marketing Archives - Page 37 of 41 by Mark Murnahan

SEO Directory Submissions and Pink Ponies For Sale

Sometimes I wonder how pink ponies became so popular in today’s Internet marketing world. Then again, I guess I should stop wondering. People just love buying pink ponies and fairy dust. It is a shame, but when I look around the Internet and talk to people, I have to believe it is true. They think there is a magical fix for their dwindling or less-than-stratospheric profit levels.

Pink Pony Rental: $180 Per Month

I do not like to call people stupid. I try to inform them, instead. It usually doesn’t work, because the majority of people really love pink ponies, fairy dust, and all the other Internet marketing magic that gets sprinkled into their eyes every day. I can only try my best to save one or two of you.

I see a lot of “SEO companies” (that’s search engine optimization for the record) offering packages for placing companies at the top of search engines for search terms. The packages often consist of submission to a squillion search engines and directories, building incoming links to the client’s website, and a bunch of other magical fairy dust. Some of them will say their magic potion includes creating h1 tags (Google h1 tags and see where my article about h1 tags is), meta tags (serious, this is a joke) and HTML title tags (sure, that is all it takes).

What bothers me is how hard some people’s heads are when you try to explain that pink ponies and fairy dust are just ways that pretend SEO companies take people’s money and then leave them thinking that this whole Internet thing is a big unicorn chase. I hope this is not the case with you, but based on the numbers … the real hard facts … you probably have a lot of room for pink pony rentals deep in your heart. If you keep reading, I am going to smash some pink ponies into tiny little bits and eat them. This is not for the faint of heart.

Maybe you believe in magic, and you aren’t ready to put down your “My Little Pony” doll. Fine, but maybe you should mark your calendar for a good time to have somebody pop that bubble for you and help you to do things that actually work. You know, things that actually increase your profit and create more sales. If you are in business, profit is what you need, right? Not precious little pink ponies and fairy dust. Just in case you are not ready or you are in SEO relapse, I will give you a fun little pony video to look at while your competition continues reading and takes away some more of your profit.

SEO Magic Takes Research, Targeting, and Talent

Call it “SEO magic” if you like, but real Internet marketing and SEO takes research. Real research … the kind that compiles real data and has a focus on real results. You do not get that with an out of the box SEO service offering … for any price.

Once the research is done, online marketing success requires a targeted approach to reaching the right audience. The research tells who the audience is, but knowing where to find them and targeting their attention is another task. This is often skipped and companies end up with the equivalent of trying to sell knitting needles to race car drivers. Is that the right audience to spend your money marketing toward?

When you understand who and where the audience is, it takes marketing talent (yes, you should click on the link about marketing talent) to convert those lookers into buyers. This is the artistic part of SEO and Internet marketing, and an important piece. If you get this part wrong, you can just drop a signed blank check in Times Square right now. Your money is wasted … gone … poof … it disappeared!

After these things are handled, it takes more research and understanding the marketing data to know where to focus the next efforts. When you discover what works, it is time to keep doing it, only better than before. That is what takes profit into orbit.

Oh, and I probably should not leave out the huge fact that it takes a website that does not suck. Here, read a story about a $150,000 website that sucks.

When you think about these things, maybe you can drop me a comment to tell me how stupid I am for never submitting this blog to any directory other than DMOZ. Maybe you don’t know what DMOZ is. Well, the pink pony salesman probably doesn’t either. He probably does not have thousands of incoming links pointing at his site, either. That is because most SEO fail at link building.

Real SEO Providers Eat Pink Ponies

I was talking to one of my SEO buddies yesterday as we dined on some pink pony burgers. He was telling me of a prospective client who came to him for search engine optimization. The man had a great product and wanted my pony munching friend to perform some search engine marketing for him. My friend, who had no reason to lie to me about this, told me he could make this guy’s product a smash hit. I mean, the way he described it, he could have sent this guys profits into orbit. A serious SEO guy knows when they can totally smash a market, by the way. We have research on our side.

My friend went on to tell me that after talking to this guy a bit, the potential client said he could spend $180 per month to sell his machines. Where in the heck did this guy get the figure of $180 and what kind of pink pony did this guy smoke? Seriously, a $180 per month budget to make a serious impact in his company’s profits? Is this really what people think we SEO people do? Do people really think that a person who can send their profit into orbit is going to live on minimum wage? Wow, so the one person who can truly make the biggest impact on company sales volume is worth all of $180 to the company?!

