how many companies/clients I work for so that I can always ensure top quality work and results.
In terms of why a company wouldn’t try to save money and hire someone internally, I’ll talk about that here. Generally when someone works full time at one company not only are they not exposed to what is happening around the Internet in other verticals, but they may not be driven for many reasons to find the latest and greatest techniques. In my work, I see results of many companies online plus offline, so that I can always know what is working at the moment and where to look for new opportunities to deliver client results. This insight is very useful to companies, as they can know that I’m testing, seeing, and most importantly experiencing a wide range of useful information that can help deliver them results.
Posted on: December 12, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
Top Google PPC is both an art and a science. The higher your ad and the better your call to action, the better chance you have to get clicked and land a conversion. Of course, the factors on the landing page a user gets to is of utmost importance. To get your ads to the top of Google PPC results on a given search, spending more money for ads can only help so much. Track record of your account, ad phrasing, relevance, and quality of your landing page and Website are all important factors in dominating with PPC.
When I do PPC by hand, or when I run PPC teams, research and metrics are key. I always do competitive searches to see where the company stands for organic and paid results. I see what competitors are doing, where they show up, and what they aren’t doing. I look into what has worked for this company before and what hasn’t. After enough research, I begin running PPC test ads. Testing, testing, and more testing is what it takes to eventually secure top ad positions. The key to getting top Google PPC positions is delivering quality with creative and relevant phrasing for ads, great landing pages, and a high quality Website.
Posted on: November 27, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
There is a big difference between white hat and black hat SEO. White hat in my opinion has much better longevity and integrity than black hat. If one uses black hat techniques such as hidden text, link farms, or duplicate content, it may or may not work. It may be that depending on how well things were coded, a search engine may not notice for a while. But, whether it is a search engine update or human who discovers black hat techniques, that often happens and pings the site. On the other hand, white hat brings real info on the web to people and search engines in an ideal way. If one does amazing white hat SEO, that is the best in my opinion. For example although I do extensive research on the latest techniques, I will not use black hat SEO.
Posted on: October 29, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
I’ve been asked by friends in the last number of years why I started this sales and marketing blog. There are a number of reasons:
- When I started doing contract work a number of years ago, clients enjoyed it.
- It is a pleasure helping people, so whether people I know or don’t know learn from this Website, I’m glad to have helped.
- I enjoy doing online and offline research. When I have new thoughts on an item, it is fun for me to post once in a while on this Website.
Enjoy!
Posted on: October 23, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
Nope.
Saying SEO is dead, or doesn’t work can make a great PR piece to grab attention.
Effective SEO involves not only an understanding of technology and users, but an interest in adding to the Internet in a good way. From all of the people I know at Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, there is one strong common thread in what makes search work, and SEO can add to this. The common thread is to bring useful information to people on search engines. It is to help people find what they need. Not every Website is built and marketed well. SEO can involve:
- UI
- Emails
- Content
- New technology rollouts
- New Websites
- Landing pages
- Code tweaking for important tags
- and much more
My experience with the SEO component goes far beyond coding and marketing. It is crucial not just to understand Website analytics, but also how people think and take action. It is important to understand business, design, radio, TV, and other concepts. A huge number of strategies can be combined in my experience to run a highly effective SEO program. Two goals I normally see companies have with SEO are increased traffic and conversion rate. I always have at least another three important goals, which include high visitor return rate, referrals to friends, and viral marketing.
Posted on: October 14, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
In my opinion trust, confidence, extensive experience, and training are necessary for a manager to become a mentor. In my working career (which started before high school and really got moving after graduating college) I’ve worked for companies the least being one and most being nine years.
Trust and Confidence
I’ve always had the perspective to trust that a direct report would not be able to take my position. If they did, I was confident that it would help me move to a better position there or at another company. Still today, after managing more than a hundred team members in my career, I haven’t ever had someone have the ability to replace my position while I was there. My generous team working attitude has helped me consistently work on growing my experience while also focusing on growing team members as much as possible. With that, and helping team members to grow, I’ve found people go home at the end of the day or weekend content and with hope. And then they bring more enthusiasm to their next work day. Having strong trust between the employee and manager is essential.
Experience
Experience I had after college vs now is very different. When a person is a manager and has managed many other people in the past, they can know well how to deal with situations that again arise. They can easily improvise if needed. The learning curve grows so a manager has enthusiasm in quickly learning new things. Most importantly, the manager needs the experience to be an expert in everything they manage so that their team has someone who can manage what they do, have realistic expectations, and do everything as well if needed.
Training
I believe in offering not only training and mentoring, but also support in the way of possible career advancement and salary increase opportunities for performance. I would think most people like to look forward to good things. If someone can go through their work day knowing they not only have the training they need, but that they can grow from there, that can make their attitude for the day that much better.
