Increase Output, Decrease Hours Worked

New challenge facing me.

Possible huge influx of clients and short time to scale. This is going to be a quick growing and learning experience.

Managing 10 outsourcees is one thing, but managing 30+? That’s a whole nother ball game. I’m hoping the principles behind my first 10 can easily translate to the next 20.

On the other side of the equation–how to scale back hours worked while increasing production. This is a newer challenge.

Ideas to test:

• Hire VA
• Outsource using more services

We’ll see how this all turns out within the next few months. I’ll keep you posted. Any ideas you want to throw my way, feel free to drop a comment and we’ll converse.

Got to find the principles to apply. Success in due time. Patience.

PR + Relevancy in a Link Eat Link World

I’ve been so caught up in the thick of link building that I forgot the most basic rule:

PR + Relevancy

Getting links from crappy low PR sites in quantity will only return crap – unless they’re relevant.

Getting high PR links from irrelevant sites will return more but they aren’t relevant, so they fall in the suspicious category and lose a lot of their power. See Link Detox FAQ for some great info on what links you should and shouldn’t be going after.

Connecting with your niche community is a great way to find and create PR + Relevant link opportunities. Creating a niche community will allow you to create your own properties with PR + Relevancy.

A mixture of both can do wonders.

Link Building; Risky Business in 2012

I gotta admit, link building has gotten to be a scary beast. Recent updates to Google’s algorithms have shed a new light on link building tactics. Can the beast be slain? Or do we just need to tame it harness it’s powers?

I think we can tame the beast–we just have to know what to feed it.

Building links is becoming a dangerous game. The majority of posts I read about link building don’t really talk about link building anymore, they talk about content and sharing, creating relationships.

Manual link building is a meticulous art.

I’ve spent many hours coming up with a full fledged content marketing plan and it is brutal. I still have a lot to do for it. I know that it will be worth it in the end. My SEO plans have turned into 5 year plans. I’m in it for the long haul. Create likable content. Share it through the right channels. Influence the influencers and wait for the links to be built.

A recent quote I heard that I liked and see truth in was, “Content is fire. Social is gasoline.”

Dying are the days where one can simply build links. A new era has begun.

There are a few link building tactics that are still safe and work. I’m working on a post that identifies which techniques are safe and the value of each. I’ll be announcing its release.

Until then, happy reading and happy SEO’ing.

Good luck everyone!

The New SEO is the Old SEO Renewed

I thought about starting this off with a sentence such as, “There has been a fundamental change in SEO…”, but the truth is, the fundamentals haven’t changed at all. Correct SEO principles have not changed. But the way that most people were taught for the past many years was a flawed and erroneous view of how to do SEO. The idea was gaming the algorithms.

Google’s most recent changes have just promoted a return to the fundamentals.

SEO is easy in principle, but difficult in execution

An extremely hard part about this re-awakening to correct SEO principles is having to re-educate clients and SEO’s alike. Many are still in error. I have clients asking me to build thousands of links because that’s what they think is SEO. It does work, but when done the right way and at the right pace.

You Want Links? Well Then Give me Something Amazing to Share

You want thousands of edu links? Then let’s create hundreds of resources that universities can use. They won’t link to a page that doesn’t add value to their university.

You want .gov links that will move the needle and not be devalued or penalized by leGoog? Then let’s spend our time and resources on creating amazing data that government sites will eat up.

If you build great content, links will come

I can create thousands of back links using grey hat services and software–Yeah, sure, if that’s what you want.

It can be done, but It is getting extremely hard and risky to game the system. Sooner or later, Google will find out and your business can sink over night–it’s happened to many already. Just peruse the tragedies of Panda and Penguin on Traffic Planet forums where fathers lost their living over night and wondered how they would feed their family of six. It’s heart-wrenching. I do not want to be responsible for or have my good name on that. True it can happen with white hat SEO, but the likelihood is much less….likely

Do you want back links or long-term business and rankings? Then let’s follow Wil Reynold’s advice and start doing RCS (Real Company Stuff). Real marketing. Real relationship building. Real SEO.

A Fundamental Change of Thought

The fundamental change has to be within our own way of doing SEO, in our way of thinking.

Back to real world marketing, online.

Let’s do ourselves a favor and re-educate ourselves and our clients. We are not genies. We are not magicians. We are marketers.

There is so much we can do, if allowed to. We cannot do it unless clients understand it. They will not understand it, unless we teach them. We cannot teach them, unless we know. Let the change begin.

Documenting Processes During The Creation

Welp. Today I spent the majority of my time creating a process for outsourcing mundane tasks. Doing so allows me to focus on higher level activities and keep up with the latest marketing techniques and tools.

I like managing a team much more than doing all the grunt work myself. I am able to scale my efforts and I feel much more productive (most likely cause I get more work done when I do). I do get my hands dirty in the work when needed, but I would much rather be spending my time brainstorming ideas, training and teaching.

Breaking down and retracing my thought process has been hard to do. Sometimes I just go on autopilot from one idea to the next without paying attention to what I’m doing, like being in the zone. It makes it harder to recall afterwards all that I did to produce the end result. I’ve began documenting my processes as I’m creating them instead of trying to recollect what I had done after the fact<—-that always leads to me forgetting and thinking, "Okay, but what did I do next? How did I get from here, to here."

Documented processes can be duplicated

Documenting the processes as I create them has proven much more effective and less time consuming because I don’t waste time trying to remember every step–I just review my notes. It’s hard to slow the brain down when in Go Mode, but I’m getting better at it.

Just like an airplane pilot slows down in turbulence to maintain control and safely navigate through the turbulence, we often need to slow down in times of turbulence to maintain control of our efforts, business and lives.

The first wordpress post; a little insight to Right Hat

This explains a little bit of my philosophy as an SEO and marketer.

As an SEO, I believe

• great content is the best foundation for any site
• a great design is the key to higher conversions
• great content and great design will generate more white-hat, natural, quality links than trying to force the links

I strongly dislike

• when clients try to pay me to force links to their crappy content
• when they won’t pay for good content
• when they won’t listen to me about having great content or a great design

I love

• when clients understand marketing
• when clients understand online marketing
• when clients are willing to provide/pay for great content
• when clients are willing to provide/pay for great design
• great content

SEO is changing so much from what has been accepted in the past. Forcing linkbuilding is dangerous. We cannot afford to simply force links. If we are going to do this, let us all provide great content, share that content through the proper channels and patiently wait for the results (while working on more great content).