What really made us taste our partially digested pony burgers was that a lot of people think the same way. They have it in their head that there is some automated magical fix for marketing success. They think that the same thing that will work for a car dealer should work for an accident attorney, a construction company, and a real estate developer. The industry of Internet marketing has deteriorated into a pack of thieves who pick the bones of desperate companies who really so badly want to believe that there is one single magic pill they can buy over the counter and fix everything that ails them.

Those machines my buddy spoke about sell for a minimum of $14,000 and included a good profit margin, by the way. So, anyway, it kind of made us both gag on our pink pony burgers and face the fact that most people are really not ready to take their market seriously. They are not ready to push their marketing go button.

People Don’t Want the Truth: They Want Pink Ponies!

This all got me to realizing that people don’t really want to hear the truth. I have become pretty popular for telling people what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear. The crazy thing is that they may like to hear the real truth once in a while, but it is like watching a horror movie. It is like entertainment, but it could never happen in real life. Like Hollywood. They like hearing how their Internet marketing guy made millions of dollars conquering a market. What is sad about this is that the Internet marketers who actually have earned millions upon millions of dollars for themselves and their clients (yes, like me) are the guys you really don’t want to hear from, because we will pop the bubble you ride upon and give you the truth. We make fun of those guys. See … here I am in a video making fun of them, while subtly showing you that I am not full of pink pony poo and actually have been doing this successfully enough and long enough to buy a few toys of my own. Yeah, I didn’t do that selling pony poo … I did it making my clients a whole lot of profit!

Anybody who is tired of renting pink ponies and watching money slip away, what you really need is a pony slaying marketer. The presentation may be a bit crusty and abrasive for some people’s taste, but there is a reason serious pony killing search engine optimizers hang up the phone when people ask for a price before they even consider the real reason they called … the profit!

NOTE: If you like buying pink ponies, save us both the trouble and just drop me $180 per month in the mail. It will help me to cover my $1000 coffee expense while I work 25 hours per day to crush companies who try to compete with my clients.

Online Contest Contest: Win Prizes and Gain Exposure

Online contests have become extremely popular, and with good reason. People love getting things for free! So I decided to offer you the “Online Contest Contest”. Yes, you read it right … a contest contest. So what do I mean by that? Allow me to explain.

I am going to give you a chance to win cash and prizes and also gain free exposure to a lot of people. Since my blog is about Internet marketing, this is both an online contest and also an article to help people think about how to better market their business. This way, you can still gain a lot of value from it, even if you do not win the contest. Yes, you still win, even if you do not “win”. While I give you the rules I will provide tips to run your own contest. Each “Online Contest Tip” below will outline this particular contest.

I hope you will enjoy this. I look forward to rewarding some very excited winners.

Online Contest Tip: Defined Timeframe

A contest should have a defined timeframe so that participants know when to expect their winnings. This contest will run from April 5th to April 20th 2010 and winners will be announced by the last day of April.

Online Contest Tip: Easy to Participate

This is a contest for the best online contest ideas but you do not need to submit a contest idea to win! I am going to give you multiple easy ways to participate and win. You do not even have to fill out a registration form or sign up for anything!

Online Contest Tip: Make it Relevant

Since prizes are a huge piece of any contest, they should be relevant to the contest promoters’ business model. For example, if you have a fishing store, you may want to give away fishing poles, but you probably do not want to give away knitting needles. It should be relevant to your industry.

As an Internet marketing guy, I help people to make their business more successful online. So, when I decided to hold a contest, I determined that it should be relevant to people seeking more success in their business. This is why I am providing ways for you to achieve more exposure.

Online Contest Tip: The Prizes

The best contests will provide value for the contest promoter as well as the participants. Nobody loses, and somebody gets a great feeling of winning along with some cool free stuff, like money! Here are the prizes of this particular contest:

Cash Prize – The first place winner will receive ten percent of any new marketing contract that I accept during the contest period, referred as a result of the Online Contest Contest, plus ten percent residuals for the first 12 months from any contingency contract. Note that I do not sell $.95 knitting needles, and this could be big.
Win a Blog – The first and second place winners will each receive a custom WordPress blog setup including ten hours of customization and SEO services, or equivalent redesign services.
Business Exposure – Gain more exposure to your business! Each winner will receive spotlighted exposure in a blog post here at aWebGuy.com in a winner’s announcement, plus all participants will receive recognition in the comments and reactions on this blog post. This can add up.
Brain Food – Top ten participants will win a copy of “Twitter for Business: Twitter for Friends“.