Posted on: October 14, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
The most recent unsolicited email I received from someone I don’t know offering online marketing services was this morning. It amused me to no end. I think it was partly the grammatical errors that added to their professionalism. Or possibly it was that they didn’t know my name and addressed me as sir or madam. Or maybe it was the fact that the person spent a paragraph explaining they really did look at my Website thoroughly before sending me an email. But in their email they didn’t take the time to actually mention my Website name / URL! They talked about having techniques to get any Website to the top of Google quickly. They alluded to a handful of social networking Websites as examples of the kinds of sites they would automatically link me to. They feel it is effortless for them to do this work, as if their magic computer would plug my Website into the “mysterious” online world. Their ending, to gain my trust, was to offer their personal cell phone number and Skype ID.
They are probably contacting me not from jordanhardy.net, but another Website I had worked on in past years where they somehow found my contact info on a cached page.
If really this person is legit, I see some problems in their offering.
Personal Issues With Hiring this Person
- Generally when I’ve hired marketing, sales, and other team members, it has never been from unsolicited emails like this one. It has been from posting an ad on Job Websites, sorting through a huge number of applications, and finally interviewing up to 20 people to fill each open position. Or it has been through networking.
- They’re the expert? What about the fact that it has taken me a huge amount of experience and training to do this so well myself? They just happen to be gifted? How come it is so difficult for me to find high quality sales and marketing people when I hire? Just this one person will do it all for me? Wow! When I hire people, to get them very good at what I need them to do, it usually takes a lot of training, coaching, and experience.
- Where are they? What proof do I have they are really one person?
- Why is there no portfolio URL in their email letting me know I can contact them from their Website as well?
- How would I know they are actually getting me linked out there in a good and not bad way? Can they provide links that show a human has done marketing work, or will it have been that a cheap Web tool submitted automatically with many errors or submissions to low quality Websites therefore affecting Google Pagerank?
- Do they know who I am? In other words since they did now know my name in the email, what would happen if I used a technique I use with telemarketers? I’d say, well since you’re alluding to me and my Website, what is my name and what is my domain?
Professional General Issues with Hiring this Person
- It needs to be clear how they will go about their work. They need to be clear what kinds of Websites they work with, how they work, and how many of each task will be done. When work is done, they need to track it to provide to the client.
- Although in rare instances someone can find an employee like this, it would be much better finding the person from online research, a reference, or digging up their resume online.
- Spelling errors should always be corrected.
- Although there is some special magic that comes from extensive experience in online marketing, most is smart, hard work. This needs to be clear.
Although this was a bit of a long post, I had to do so to have a bit of fun.
Posted on: October 2, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
I often find it interesting how useful vs. useless forum posting can be as a marketing strategy. For example, one of the message boards / forums I run has quite a large number of people that apply to become members each day. Of these applications, I find that 92% have no intention of posting relevant content. They just want to market their product in categories that are not relevant. I deny these people becoming members as clearly these days there are online tools to see who is going to be a real participant on a forum. These tools search existing forums to see if particular members, based on their email addresses, are relevant or not.
My thought on the best way to market on forums is to not waste time. If you have a product to market and want to talk about it on forums, have something to say. Sure, SEO strategy and keywords can help, but most importantly have a point. By posting on forums with relevant helpful information to others, a link to your product can be clicked more often when trust is built. People figure things out. If a person is just thinking they will be smarter than everyone and find clever ways to sneak in selling, it will rarely work. Conversion rate will decrease, other members may not interact as much with you, and the message board moderator may even remove any member that is detracting from the point of the message board.
I’ve posted on forums over the years, testing conversion with many techniques. Although quite a lot of strategies help, a base belief in adding to the forum is needed for success.
Posted on: July 23, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
To feature a business online is an important step these days. There are 15 elements that are very important in getting your new Website online with success. Reading up online, talking with experts, and reading books
are all effective, affordable ways to build up knowledge. Here are 10 top steps with resources and tools to help bring your business online in a very effective manner.
- Select a domain name. Go Daddy and aplus.net have good domain name selection tools.
- Select a company to host your Website. As you research hosting companies online, ensure you check samples of their clients to see how well the Websites rank on search engines and how quickly their Websites load.
- As you plan your Website, a good architecture with strong Web standards and usability, is best written on paper before it is coded.
- Either hire a team to build your Website, use a tool, or you can code it yourself if you have the time to learn. Wordpress and Drupal are my favorite tools. Wordpress is good to build a blog. Drupal is good to build a Website.
- Write great copy to ensure you have the attention of search engines and users / Website readers.
- Build SEO into your Website to ensure you get traffic from good online marketing.
- Make sure you can create images as needed. Adobe Fireworks is a great image tool and there is some excellent documentation on using Adobe Fireworks out there.
- Get a great coding tool to use quickly or in detail as needed for Website posts. Adobe Dreamweaver is terrific and there are very good books one can use.
- Work on conversion and optimization techniques to ensure people don’t just visit your Website, but that they do convert to a lead or sale.
- Leverage landing pages into your website.
- Bring your selling online as well as offline.
- Test, test, test. This means look at your Web analytics and optimize what you do based on your Website statistics.
- Roll out useful, creative new Website enhancements as often as you can.
- Listen to user feedback.
- Keep track of new Web trends.
Tags: business online, new website, Online Marketing, results, SEO, usability, web architecture, web hosting, web tools Filed Under: Building a New Website, Businesses, Online Marketing, SEO, Sales, Website Analytics, Website Sales, Websites
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