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: 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: 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
Posted on: June 26, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
Over the years I’ve done a lot of work for companies in regards to either helping them get the right Website built, or hiring the right vendor or team to do this. A website can cost in the thousands to millions to build, depending on a number of factors:
- Is this website being built from scratch with proprietary software?
- Is the website being built based on an existing CMS platform and code tweaked/customized? An example of an open source platform is Drupal.
- Has a team been hired just for this project?
- Is this project being done by a vendor?
- Have you or the vendor done a project such as this before?
To me, for a small to medium sized business the perfect website is based on existing tools and platforms but edited and tweaked to have:
- A unique look
- Unique content
- Necessary branding
- Updated content
This way, the Website will be affordable, in the thousands of dollars and not hundreds of thousands. The website should also be built on a platform where sitewide rollouts and navigation updates are easy and possible. The website can hopefully be updated by anyone with a login. And, of course the website should be built so that online marketing / SEO elements and keyword strategy can be worked throughout.
For larger businesses, this website style can still work well plus scale. Or, a large website can be built from scratch. If you have questions, let me know as I’ve dealt with hundreds of types of top performing websites, from thousands to millions of pages.
Posted on: June 26, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
SEO is a component of online marketing. Online marketing can include SEO, SEM, press releases, social media optimization, blogging, article writing, online promotion, website roll-outs, and more. SEO can include any of these items as well in my opinion, since almost any public change to an online website can affect SEO. Here are some examples below. In these examples, “you” or “your” stands for a random person I may have met here or there.
- A new version of your website rolls out. It is missing some pages or some code has changed. Search engines index the site differently based on better or worse coding and inclusion of pages.
- Blog entries are deleted. Google may have given your website a higher pagerank based on the dates and number of entries on your blog. Now things have changed and pagerank drops.
- People are talking about you on social media websites. Search engines note various information about this and include that in their ranking for you.
- Your website is coded with non SEO friendly elements. Your competitor has their website coded with well done SEO. Even if you are the better business, your competitor has a better chance of being crawled well by search engines and indexed better.
- You have a writer that decides to copy text and cut corners. Search engines find this and ping the website.
These are just a handful of examples, but they do show it is ever so valuable to have good SEO in place. I’ve done consulting as well as worked as an employee for companies, managing SEO /online marketing departments. To do it well is both an art and a science. It is necessary that one never tries to trick search engines, but rather understand what will help both users and search engines.