Online Contest Tip: Let People Win

If you run a contest, try not to exclude people. You should make it easy to join in and win. In this case, I am making it really simple to participate. Since my blog will add social media reactions in the comments, it will be really easy for you to show your participation and gain exposure, too.

Everything that appears in the “Comments and Reactions” for this blog post will have a chance to win. For example, my blog is set to include social media “reactions” from FriendFeed, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, Blogger, WordPress, YouTube, Vimeo, Picasa, Flickr, TypePad, Movable Type, BackType, UberVU, and other services. These are just the services that are set up to automatically appear in the comments and reactions. You can also add comments directly. Remember, everything that shows up has a chance to win!

Online Contest Tip: Make the Rules Easy to Understand

If it is easy to understand, it becomes easier to win. In this case, I am using a point system. Winners will be determined based on a simple points system, and can choose how to get more points. Some of these are really easy! Here is how to get points:

250+ Points (New Contract): I will award two hundred fifty points to the referrer for each new client who contracts my SEO and social media marketing services during the contest period from April 5th to April 20th 2010. That is 250 points per new contract, and it adds to the cash prize, so don’t be shy! They simply must express that they heard about it from you.
100+ Points (Contest Ideas): If you submit the Contest Idea that receives the most “likes” (note the “like” button beside each comment) you will receive one hundred points plus five points for each “like”. You surely have friends to help you, right?
100+ Points (Blog Points): If you blog about this contest with a link back to it, you will receive one hundred points for the blog post (or other website) plus one point for every 10 unique visitors linked directly to this page coming from your blog / website during the contest period as verified through a Clicky Web Analytics referrer report. I suggest adding a comment here on this blog to claim your article. I will also provide a “dofollow” link back to your post.
50+ Points (Comment Points): If your individual comment here on the contest page other than a Contest Idea receives the most “likes” (note the “like” button beside each comment) you will receive fifty points plus five points for each “like”.
50-550 Points (Digg Points): If you Digg this article and include a Digg comment, you will receive 50 points. If the article reaches the front page of Digg.com, each person who diggs the article will be awarded an additional 500 points.
25-45 Points Daily (Twitter Points): If you send a tweet, you will receive 25 points, and if it is retweeted, you will receive an additional 2 points for each verifiable retweet up to a total of ten (for a possible 45 points per day). Twitter points will be calculated based on tweets which appear at TweetMeme.com.
25+ Points Daily (FriendFeed, Reddit, Blogger, WordPress, YouTube, Vimeo, Picasa, Flickr, TypePad, Movable Type) Reactions aggregated and appearing on this blog post as reported by BackType and UberVU across these listed social media sites will be awarded 25 points each, with a limit of 25 points per network per day.

Online Contest Rules: The Fine Print

Every contest needs some rules, but the fine print should be easy to understand. In the case of this contest, I have tried to make it as easy as possible to understand, and to win. See the Contest Contest Official Rules.

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Marketing as Usual: More Money and Less Exposure

I work with marketing numbers every day in my business, but sometimes I like to break it down to an individual level and gather more specific opinions. I can’t be brilliant every day so some days I rely on my dear Mother. I did that today, and I asked her about marketing. Ironic, isn’t it?

Since my mother remembers the days before television, and when telephone lines were shared across multiple households, I figured she could provide a good representation of “old school” thinking about marketing. I asked her a very specific question as follows: “If you were going to market a business, where would you focus your efforts?” She did not even ask me what kind of business before she replied “On the Internet.” I asked her, “Why do you think that some businesses still don’t think that way?” She said “I think they do, don’t they?” I told her that overall market spending spend says yes, but that I still find some companies marketing as “usual” … as if it is 2007. I wanted her opinion of why this could be the case. She said something that I have thought many times, and her reply was “It is foreign to them, and they probably just don’t understand how it can work for them.”

Thanks Mom!

The Monsters Disappear When You Turn on the Lights

Now do you agree with my Baby Boomer age mother? Nod yes. Most people agree that the Internet is the way to go for marketing. It is the most measurable venue for marketing of all, but I sometimes wonder if people realize that fact. The Internet provides enough data that marketing efforts can be accounted for down to every “click” and every dollar. You simply must look at enough data to create statistical significance. Anybody who does not grasp the value of measurements in marketing probably just does not understand it, and may be just a little bit scared. It seems that Internet marketing comes with a fear that many people have a hard time overcoming. The fear can be proven irrational using facts, but some people are just too stubborn to pay attention long enough to learn. They hear it, and they think it, but until they take the time to know the facts, they don’t fully believe it. I think of it like a kid with a bad dream when you turn on the lights, all the monsters disappear.

Many people want to achieve huge success before they actually make a reasonable and well calculated effort toward online marketing. They can read case studies of how others have done it, even in their industry, but as soon as the lights go out, they see monsters again.

Marketing Like a Goldfish in a Shark Tank

Fear and disbelief are big reasons that most companies using the Internet for marketing are doing it terribly unsuccessfully. They want to dip their toe in the water and test it out with a goldfish sized budget. What nobody tells them is that there are sharks in that water. If you don’t swim like a shark, you are likely to be “bitten” and fail miserably. The sad result for many business people is that once they are bitten, they will blame the water or the sharks, but they seldom ever blame the real culprit … themselves!

The alternative to having a shark budget is to shrink the tank using a more focused and creative marketing approach. It requires significant marketing talent to create success, even with a shark budget, but talent is even more important with a goldfish budget. In every case, it still requires more than a toe in the water to avoid the shark bite of an unsuccessful marketing attempt.

If you want your marketing to be successful, you can be one of the sharks or you can shrink the tank with focused marketing enough to take away the sharks’ advantage. Either way, you will have to address the sharks!

Bolstering the fears associated with Internet marketing is the fact that most Internet marketers (SEO, SEM, SMM, Guru, Expert, Maven, Evangelist, et. Al.) really stink at their job. It should also be noted that even the good ones will suffer if they have a client who bucks them at every turn, already knows it all, or asks them to jump through flaming hoops with a goldfish budget in a shark tank. Of course, successful marketers will usually not put themselves in this position. We understand the numbers, and we know that the chance of failure due to under-marketing is statistically significant.

We have surely all seen the overwhelming data, or at least heard a huge frenzy about newspapers, television, radio, and telephone book advertising sales each dropping like lead balloons. There is a reason for this, and the reason is that the Internet is far more effective. Still, I find it shocking to witness companies that have not shifted their efforts and their budget where it can make an impact.

I went on talking with my mother and we discussed business marketing budgets. I was curious why a company spending “x” dollars on ineffective marketing will often try to take a small fraction of that same amount of money to market on the Internet. I asked whether, as they shift their efforts, if it made sense for them to plan to spend less money and effort in the place it could really work. I asked her “If you were going to budget efforts between television, newspapers, phone books, and Internet, which one would get the biggest portion?” Without regard for industry, she said “the Internet, because you can reach anybody there”, and she was right. Of course, she did not have the fear that I was going to sell her something. She could be honest with me about what most people already know, but are afraid to address.

Marketing Without a Budget: Guerrilla Marketing Tips

Juan Martin Diez: 18th Century Guerrilla

If you struggle to produce the money needed for marketing, you had better learn some guerrilla marketing, and fast! You should always assume that somebody else in your market segment has deeper pockets and the longer you wait the harder it will be to reach the customers. When marketing a business with a small marketing budget or no marketing budget at all, you can still improve your chances of success using free or very low cost guerrilla marketing.

How to Grow a Business Without a Marketing Budget

I do not want to let you down, but the truth is that it absolutely cannot be done. You will have to budget something, and if it is not money, it will be time … probably a lot of time. Be ready for that, and budget your marketing time. Set aside a scheduled time to learn more, do more, and earn more. This is your business we are talking about and if you have a family to feed, like I do, it really starts to seem worth it to make it a success. Budget your time well, because although you may think you are too busy to budget time for marketing, the truth may be that you are just busy with the wrong things. If you are marketing your business well, time in other areas will almost surely free up for you. While you are budgeting time, be sure to budget enough to finish reading this article. I have some guerrilla marketing tips for you.

Useful Guerrilla Marketing Tips

I am going to give you some free and effective guerrilla marketing tips that you can start using today. I will also welcome your thoughts and additions, but if I try to add more than a short list, I will be writing this all day. This is only intended to help prime you for the task of marketing your business.

Guerrilla Marketing Tip Number One: Get Uncomfortable

If you are sitting back in your easy chair feeling comfortable about your marketing, you are not ready for this. If you are marketing without a budget, and you are comfortable about your marketing, you are really not ready for this.

One of the first things I would suggest for anybody trying to grow a business is to get uncomfortable. The more uncomfortable you are, the more likely you are to take serious measures to do something about it. If you relax and think things are just fine, you are just asking for that comfortability to all slip away. I have been in business for over 20 years and I have seen the good times and the bad times. I remember joking with my wife while living in my ivory tower and having a whole lot more time and money than I ever thought I could want or need and saying “I’m tired of living like this.” I actually joked but also kind of meant it, because while earning more per year than an average family does in ten years can be fun and all, a fall can also happen a lot faster. I have seen it … the hard way. Never get too comfortable, and always find reasons that you are “tired of living like this.”

Guerrilla Marketing Tip Number Two: Find Success and Follow It

Find success and follow it! Look for what successful people have done and learn from their experiences. I am not saying to imitate their every move, but rather to learn what they know and find ways that it can be applied to your marketing efforts. Many successful people will blog about their experiences and are happy to share what is in their head. Read blogs until your eyes hurt! Although it may seem like a waste of time at first, look at it this way; if you want to know how to do something better, doesn’t it make sense to use what others have learned instead of trying to learn it all the hard way?

Do not believe everything you read, but choose carefully and read a lot. Pay attention! Pick out a handful of blogs and spend some time to do more than just scan and click. Your competition is scanning and clicking through a lot of information. You want to learn and improve your business profitability, so what you should know is that even a little of the right information is better than a lot of average information. Get involved and find information pertinent to your industry. Find information from marketers who know marketing. Find things that challenge convention, because conventional is what everybody else is doing. Here are some blogs to help you get started, and of course I should mention that I have a blog archive with many nice trinkets to share.

Don’t just sit there! Learn opinions from other readers and add your comments. Note that while you are commenting that there is a place to enter your web address URL and it will create a link back to your website. If you are active in blogs, those links can add up to a lot. It is also a great way to become familiar with other frequent readers or people who had a common interest. Reach out to them and find out what works for them. Also be sure to read “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog” … seriously, add it to your time budget and read it!

Guerrilla Marketing Tip Number Three: Look Where Your Market is Looking

Look where your market is looking. I want to be really clear on this when I say that your customers are using the Internet. I was recently visiting with an old client of mine who is in the railroad construction business. They came to me about a website several years back, because they knew that they were supposed to have a website. They did not really know why, and their biggest focused use of it was to find job applicants. Even today, they still find it hard to comprehend that the people out there who make decisions about who will build their railroad bridge or railroad extension are using the Internet. Think of it this way, if you were running this company, even if they are not using the Internet to search for where to buy a railroad bridge, you should be there to increase their awareness of you. The company spends virtually zero money or effort in marketing, yet they want more business. This is what happens when you stop saying “I’m tired of living like this.” The moral of the story: Don’t get railroaded by thinking that your customers don’t use the Internet. Unless your potential customers live in caves without computers and no cellular signal, they are using the Internet every day. Just because you do not sell the product online or receive immediate gratification does not mean you can slide by without it. Selling more of what you offer does not always mean you are pitching them your next deal. There is a reason that Mc Donalds runs ads that say “You deserve a break today” and not just “$.99 Big Macs for a limited time at participating locations.” Branding is important, and the company the potential purchaser has heard of will have the upper hand.

Guerrilla Marketing Tip Number Four: Guerrilla Marketing is a Stepping Stone

You should be aware of some basic assumptions about companies that try to perform marketing without a budget. You need to know this before you can overcome it. If your marketing budget is small, we can make a couple of accurate assumptions. Whether these assumptions are right or wrong, it is very likely how your prospective customers and your competition will perceive your business, so be aware of this. Here is the first assumption about marketing without a budget: If you do not have a marketing budget, it is pretty likely that you are broke. Successful companies that can afford marketing do not flinch at the idea of investing in growing their market share to squeeze you out of the picture. This brings me to the second assumption about marketing without a budget: Wouldn’t you, if you were them?

You could just try the old line that you don’t spend money on marketing because you are trying to keep your cost low. Sorry, anybody who has ever been in business will see right through that one. Let’s face it, your cost is lower when your company is productive and making money. Marketing does not create a net loss … it creates profit, money, business, customers, growth, market share … you know, all of those things you want more of. Marketing lowers your cost by making your business successful.

Guerrilla marketing is a good way to get started, but businesses that do not reinvest in professional marketing services will often fall into a wasteful trap that they are not able to get out of. Once you have seen the benefits of good guerrilla marketing, use it for professional marketing. You probably answered affirmatively when I asked “Wouldn’t you, if you were them?” Stop imagining that you are above this one very basic law of successful business: It takes money to make money. Remember that without experienced marketing talent, it will be much harder to get your hands on money. It is like a chicken and egg question, only worse: What came first, the money or the money? The more you invest, whether time or money, the more you will receive in return. If you use guerrilla marketing as a stepping stone to grow beyond your current constraints, you will then understand why you did all that reading i assigned you.

I will have some more tips for you soon, so budget your time and keep coming back.

SEO Contracts Should Not Require a Cryptograph — SEO Should Not Require a Cryptograph

Search engine optimization can be a pretty deceitful field. There are a lot of challenges to the SEO every day which can make us look bad as an industry. SEO is a very lucrative field, which makes it prone to excessive competition and it is frequently a target for fraud. The fraud can happen on both sides; from the SEO, as well as from the client. I have a couple ideas on the topic, and I hope this will benefit you, whether as the SEO or the potential SEO client.

Considering that the SEO professional has to look over his or her shoulder at all times, there should be little wonder why even the best SEO with good abilities and intentions can come off as shady. After all, anybody who feels suspicious all the time can appear suspicious, themselves. This suspicion of SEO services prompted me to question how we must seem to potential customers when they read the SEO contracts, proposals, project scope, retainer agreements, engagement letters, needs analysis, non-disclosure agreements, and etcetera.

Many SEO proposals and SEO contracts that I have read lean toward being a bit ambiguous and one-sided. I am “guilty” of this, too, and I have even heard it from clients in my decade plus in this field. What is sometimes hard to overcome are some of the reasons the SEO contracts are ambiguous … and why sometimes they should be.

What to Include in SEO Proposals

The question of what to include in the SEO proposal is a tough one. I think a lot of SEO must have felt that little pang of uncertainty after they have crafted a brilliant SEO proposal and present it to the prospective client. Some of the questions the SEO may ponder are whether the prospective client is just using it to try and implement the proposed work internally, using the SEO proposal to shop around, or even stealing the brilliant work to provide the proposal to their shady SEO who was too lazy or incompetent to do the research themselves. I suspect that every good SEO is cheated at least once.

How much can you include in the SEO proposal before the client thinks they can implement it themselves (which seldom works well for them), and how little can you include in the SEO proposal, yet still convey a high value? There should be a balance, but my approach has often been to just put all the cards on the table and give them the gold. The problem here is that so many people view SEO as a science (see “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Art or Science?“). Clients do not always realize that SEO implementation is not created equally, and there is also an artistic side to SEO. There are many degrees to doing the job right, and even the same strategy implemented by two different SEO will yield different results. After a potential client ends up hanging themselves on that rope you give them, they lose faith in you and even the whole prospect of hiring out SEO services.

The other side of the coin is to show very little strategy in the SEO proposal but provide a lot of proof. In this case, it may look like the SEO strategy is weak and not show enough value. Proof of concept and SEO case studies are fine, but many people cannot relate that into their world due to inherent doubts about SEO.

What to Include in SEO Contracts

A great SEO proposal must be backed up with a great SEO contract. Putting too much information in the SEO contract can have the same results as with the SEO proposal, but worse, this time you are asking them for a signature and money. Leaving any ambiguity may look unprofessional or dishonest, but making it too rigid comes with a risk of not being able to provide the right responses the client needs under changing market circumstances. Just imagine the contract that says exactly what the SEO will do, but then you find an instance where market changes say that you should do something different.

The SEO contract can be a deal-breaker, especially if it is going before a board of directors with a bunch of people who do not have a clue about SEO, or marketing at all for that matter. When you have a company filled with a bunch of people doing all they can to be sure they still have a job tomorrow (most companies), the last thing you want is for them to vote something down just because they didn’t understand what they were approving. This applies to small companies and large, and even a one-person company has a “board” of sorts.

Consider What the SEO Contract Represents

Everybody wants to avoid a lawsuit. It may sound too simple, but let’s look at what the SEO contract really represents. It is a contract that says that the customer agrees to pay “x” money in exchange for “y” services. If everything goes just as planned, and everybody involved is on the up and up, the contract should actually be a very useless piece of paper. Looking at it this way, you can see that the contract is mostly in place solely to make everybody comfortable in case it has to go to a court to be upheld. This is the bottom line with a contract. It is really useless as an instrument unless or until it is contested by one party and is brought to a courtroom or mediation.

With the purpose of the contract in mind, it should be easier to prepare your agreements in a way that addresses these basic components of “x” money for “y” service. A lot of the fluff beyond that is mostly there to address irrational fears. Not all of it, but this is the case with much of the content in most of the SEO service contracts I have read.

I have spent a significant amount of money having contracts reviewed and prepared over the years. I recall something one of my attorneys once said when I asked him to review one of the contracts I used for my customers. He said that the contract looks great, but that he could not “bless” the contract, and for that I would need a priest. He went on to say that any contract is only as good as the people signing it or in the worst case, the judge who makes a ruling on it. Looking at it this way, I may suggest that you just be sure to use waterproof ink before you splatter it with holy water.

SEO Espionage is an Irrational Fear

To the SEO: Collaboration between SEO is great, but sometimes the SEO has to know when to watch his or her back. Right? Well, the answer is yes and no. Most of the time the fear is irrational. I know that many SEO have used my work to build upon their services and their knowledge base. They have used my contracts, my proposals, and they have used SEO espionage to take food from my kids’ mouths. Should I concentrate on that, or the fact that I have done my little piece by using integrity and ideas to make the industry stronger?

I place providing value to the industry very high. I have been giving away information and putting my ideas out here on the Internet since the 1990’s and somehow people still pay attention. They flock to things like my very old article on h1 tags, and constantly find me when searching for SEO contracts. Being useful and providing value is a good thing … a very good thing. When you look over your shoulder with fears that somebody will get a leg up on you, it is easy to miss the big picture. There are enough SEO clients out there, and even if somebody takes your prized prospect away, there is always another one better suited to be your client.

A better way to look at it is that if you are working with a good spirit of collaboration between SEO, the whole industry becomes stronger. When the industry becomes stronger, your business becomes stronger. The market for good SEO will never be saturated. Really, pay attention: “The market for good SEO will never be saturated.”

Why SEO Contracts Don’t Matter

If contracts were ever a deal breaker, it should be with the credit card industry. If people actually read everything they agree to by using a credit card, spending habits would surely be a whole lot different, and the credit card industry may not even exist. It is not because they are all that bad, but reading the contract can be a bit scary.

Think about this and tell me if you can relate. I have purchased a lot of things over the years. I love buying stuff! When I think about the things I wanted the most, I recall that I barely even paid attention to the contracts. I already knew that I wanted to buy, I had a pretty good idea of who I was dealing with, and I knew that I would not have the “thing” I wanted until I signed the contract.

An extreme example is when I purchased the house I live in. I went to the closing at about 4:00 p.m. and signed about a squillion contracts by the close of business. I did this with little more than a brief explanation from my real estate agent of what I was signing. If you have ever purchased real estate, you surely know what I mean. Your hand probably got cramped before you were done, right? Now consider whether you read and scrutinized every line of those contracts.

As I consider the people who signed contracts with me over the years, I recall that some of the happiest ones barely even scanned through it. They had an absolute faith in my work, my integrity, and they wanted the help that I can provide them. The ones who got hung up on fine details of the SEO contract simply did not have that faith in me. I had failed them long before it was time to sign the contract.

I hope that you will consider this, whether as a prospective SEO client or the SEO provider. Getting the job right and having a signed contract is really the last thing that should matter. Gaining the client’s trust should never come down to the contract, but rather all of the gains that the SEO contract represents.

SEO Contract Examples

If you would like sample SEO contracts, proposals, or other documents, just leave me your comment here on my blog. Let me know what you think of the matter, and what kind of document you need help with. If I have something I believe will be useful to you, I will post an example here in the comments. If you can provide some input to help others, whether as SEO or client, add your piece. Collaboration is a good thing, and usually a whole lot more useful than coming off as shady to avoid somebody stealing your work.

Category: marketing